How is it possible for a question to appear in "New Questions" category? Today there is a question by Airmale who passed away in January 2012.

I fully understand how and why this happens with quizzes. Are questions really held for that long?

Thank you.

They are not held in reserve for that long, but after a question has had a correction sent in (from any kind of play), it seems to get thrown back in the pool of new questions again, since the changes could in fact make it quite a different question.

Thank you. It was just a bit of shock to see his name.

One of my team members has a variety of new questions which have been accepted but have not yet played. Some are going back 10-11 weeks.
Does this sometimes happen? Just seems like quite a while.
Would appreciate any help.

Three months (12 weeks) seems to be the current average wait time. That is not an official number but is has been the topic of several threads lately. I think some of those threads have been removed for whatever reason.
I will bring up the number of submitted questions as posted on the Question Quest home page that over 100,000 Qs have been accepted. There is denial that the number is not that large but after 5 or so years x 52 weeks x 150 Qs per week = 39,000 accepted Qs for a dozen or so editors to have handled. A huge task being performed well, I'd say.

Thank you for your reply. I will tell him to wait a few more weeks.

To confirm, I have a question out in this week of play (Oct 19-25) with a listed entry date of July 24. Which comes out to 12 or 13 weeks. Of course we are not submitting questions at an exactly constant rate of 150 per week so the wait time does fluctuate. But since I have been watching it for the last year or so (albeit with gaps of weeks or months where I had no questions in play) it has held remarkably steady at about 12 weeks +/- 2 so it stands to reason that approved submissions are coming in close to 150 per week and pulls from roughly a seven day range of past dates.

It presumably just grabs the next 150 questions running straight down the chronological list and the next reset date is Oct 26. Of course with only one question out I do not have any sense of where it left off when pulling the last set of questions (was my july 24 one of the last ones pulled, the first, or somewhere in the middle?) but for a rough estimate..the new sets starting this coming Wednesday should run through questions entered up to the end of July and possibly a few days into August. Then successive wednesday resets should work their way one week at a time through the August submissions

Thank you. The more information the better.

Then there's the anticipation of waiting for it to go on line. That's the best part - like waiting for Christmas as a kid

well at the risk of having Creedy dub me as a present snooper , I have a bit more for you this week vee.

(The new Question game week runs Wed-Tue if I did not already say that) I have 3 out in the group that just started play today. I had a fair few questions packed in close around the next acceptance period but didn't expect it would even reach one dated Aug 4 but it did. It also picked up 2 more from aug 6. this time I have a more exact picture of where it left off because I have a third question dated aug 6 which did not make the cut.

So to re-iterate it doesn't pull from exactly 7 days nor, obviously does it pull the entirety of a day's question submissions. it just goes until it has how many it needs and stops but 7 days seems a reasonable estimate. So a very rough projection of the next few cycles from now if your friend is still waiting...(with increasing margin for error the further out it goes)

NOV 2 is the next reset date which will run through questions with a Modified date from approximately Aug 6-12

Nov 9 will then pickup Aug 13-19

Nov 16 will pick up Aug 20-26

and so forth

It has been pointed out before that the game selects questions from a range of categories, not just all from the same date. If your question is in a category with few submissions, it will probably appear in play more quickly than if you select one of the more popular categories with truckloads of questions to choose from. This is one of the reasons that waiting times cannot be predicted with great accuracy, as the number of questions being submitted to each category is beyond the control of the system. (But the roughly three months wait seems to be pretty consistent across all the categories, give or take a couple of weeks.)

see that is what I don't understand; I don't submit them exactly like clockwork but I have been sending them in fairly regularly, and have seen it go through a variety of groupings (from one offs, all the way up to bunches of questions packed together where I had as many as 9 out in the same week) which has presented some patterns.

They are arranged chronologically on my list of all approved submissions by "last modified date" which more or less corresponds to the submission date...any time I have had a question "hung up" in the approval process longer than it normally takes, whenever it does eventually get approved it drops back into the order where I submitted it, ahead of later submissions which were approved earlier.

When it pulls questions for play it goes straight down the line chronologically. I have never seen it skip one, including those ones which were held back. In fairness there, I do try to vary categories if I am sending in more than one on the same day so it is possible I am missing that selective element based on category, but rumors abound that sometimes questions get purposely held back in the approval process if a category is overloaded so as to balance the subject matter of the New Question game. Based on observation I just don't see how that would be effective since they jump back in line in original order.

If there are 150 Qs picked and posted each week, there's probably a statistically fair chance of all categories advancing pro rata in the 3 month schedule. Maybe authors are submitting an inordinate number of 'General' Qs but the fact of Editors re-assigning them to more accurate pigeonholes fixes that dilemma. If there is a lack of, oh say like noted in another thread Campaigns and Elections, those come under 'World' and if there are only 3 World to get added to the 150 that week, well you wouldn't see any inordinate delay in the Q appearance. The only way I see an impact to a fair selection/distribution of Qs from each category is if there are too many, say, Literature Qs that follow the release of a new Potter movie and there is a glut of Potter Qs submitted.
The ways I see the 12 week hold changing is if there is a need to generate more or less sets per week due to change in player amounts, or there is a sudden increase or decrease in submissions, or, Terry wants to make changes and confuse all us persnickety observers of fashion.

The outstanding differences I see from the posted rules are that we get credit for a good Q by the time 100 plays have been made, not at the end of the week's rating. That the number of plays lately have held at around 275 per week but it has been as high as 325 and as low as 175 plays in the rating arena. That variable could also effect the wait time for accepted to get rated. There is also a possibility that some Qs are posted in more than one set. We hear often that is the result of pull for fix and adding back to a different set as the reason for seeing a Q twice in a review cycle buit it may also be that double placement to fill out 15 sets without going beyond a specific wait window and that is where the categories could come into play.

Bottom line::: It all depends on people playing the New Questions game at a high rate At 15 sets per day there's 150 Qs being reviewed each day. To estimate the number of players altogether at a 75% 'do rate them' ... Okay this is where I usually do the numbers wrong... Each Q getting 300 votes means 400 people played the Q, I'm guessing that 6,000 total players do the game each day. CVhange that number and you need to adjust the wait time.

Nowhere near. Currently, the total on the homepage (at 5:30FST) says 434 players have been in-game today.

I just came to see if I could actually swim in the tears I've shed. Now the number is 455 and that's all players so there are probably less (350?) that have rated the Qs. Does the number of players rise significantly at FT nighttime or on weekends?

My set (#15) has nearly 30 players listed (scorers with less than a 0 score don't get listed) That would be 450 players with scores> 0, maybe 500 total players, Kyle. And the day's not done, but 6,000 is definitely wrong. Off by a factor of 10 at the day's end?Sorry.

Considering the above was posted at 3:38pm FT...

Woops! Got the time zones mixed up. Mine with FT's.

I'll let you swim in my pool of tears if I can try yours.

I had a problem submitting a new question. First I received an internal server error than I received an error message stating that the connection had been reset. I finally did get to submit the new question.

I think something happened to the whole site. I got a bunch of messages saying that FT was unavailable. I hope everything is okay.

Just a hiccough I think...it wws down about 5-10 minutes and some hourly gams failed to roll over but it seems ok now

This only half registered with me when I read it before but I can see I jumped up midway through a new week just recently and this point came back to mind.

So if a question is on the border of the qualifying criteria and dips below the line as the week progresses, do you lose the credit for that question? Likewise if you are almost there but just outside the target range(s) at 100 plays and it does drift above the line as more results come in, will you be credited for it then?

I don't think you get permanent credit for qualifying questions, any more than sunnies stay permanently on quizzes. I would expect that there is some routine that checks at some appropriate interval to see what the status of your questions is - probably when a new batch is set up for play. Just as sunnies re issued once a week (after the initial three-week wait), and it makes absolutely no difference what the ranking looks like along the way.

Just to be sure we are discussing the same thing, I am talking about credit as one of the 50 questions for the question author challenge badge (or 100 for the more advanced badge of the same type) where you need to average better than 0.200 on your cumulative average of player rankings of the question in New Q...and also average better than 55% of players getting it right there.

At some point it has to terminate the count. With player rating it absolutely has to end after the week run through new Q because at the latest because it does not get rated that way once it transfers to other games. I assume it keeps tracking the % correct numbers in later play (or likely starts a new count) but since the badges are specific to New Question I assume the count for the purposes of that badge stops either at the 100 plays point...or whenever it reaches its final tally for the New Q week.

After the NQ hurdles, the % correct value can change but once out of the review process there is no way to influence that likability figure (excellent, okay, terrible selection (0.200)). So, the ranking for a 50 or 100 good Qs and the badge won't change.
My experience with that measurement made after the 1st 100 to the end of the week is that it can drop out or drop back in if big swings happen in values, otherwise I think it stays selected or rejected at that 100 vote level. I just had one that was counted at the 100 as good but by week's end it showed 50$ correct and dropped back one step in the standings.
All this is speculation of course. Terry is I think the only one who knows how the gears mesh and turn behind the curtain.