This thread will contain news on what's being added. I still hope to get the thing opened within a couple of weeks.

- An option has been added to view all of your quiz results that you have ever had.
- Query results will now be split into multiple pages, much like a search engine.
- The 'ratings' that people enter at the end of a quiz are averaged to form a rating for each quiz. This rating is used to filter out poor quizzes over time (this will become an issue once this thing grows). The rating is also used in algorithms to offer higher quality quizzes to people before others. The idea is that new players will play the most highly rated quizzes first.

Highly rated quizzes imply that the quiz is well rounded, accurate, free from typos and spelling mistakes, and fun.

- Play a "Random" game option has been added. It isn't entirely random. It will present you a quiz that you have not played yet, and that has a high quality rating. Popularity and other variables are taken into consideration.

More to come
I'm hoping that we'll have at least 20 quizzes online by the time the area opens to the general public.
http://www.funtrivia.com/cgi-bin/quizmain.cgi

Terry

Added:
"Extra, interesting information" now appears on the answer page of a quiz. This area is for interesting trivia, explanations of answers, references, URLs, etc. Add info here to spice up your quizzes.

Terry

This is a great idea Terry!!
I get a bit itchy for a quiz when my Daily and Weekly is done. The thrill of seeing big green "Correct!" raises my heartbeat( Yes I'm sick I know!).
Keep em' coming!

Added:

- The owner or an editor of a quiz may delete a quiz from the list/edit menu.

Ok, it's almost ready to go online, and will probably appear tonight or tomorrow.

Added is a help file and a cleanup of the main screen.

Terry

Added:

'Brief' option for main quiz pages, to better display our quickly growing # of quizzes

Quiz 'rankings' appear in your quiz creation list, so that you can determine what sort of things people like, and improve the games that are performing poorly. Just another form of feedback. No one else can see these ratings.

The quiz creator has been updated to be a little more intelligent. It makes sure that questions are formed correctly, and catches a bunch of common mistakes. Please capitalize sentences, and end with some form of punctuation!

Last message received appears on the main quiz page.

A guest interface is being designed so that players without accounts can test drive quizzes. With this interface you will be able to link your quiz directly into your homepage or a website.

More to come

Terry

A new top level category "Science" has been added.

A concept of "guest" accounts has been created, allowing anyone to play games without registering. This allows me to put links to quizzes wherever I want, and it lets you add your (or other player's) quizzes to your own webpages seamlessly.

All you have to do is click the 'link' option under quiz options, and you can link to any quiz that you want. It's quite cool.

Let me know if anything's broken. I sort of made up what I was doing as I did it, so it's possible something broke.

Terry

Hiyas

I added an entirely new categorization system this afternoon. Please move your games to the most appropriate category (I moved a bunch of them). It will also support directory hierarchies, so when we have lots and lots of games we can categorize them in a Yahoo-like structure. Have fun, and thanks to all you contributors!

Terry

Quizzes will now display the % correct for each answer when you are done answering them. This still has to be tweaked, and I will add an option 'View Stats' or something that will let people (who have already played the game) to peek at the quiz to see the %s without having to play the game over.

In other news, I'm going to entirely remove the timing component of the game. It really *means* nothing and is taking up valuable disk space.

Tery

I don't see Sports on the category list.

Jerry

One comment though, about the timing...

One thing it *did* do was remove the incentive for what I consider "cheating" by taking the time to go research answers while taking a quiz. When you looked at top scores, it was obvious that the person who took 120 seconds to do a quiz was truly playing off the top of his or her head, while the person who took 3000 seconds was not...

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Cris Waller
CrisW@ix.netcom.com

Not at all.

Quizzyland was never designed to be a speed game nor a competitive one. Players have ever right to research questions all that they like. Some choose to 'guess' at answers, others take their time (playing far fewer games), but getting much higher scores.

"Cheating" is much simpler with that. You open one browser under one name, look at the answers to a quiz, and then lip back under another name and get 100% in 30 seconds or so.

The whole point is that cheating in Quizzyland is so entirely pointless and tiresome that anyone that does so really is disturbed. Sure, you can cheat on 300 quizzes with multiple accounts.... but what the heck is it going to accomplish? (besides, after they got 100% on every single quiz I'd simply delete them. snicker)

Quizzyland is a personal development type of game, whereas the challenge is competitive in nature.

Terry

[This message has been edited by Terry (edited 02-26-2000).]

Good points, Terry! Thanks for the clarification.

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Cris Waller
CrisW@ix.netcom.com

Added:

-Percentage correct for each question.
-Average score for each quiz.
-'Introductions' are now displayed in quiz list information.
- Fixed: Small bug in scoring which sometimes market wrong answers as correct.

Terry

[This message has been edited by Terry (edited 02-28-2000).]

Just when you thought that quizzyland features couldn't get any cooler...

I've just added a new feature that gives quizzes difficulty rankings *based on how people perform* on them. So, if your quiz is rated as 'imposible' and you intended it to be easy, you should really make your questions easier!

Hopefully this will help new players pick and choose the games that best fit their ability.

Terry

When will we be able to filter unwanted subjects from our not-yet-played list?

Maybe move kid-specific to another category......When I go to "as yet unplayed", the first pages are all things I don't WANT to play....I have to page thru to guess where the rejects end....Solution? (watch more TV not an option)

That's on the to do list. Right now I'm trying to get Quizzyland into a flawless state, get together category editors, and help fix some of the most annoying problems.

Terry