Guidelines for Quiz Creation
Important: ALL of the following sets of
guidelines are
relevant for the
category you would like to submit to. Please read all of them carefully
and keep them in mind as you develop your quiz. Thanks!
The following sets of guidelines apply to quizzes created in
Brain Teasers.
Guidelines for Brain Teasers
Note: Brain Teasers is perhaps the most difficult category in Quizzyland in which to get a quiz online. We highly recommend that you do not attempt to create a Brain Teasers quiz until you have several quizzes online and have played most of the quizzes in this category. We also recommend that you play the quiz http://www.funtrivia.com/quizdetails.cfm?id=103918 "How to Write a Brain Teasers Quiz" before attempting to write a BT quiz.
This category is for riddles, logic problems, word games, etc. It is not a category for any kind of miscellaneous trivia, entertainment-related quizzes, or math facts. Miscellaneous fact quizzes go to the General category, while math quizzes go to Sci/Tech-Math. Pure vocabulary quizzes should go in Humanities-English-Vocabulary. Word-play type quizzes on specific television, entertainment, celebrity, movie or musical topics now have their own special categories in Music-Other Music, Celebrities- Celebrity Mixture, Television-TV Mixture-TV Wordplay and in Movies-Movie Mixture-Name the Movie-Movie Word Play. Please also note that we do not accept any quizzes on the FunTrivia website, editors, etc., as this information changes with time.
Please make sure that your quiz does not require knowledge about a specific subject that any reasonably well-educated person would not know- for example, a Fractured Words quiz on fruits and vegetables would be OK, but one on scientific names of African trees would not. A cryptic quiz on world capitals would be OK, but not one on street names in Pasadena, CA. In addition, logic puzzle quizzes and questions should not require any outside knowledge to be solvable; all of the information needed to solve the puzzle should be contained in the clue.
Here are some ground rules for submitting a quiz here. First of all,please play some games in this category before you attempt to write a quiz.. Look for games that are the same type as your quiz. This will help you with what kinds of questions work well.
Please note- the following categories will NOT accept entries:
Logic Puzzles- any quizzes that are of the "quiz about this quiz" type
Scrambles- none will be considered; this category is closed
Wordwise- none will be considered; this category is closed
Please note,the following categories are full, and only the most outstanding admissions will be considered.
Numbers and Patterns
Word Play- Before and After
Word Play- Hidden Words
Word Play- Missing Letters
Word Play- Number Phrases
Word Play- Rhymes
Fractured Words
Cryptograms quizzes must not be just simple cryptograms with no clues. Quizzes that are just cryptograms of lists of words on a single subject may be rejected
Please don't submit any quizzes on teh FunTrivia website itself; the website changes too often to be the subject of a quiz.
Here are some examples of questions not to ask because we see them too often.
Do they have a 4th of July in England?
If a plane crashes in the Andes, where do they bury the survivors?
Any questions ending "What color was the bear?" with the answer "white."
The riddle that starts "What is greater than God..." with the answer "Nothing."
Some months have 31 days. How many have 28?
If a rooster lays an egg on a roof, what side doe it roll off of?
How many animals of each sex did Moses take on the ark?
A butcher is 5' 10". What does he weigh?
If I take 10 apples from 12 apples, how many apples do I have?
How many letters are in the alphabet?
You are in a room with (various lightable things)- what do you light first? The match.
Is it legal to marry your widow's sister?
In baseball, how many outs are in an inning?
Twenty crows are in a field. You shoot all but six of them. How many are alive?
How far can a dog run into the woods?
If you were running a race, and you passed the person in 2nd place, what place would you be in now?
What is black when you buy it, red when you use it, and gray when you throw it away?
What cheese is made backwards?
What word can you add 2 letters to and it becomes shorter?
The riddle about coffins that starts "The maker doesn't want it..."
In addition, please note that riddles need to be answerable with a fill in the blank answer. Multiple-choice just doesn't work well for riddle questions.
Note that no repetitive questions are allowed- we can't say this often enough! If you didn't make it up yourself,it will probably be rejected.
Please submit only one quiz per day to this category.
Writing a good Brain Teasers quiz is very difficult, and this category has a very high rejection rate. The biggest mistakes that people make are submitting duplicative quizzes, writing questions that will not work well as fill-in-the-blank (FITB), submitting scrambled-word quizzes, submitting copied quizzes, submitting quizzes with lots of spelling or grammar errors, and submitting quizzes that don't belong in this category at all.
Before writing a quiz, check the appropriate subcategory for your quiz. If any quizzes in that subcategory have the same subject as yours, please look them over before writing your quiz, as quizzes with duplicative questions will be rejected. If the question is anything unoriginal- you didn't make it up yourself- we probably already have it! No Tolkien riddles, Steven King riddles, common riddles, etc. No nonsense or trick questions.
Writing a good FITB question is very difficult. Fill-in-the blank questions can have only ONE possible answer, and questions with two or more possibilities will be rejected. Most riddles have answers that can be written in many ways and thus won't work well as FITBs. For example, you may think the answer is "mother", but quizmakers may write that as "mother", "mom", "mommy", "your mom", "your mother"...it just won't work! Quizzes composed primarily of riddles with 'yes-no' answers will also be rejected
Please note that usage of questions from copyrighted sources such as books like "The Hobbit" or games like MindTrap, or copying questions from websites is not allowed. Everything on your quiz MUST be in your own words and should be original.
Please check your spelling, grammar, punctuation and facts BEFORE you submit your quiz. Quizzes with significant errors will be rejected! Do not write in all caps or all lower-case letters, and do not use Internet/chatroom abbreviations anywhere in your quiz. All sentences must start with a capital and end with appropriate punctuation.
Please do not write or submit a quiz until you have played a few games and are familiar with Quiz Creation Guidelines. Link to the Ask the Quiz Editors forum.