Please, please, please for the love of Pete, or whoever..if your gonna make a fill in the blank question make sure the answer is short and simple. I cannot tell you how many times I have had the right answer only to not get credit cuz I'm such a lousy speller, especially if it's a name for a foreign word. That is the most frustrating thing about this game. Take the time and supply other choices. It makes it funner for everyone. Now I know there are times when a fill in the blank is a must, but most of the ones that I have seen online could easily have been multiple choice. When I get a quiz with fill in the blank questions, it usually gets a low rating from me.

Sorry to vent,
Roswell

Agreed. Fill in the blank quizzes are discouraged. They have their place, but quizzes made up of entirely fill in the blank questions will find their way to the bottom of the rankings really quickly.

Suggestions for fill in the blanks:
- Think of all possible answers (and maybe even spelling differences) that you will accept. Try to be lenient.
- Use them carefully. 3-4 per quiz is a nice number.
- Use them ONLY on ambiguous questions where there is a single correct answer.

I *could* disable fill in the blanks entirely, but I kind of like having the capability to do neat things with them.

Terry

I was doing a guideline quiz today and they said you should only use the correct spelling of a word. Are the slighty different between topics or what you should put as the answer for a FITB question?

The post you replied to was made 5 years ago. A lot has changed since then, so what Terry wrote isn't necessarily valid anymore today. If a FITB answer has a difficult spelling and makes you feel like you have to include wrong spellings of the answer as well, then it makes for a bad FITB question and should be changed into multiple choice. FITB questions need to be totally unambiguous.

Sorry lol, I didnt even see the date!

The type of spelling differences that we could allow are such things as colour/color.
Just in general, FITBs should be:
-No more than four words maximum, the fewer the better
-No punctuation of any kind, apostrophes, hyphens, periods
-No words that are normally spelled as abbreviations - players won't know if you want Mr Mr. or Mister
-No dates
-No difficult to spell words
-There must be only way to word the answer - questions like "Why did Hamlet hate Claudius?" are NOT suitable for FITB
-quiz authors must be very careful of things like extra spaces in their FITBs. Inadvertently putting two spaces betweeen words, or a period after the answer, can make every one of your players wrong, and an editor might not even notice it.

In some categories the number of words allowed in FITB is only two. Please bear in mind that many FITB questions cause mind-boggling problems even if the "real answer" is common knowledge. Consider this question for example: Which European power ruled most of India from about 1800 till 1947? Just think of all the correct answers you'd have to allow for: Britain, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the UK, the U.K. - and to cap it all, one would surely also have to allow England as an answer, as in the US and in much of Continental Europe it's still widely, though inaccurately, used as a synonym for Britain, the U.K. and the various other names by which this country is known. After all, the point of the question is that the colonial power wasn't France, Portugal, etc. It's *not* about the various names used for Britain.

I remember getting a little annoyed once when I did a FITB which was in a LOrd of the Ring quiz.

It was something about one of the hobbits (it must have been something along the line "Which hobbits last name was Gamgee") and I filled in "Samwise" which was said to be incorrect and that the answer was "Sam". I think my answer was correct and that the quiz maker should have thought that some people might give this answer.

That's exactly the sort of thing that it is very helpful to get a correction note about. In a case like that, it's not too hard to add the alternate anwer, though of course it would be much better if the author thought of it BEFORE the quiz went online!

Good example Kuu, and in fact, it illustrates why the only FITB answer you should even put on your own quiz has to be even more airtight than that one in my opinion.

Oh yes, one more thing, we get some quizwriters getting a little huffy because they assume that people read the clues where they've put, 'put Mr. and then surname' or 'either Sam or Mary' or 'first name only' and the person didn't get it right and complains.
Well, we know time and time again from working the behind the scenes corrections, that these types of ambiguous questions just don't work nor is it a good idea to put elaborate directions down in addition to what you're asking in the body of the question.

I know that people still insist that this is dumbing down their work, but if you were playing a game out loud, you could use this type of question, or if it were on paper, but not in our context.

I know that some people will say, 'but they don't follow directions.' and yet, I think they haven't realized how many different types of computers and users we have here.

Terry said it well in the original post though, there are quizzes that work well in this context. Word games etc.