I submitted a question a few weeks ago which required you to know a little bit about divisibility. It was easy enough for an 8-10 year old. The question was refused because it required some calculation. Adding 2 or 3 single digit numbers and knowing your 3X table up to 21 was deemed too tough or would take too long in a timed game.

Today another type of question came up which is frequently seen in the Daily and TvT games.

If you take the number of commandments Moses received on Mount Sinai, divided it by the number of ugly sisters in the pantomime Cinderella then multiplied it with the number of sides on a hexagon, which number would you reach?

To me, this question is far more complex in comparison to the one I submitted...and it's in a timed game.

I agree. The combination of facts and the translation into numbers and then performing the operation would definitely be too much for an 8-10 year old.

Just to confirm though I have one in play this week which is passing ok on the % correct requirement but is dancing on the cusp of the user rating requirement 0f 0.2. It was just over at the 100 play mark so I was credited with one more on the Question Quest challenge list but it has gone and come back at least twice since then as the rating bounces around. I am not sure how frequently it checks but it is not instantaneous...probably either every hour or those critical points 4 times a day at 3:34 and 9:34 both AM and PM. those are the award times for numerous badges of the "rewards automatically when complete" type, including the question quest 50 and 100 badges.

And yes I am babbling to distract myself from the stinging pride of this question of mine suffering so in the court of public opinion. I didn't think it was bound for the top 20 of the week or anything but it seemed at least solid and relatively player friendly in my head

The guidelines are specific on this point:



If we start making judgements on what may be easy enough to allow, we'll get other players saying 'you accepted that one, why not mine?' which seems to be the point you're trying to make.

As to the question you saw yesterday, I don't know where it came from - probably lifted from a quiz. The best thing to do is send a correction note on the lines of 'the question is fine, but shouldn't be in a timed quiz' and we might then be able to remove it from that particular pool.

This is actually the point I was trying to make. The answers were a selection of saint's days which really made it a mindbuster for a timed game.

The difference is we have the ability to remove individual questions from quizzes, so we allow those types of questions. Single questions are always meant to be used for timed games, so we don't allow those types of questions in the first place.

Set 5 in today's New Question game shows a major flaw in the game. There were three questions dealing with the World Trade Center tragedy all submitted by the same author. These must have been approved by an editor at about the same time - even though the recommendations are that questions not be bunched up in the same category. Then the game mechanism allows for the picking of questions from the same author in the same category to go in the same set. Today's case is extreme with three - but I have had this happen before with two questions on an obscure television show. Can something please be done to prevent this from happening.

If there was a slight difference in the wording of the questions, they could have been submitted to different categories. The questions you mention could have been submitted to History or World or even People depending on the question. When playing the New Question game we don't see what categories the questions have been submitted to.

There are also at least two editors for each category. The questions may not have been submitted all at the same time. Day 1 the first question is submitted and approved by editor M. Day 4 the second question is submitted. Editor S approves it. The third question is submitted on day 9. Editor M sees it and approves it.


I once had the exact question with the exact info section appear twice in the New Question game. The only difference was the incorrect choices. In the error reporting areas I mentioned the question appeared twice and copied the other question as proof. Several weeks later, I was amused to see the reworked question reappear.

I have no problems with the editors (I understand they have a lot of other things to worry about) or even with the person who submitted these questions. It just seems that there should be a mechanism when sets are composed that would prevent multiple questions from the same submitter in the same category. With questions taking over three months to show up in the game there are plenty of other questions to choose from.

But how do you know they are the same category? I believe that was the point she was making.

The category is stated on the Question page. Copied from my set today and I hope I've limited the Q enough so that I've not given anything away:

Not necessarily. I never got a satisfactory answer to this when I asked about it before but, to me, by circumstancial evidence it seems that trying to gerrymander the question queue by delaying approval of similar type/too many same category questions (which I have heard cited as the reason behind approval delay of questions) is a pointless effort because they get reinserted into the queue on a first come first served basis by submission date (technically, "last modified date" but it is effectively the same as most approvals even with small editor adjustments made, go back to their submission date. I have seen this first hand with several of my questions. Even with up to a month long wait for question approval once, when it did get approved it appeared in my "yet to be played" queue ahead of several questions which had been approved in the interim but which were submitted later.)

It seems the best enforcement measure may be as you said, to discourage authors from submittting in clusters of very similar questions. This may have just been a perfect storm of the statistically unlikely grouping of three questions from one author in a single set and the aforementioned ineffectiveness of the staggered approval method for ungrouping such a cluster.

Or it may just have been that the questions were different enough not to warrant such action at all. I too am wondering if they are all in the same category. If their only similarity is being related to the Sept 11 attacks, but they were under dfferent categories as MiraJane said it is possible three different editors would have taken them on and each would be unaware of the other two questions. I imagine the red flag system for author clumping comes in the form of looking for same category questions submitted close together by an author and manually comparing them. Setting up a filter to search for specific content seems...cumbersome at best, but more likely closer to impossible/apt to do more harm than good. For that matter such questions would be approved without fundemental complaint if coming from different authors so why would the same questions suddenly become unacceptable just for coming from a single author?

Also the questions submitted on Sept 11 2016 are being played this week, so it seems possible question submitters may have had the subject in mind and these three may not be the only ones that the editors saw at that time on it. So this overlap if questionable may have been lost in the shuffle that way.

Even if any one or several of those things happened, I would hesitate to call it a "major flaw" as even with the stars aligned so to speak to make this possible it would still be unlikely. It is more like you had a winning ticket for a pretty crappy lottery.

So far as I'm aware, you're right - the questions go online by date created, not by date accepted, so there's not much editors can do if authors submit acceptable questions in clumps.

If you think you hear wailing and gnashing of teeth about questions appearing in the game in bunches, you ain't heard nothing compared to the outcry if we were to delete or reject perfectly acceptable questions simply because the author had a burst of creativity and wrote several at once.