To be honest, this would be a rare thing, but we do allow creative license for such a thing. For example, I have a fruit-themed quiz which changed several scientists names to have fruit in them such as Albert Limestein. It's silly, but the player would certainly understand that it is a pun.

If you see misspellings on a normal quiz that doesn't have that sort of "catch" to it, please send a correction. I don't normally allow misspellings to disqualify an otherwise correct answer as there are better ways to write a question.

I prefer correct spellings for all answer options and I would not encourage the use of incorrect spellings as a tactic.

However, if I may play devil's advocate here...we need to be careful about making assumptions.

For example, we may ASSUME that Maria Carrey is meant to be Mariah Carey. But what if there is a singer called Maria Carrey who is not quite as famous? Who is to say that the quiz author meant didn't mean the less famous one?

If the question is about THE Mariah Carey, and the correct answer option is Mariah Carey, then obviously it must be spelled correctly. However, if the answer option is not the correct answer (and the question is about someone else), then it makes no difference whether the incorrect option is Mariah Carey the famous singer, or Maria Carrey the not-so-famous singer, or even Maria Carrey (who is a real person but may or may not be a singer).

Again, I mention this only as a possible explanation for why some correction notices sent in the past appear to have been ignored. It is possible that previous editor(s) may have taken this point of view and so did not actually ignore the correction note.

This is why we say that editors will use their judgement in how to respond to CNs.

At this point, nobody knows what happened five years ago with the CNs that were apparently not dealt with in the way you'd expect. We're just giving some ideas on the kind of thing that can happen, and perhaps also giving players some notion of the complexity of dealing with CNs.

I spent a couple of hours working on CNs myself this afternoon, and perhaps 30% of them were just "Ah, yes, the player is correct, I'll make that change immediately". All of the others had a complication of some sort or other. And this is about par for the course.

I can assure you that all CNs are seen, and dealt with in some way. Exactly HOW they are dealt with? The only thing I can say with complete certainty is "it all depends".

Why would there be a disclaimer? I do it (or at least did for a time) quite frequently.

For the record about CN's, I had an editor send me a note today asking for help in identifying ways to change a question that I submitted one on a couple of weeks ago.

When I sent in the note, I described from personal knowledge why the question was wrong, and she was unable to verify on her own. I quickly provided a link (and some background on why I knew it without the link.)

I didn't circle back around to see if it were corrected, but I trust it was handled well.

looney_tunes, and the other editors, thanks for confirming that typo reports are welcomed. I have sometimes thought that it was an annoyance to report them. Glad to learn that these are welcome "easy fixes". I, for one, as an author, am always grateful for corrections of little details that I have missed and that were overlooked in the editing process. Sometimes our eyes just see what we meant instead of what's there!

Oh, I love them. After a couple "fifteen minutes research and still no real answer so must rewrite the entire question" CNs, a typo report is so nice to see.

It's encouraging to know that some editors are on top of things, like you are. Your last phrase is what I have trouble with. It is my opinion that not all are as ready to make necessary changes to typos and other errors.

Agony's response there doesn't mean that we simply won't deal with errors as they're reported. It means that some CNs actually don't merit the changes. Many players might be surprised at the amount of Correction Notices we see come through which simply aren't corrections. Some authors send invalid corrections; some send opinions for how they think the question should be rewritten; some send corrections on stylistic choices (like American v. British spelling, or variations on punctuation). Sometimes new players even come in using the Correction button as a way to correct their own wrong answers.

Some may also be surprised to see how many corrections are actually critical enough to have a quiz pulled offline entirely. I deal with a number of quizzes about Video Games which are, by their very nature, always being patched or rebuilt over time. What happened in 'Minecraft' or 'World of Warcraft' back in 2010, for instance, can be MILES away from the present day. If a quiz contains a question that's no longer usable because time has rendered it irrelevant or non-existent, it could mean the quiz can't be corrected by an editor. The necessary changes are, thus, something our editors aren't going to be ready for.

All I'm saying is that players should not have trouble with this additional work our editors are doing beyond editing new quizzes/questions. We want quizzes to be cleanly edited. We will always (and heck, many of us would prefer to) correct typos. Agony is just pointing out that there's a world of other possibilities out there that many won't consider, and it's up to the editors here to use their best judgment as to whether or not they should be sinking the time into another author's quiz to make it work. Replacing a question likely isn't in the cards.

I can assure you that if the editors think there is a problem, they will deal with it.

All of us would consider something like a typo to be a problem.

I do want to emphasize, though, that changing the question in the way that a particular player might best want it changed may or may not happen. We want players to send CNs, but we also want everyone to realize that the editor, upon reviewing the situation, may not agree with the player that the quiz needs changing.

One of the main criteria for selecting editors is our trust in their good judgement.

I submitted a CN yesterday because the information in the question was erroneous. However, if this does not have any impact on the options given in the answer, is anything done about it?

I have submitted a correction or two like that where the question and answers were ok but something in the II was wrong. I remember seeing one come back up and the fix had been made.

Yes; if an author has their facts wrong in any part of the quiz, then we want the facts to be right.

As an author, I received a CN on a typo (or possibly a mental error) in the information section on a quiz that went online yesterday. I used "it's" when "its" was appropriate. So I simply fixed the error, sent the person who caught the error a quick thank you note, put the quiz back online, and closed the correction notice. So yes, the author receives those as well.

I submitted quite a few CNs for a while, mainly for typos, misspellings and such. I got the distinct impression that I was considered to be a pest, so I quit sending them.

We welcome these. Typos are errors; errors need to be corrected.

As an author I'd always want to be told of any error, typo or otherwise. As an editor, I'm more than happy to deal with correction notes. As has been mentioned, the ones about spellings and typos take very little time and effort to correct.

In the Expert game, I found a question that had a proper name capitalized three times out of the four times it was used. Remembering how the Editors don't mind plain old easy typo CNs, I sent one in. I received this reply from the author of over 100 quizzes, " It's a typo. Anyone can see that. I see typos all the time playing quizzes but I don't say anything because I know it's just that. I can't edit it anyway because the quiz has been archived."

While it was a bit of a rude message, I didn't report it. It wasn't anywhere nearly as rude as a message from another prolific author who wrote me she was sick and tired of seeing correction notices from me and I should stop sending them until I learned how to read properly. Ironically, the second author has posted several messages in this Forum complaining of the number of correction notices she receives because quiz takers "are confused" by her answer choices and she receives many CNs on the same questions.

An editor saw that note, don't worry. This is one of the reasons we want you to send actual CNs, rather than letting authors know about the problem via compliment. Any response to your CN stays attached to the quiz until an editor clears it, while a note sent any other way will go unseen simply because no one is looking for it.

We see this type of response from authors now and then, and have no problem letting them know what their responsibilities are re CNs.

Further to my earlier query, I noticed that the author has not been online for a considerable length of time, so how long does it normally take an editor to amend the question?

The time depends on how busy the category is. I don't know about other editors, but when my time is tight, I tend to work on editing new quizzes and single questions before tending to corrections (both for quizzes and for single questions). This does not mean they are less important, but active authors invest a lot of energy into waiting for their work to be edited. I try to clear all corrections in my categories each week, but sometimes real life gets in the way. And some categories get a lot more corrections submitted than others. I can assure you that an editor will sooner or later look at every correction, and decide on the appropriate course of action.

Also, just because someone is showing as online doesn't mean they are actively using FT. For example, I have a window open at work but I may only really check it first thing in the morning and at lunch. If the correction is more than a simple typo, I may wait until I have time to research it. And if the quiz has been online for more than a year, it is archived so we can only ask the editors to make the corrections and then wait for them to get a chance to do so. Showing as online may not be indicative of how quickly we can fix our errors.

Except I just reread your original comment and it said the author has "not" been online, so my response is meaningless :-)

OK, thanks. Just revisted the quiz and nothing has been amended thus far, so will wait until next week and see.

lol...yeah, that word is a particular bugbear for many on this site but usually when it comes up in questions on timed quizzes. So i can
empathise with you there. Thanks for taking the time to post, anyhoo.

Definitely think of the timeline in terms of weeks, not days.

If the issue requires considerable research on the part of the editor, and if the question has been online for quite some time with a reasonable score correct (showing that the problem doesn't really affect playability) it's not unusual in my categories for it to take a couple of months to get resolved. I will get to it, but it's not my top priority.

Something players can do, if they do want errors to be dealt with promptly, is to include a link that gives the editor somewhere to start researching the ins and outs of the problem.