As soon as I send a CN it's out of sight and out of mind. I wouldn't remember a note I sent yesterday and would definitely not follow up. No time to, and as noted, our editors read all of the notes.

I hope that is true. But then are you suggesting that CNs are ignored, even though a legitimate error needs correcting?The above example may seem insignificant to some, but some of my CNs point out glaring errors.
Should errors such as Emett Smith, Bob Seagram, Dion Sanders and Maria Carrey stay as is?
I was curious about whether I was wasting my time sending in CNs. For the most part, no I wasn't, but nearly 20% are unattended to, after 5 years. That's a little high in my books, given the fact that time was taken to draw attention to an error.

You may have sent those notes at a time when the editors in that category, for some reason or other, felt they couldn't or didn't need to worry about the points you raised, and had more urgent matters to attend to. It is certainly worth sending them again - but I must say that three of the four names you give are unfamiliar to me, so I wouldn't know what point you were raising if you only sent the name. I would need to actually have it pointed out how the name should be spelled - they look fine to me as is.

If for whatever reason the corrections were not made five years ago, it is definitely worth sending new reports, and they will be addressed now. Spelling and grammatical errors are easy fixes and can be addressed quickly.

I'm sure you have dealt with some of my CNs. I always make it simple and clear what the error is. I show the correct spelling. I don't fabricate. Often I refer to a website for authentication. None of those are "fine" as is. Just google them and you will see. Spelling mistakes are not something that doesn't need to be worried about.
Do editors just delete the CN if they are busy or can they put it in a "pending" file to deal with later? Sweeping things under the rug is not a solution.

No, it is not our current practice to sweep anything under the rug.

If you see an error, report it, and it will be taken care of.

I will add, though, that often an editor, after checking out the issue, decides that no change is needed. Obviously this is seldom the case when it comes to spelling errors, but it should be understood that any changes made are done so at the editors' discretion.

I have, for instance, seen CNs where the player is "correcting" a deliberate misspelling that is used as a punning clue. It's also very common for the player to be just plain incorrect.

We also get CNs about questions of style, or where the player thinks a certain fact should be included in the info. We deal with all of these on a case by case basis and use our judgement.

I can't really see much point in rehashing notes sent five years ago. If there is still a problem, let us know, and we'll deal with it.

Which name did you recognize? One of them I had to look up, Bob Seagren.

Emmett Smith and Deion Sanders were former Dallas Cowboy players, and Mariah Carey is a singer.

I think the point was, what we sometimes assume to be universally common knowledge, isnt. So, for content based corrections like that, it doesn't hurt to include a quick note explaining in explicit detail why it is wrong, just in case it is not as obvious to the editor as it is to you.

Something like: "singer's name is spelled wrong...last name is "Carey" not "Carrey"

Exactly - although that was in fact the name I recognised. I assume the others were all American sportspeople, whose names would not be familiar from Australia unless they are in a sport that has international competition. Or played and were very famous in the days of my American childhood, which was quite a while ago now.

There is a consequence to dismissing a CN as inconsequential as in a small typo. That gets regarded as a false CN and that gets CN generating powers removed from the submitting player.

Not at all. In fact, I'm suggesting telling you that we investigate every single CN sent in.



Small typos are not inconsequential; we correct typos (or we ask authors to). The only times we end up removing the ability to send Correction Notices is when we find that players have been spamming, sending consistently erroneous or offensive messages, or they send messages about non-issues they've been asked not to submit about and have neglected to stop.

The CN system is here to help us make sure the site is in the best shape it can be; we want quizzes to last the distance. When players have a track record with messages or CNs that the admins/editors ask them to stop sending, for whatever reason, and they don't, then we find it in the best interest of the authors to make something happen.

Typo corrections are regarded, universally by the editors at least, as easy fixes and, while occasionally small enough to be trivial (ha, at a trivia site), they're still valid. This of course does not include stylistic flairs, like insisting an author use a semicolon or word a sentence differently. Those aren't errors. Sending stuff a lot of stuff like that would result in a warning (from me at least).



Absolutely this. If there are corrections to be made, then there are corrections to be made. Five years is a bit silly a length of time, in my opinion, and it's surprising no one else picked up on the error in that time, but if there's a typo, then it's really not a hard fix.

For the record, typically, if a CN gets sent in on a typo in one of my categories, I'll fix it immediately. It takes no time. I can fix it quicker and in a more convenient way than the author likely can.

As has been said several times, that does not happen at the moment. A CN is dismissed if it is in fact inconsequential as in a fine point of grammar (especially one in an area over which grammatical experts disagree with each other) or a suggestion for an improvement rather than an actual error being reported. It gets dismissed if it is factually incorrect (and that happens quite a lot of the time), or if it was sent by someone trying to correct their own answer in order to get the points they missed out on (again, more common than you might think). It does NOT get dismissed because it is only a typo. In fact, that is a nice CN to work with - it takes almost no time to see that the change is needed.

When the CN says that the name of a character in a book is actually Susie, not Suzy, it can take quite a while to research and find out which it is if the editor does not happen to have a copy of the relevant book available. That time will be taken, but the CN may wait a while before there is time to research it. A while means days, maybe even weeks, but not years!

But when I'm told by an editor that an error won't be corrected because it doesn't interfere with the understanding of the question and answer, what then? That really compromises the integrity of the FT website.
Three of the four editors in Sports are from Australia, the other from the UK. Most Sports questions are based on US sports. A lot of googling is needed to check up on Emmitt Smith type questions. I always provide the error/correct spelling in my CNs.

I have nearly 40 CNs that disprove that, just from 2011. I have not tracked the hundreds of CNs I've sent in the last 5 years.

If you are talking about the five-year old ones, that is ancient history. They have been cleared out of the system, for whatever reason, and will never be attended to now. If you resubmit those CNs, and editor will take care of them. Although a misspelled name may not prevent players from selecting the correct answer, it is not an error we will let slip if we know about it. As has been pointed out, editors may not recognise when a name is not correctly spelled, so your CN will help them rectify the situation.

Ssabreman, I am sorry your notes were seemingly ignored, but being 5 years ago, none of us know what happened to the 40 correction notes you say were not attended to. If you believe there are still errors, please send the corrections again. An editor will attend to them and make the proper adjustments. We would like to focus on the present and future, not the past, which we cannot change.

Also, where an editor is from is irrelevant in dealing with correction notes. If the correction is a typo, then it is a simple fix even if that correction is a sports figure's name (which can be easily Googled). If it is a factual error, then steps are taken to ensure the information is correct. This can be online research, querying another editor/friend who knows a lot in the field, querying the original author, or even querying the correction sender.

Wasn't there a time that quizzes were archived and under lock so corrections meant going through Terry to unlock them? If so, is that still the situation with archived quizzes?

Corrections to archived quizzes do not go through Terry. An editor in the relevant category can edit them. An author who receives a CN on an archived quiz simply has to indicate what change they wish to have made in response to the CN. An editor will check it, and see what is needed; they can then make the necessary changes.

As for archived quizzes whose authors are no longer active - the editor will see the CN and act on it.

Thank you l_t.

Suppose I get a correction notice on one of my archived quizzes. If I suggest what is in my opinion the best way to handle this note, and the editor has another opinion, what happens next? Does the editor contact me to try to find a compromise? (It hasn't happened to me yet, but I'm convinced the sheer number of correction notices would imply that something in this style can and will happen).

Most likely. The scenario in which I can see this not applying is if the author suggests something convoluted, but the editor can fix it by adding or removing a word or two instead. The editor disagreeing with a proposed fix and not consulting with the author would probably be a rare situation since the author has stated their wishes.

A more common situation is the author denying there is a problem, and then the editor just fixes what they determine to be a real issue. This does happen, and if it is a small fix, then I don't really contact the author, just add something small or change something that needs to be changed so that it fixes the problem. If something more substantial is needed, then contacting the author is necessary.

Sometimes authors deliberately misspell their INCORRECT answer options as a way of giving a subtle hint to players that a particular answer is not the correct one - making the answer wrong for two reasons, not just one.

Perhaps the editor who processed the correction notes for misspelled names decided that, if a person's name was spelled incorrectly as an incorrect answer option, then spelling was actually irrelevant. (It would, however, be relevant if the correct answer option was spelled incorrectly, or if the name was misspelled in the body of the question or interesting information).

I come across this sort of correction note all the time (and I usually correct the spelling) but it really makes no difference at all one way or the other. Perhaps this is the reason why the original editor or editors decided it was not necessary to correct the spelling.

I hope that makes sense!

I can't say I've ever come across such a quiz. Would there need to be a disclaimer given in the intro?
Throwing in an incorrect spelling here and there without any pattern doesn't make a lot of sense. And I'm sure an editor would guide the author in a better direction.

I've played a few (I didn't keep an exact count) quizzes which had intentionally incorrect spellings. Why should there be a disclaimer? It's up to you to figure out the answer, clues or not.