I've noticed recently that while one of my quizzes is on the homepage (i.e. it is one of the four most recent quizzes), it gets significantly more plays than when its not on the homepage (which makes a lot of sense). As the current system is just 'display the four most recent quizzes' (five if you view in compact mode), new quizzes are very much at the mercy of other quizzes going online at the same time. For example, a couple of video games quizzes that went online today were off of the front page after around two hours and thus only have five and two ratings apiece despite being online for a good 12 hours. As they are in relatively niche topics, it could be years before they eventually get rated.

I was wondering if there might be a way to change this? I've had several ideas myself, but I'm sure there are other solutions:

1) All quizzes stay on the homepage for a minimum of either 12 or 24 hours, giving most regular players the chance to see them and consider playing them.
2) If option 1 would lead to too much content on the homepage at one time, perhaps players could be shown a random selection of four quizzes from the last 24 or 48 hours (maybe with a slight preference towards those that are struggling to pick up ratings?).

I'd be interested to hear other people's take on this. Apologies if any of this has been suggested before!

I've actually created a tab on my Favorites bar for new quizzes which lists the last 300 quizzes. Maybe instead of the current four quizzes there could be a link for this in its place.

I use the Brief version so I see 5 quizzes and when I click on 'Show More' I see 20 (11 if I use Full mode). At the bottom of that list (either way) is a link to 'All New Quizzes'. If you use the drop down menu under Quizzes at the top of the home page next to the Monopoly house there is a link to 'Newest Quizzes'. So it seems like there are several ways to find the newest ones.

I don't deny that there are plenty of ways for players to find new quizzes, and it is uplifting to hear that some people go out of their way to make sure they don't miss a good quiz.

That being said, it seems clear to me that the majority of players don't go to these lengths, and are happy playing only the quizzes that take their fancy on the homepage when they log on (a perfectly reasonable thing to do). It would be nice if those players still had the chance to see the quizzes that they may have missed (perhaps via the 'random recent selection' approach), which would benefit both the player and the author.

As the person who urged you to bring this topic here, I'm always up for more exposure for new quizzes. The front page is often one of the best places to get quizzes seen, no matter how long they're up there on the 'new' listing.

There's a balance there, of course, in making sure we don't list too many or avoid listing them at all. Maybe it would make sense to list a random set of five(?) quizzes from the past twenty-four hours that refreshes every time you refresh the homepage? Or click a button?

The Buzz would still list quizzes as they go online, and the Newest Quizzes list would still be there. Just throwing ideas out there.

A more prominent way to access the most recent quizzes would help.

I do not particularly want/need the links to my Team and Profile pages to the right of the Fun Trivia logo and think the space could be better utilized.

Those are links I use all the time! This site has so many users with such a variety of interests that it is not possible to provide each of us with out ideal pages. Since I trry to check out all the new quizzes that have been posted in my absence each day, it makes little difference to me where they are displayed. I do see, however, that more casual visitors will play the first ones they see. (Of course, guest players cannot provide ratings, so their plays may not seem important to authors waiting for their 20 ratings to get a quiz ranked.) Maybe a selection that rotates when you refresh the screen, all selected from the currently-unranked quizzes, would help keep those quizzes which have faded into the background without making the magical 20 mark for ratings stay in view a bit longer.

I don't use those links from there either (they're elsewhere on the homepage and on my GM bar), but I don't think it would be a good spot for more quizzes. In fact, I'd prefer to keep that space clear altogether.

I definitely support some kind of rotating chart of the most recent quizzes on the home page, with a few caveats:

- they need to BE the most recent, with a pretty sharp cut-off - twelve hours at most. Otherwise you'll see genuinely new quizzes, those put online within the last few minutes, mixed with two day old stuff, and "new" will become meaningless. If frequent users see a quiz on the new list on the Home Page that they already played yesterday, (or already decided they had no interest in playing) the list, and with it the entire home page, loses its freshness.

We don't want the experience of the home page to be "I've seen all this".

- new quizzes with fewer ratings should not get priority. There's a reason they have fewer plays, and it's that fewer people are interested in the subject. Just as we don't want users to hit the home page to see a bunch of stuff they've already seen, we don't want them to see a bunch of stuff they have zero interest in.

Now, anyone who has looked at my own quizzes knows that I'm a lover of the niche topic. Those are the quizzes I write, and those are the quizzes I play. Niche and obscure quizzes are why I love this site - you can get a quiz on the top hits of 1975 anywhere, but only here will you find quizzes on jazz drummers, or left handed guitarists. We need and love quizzes on topics that only a few people will find of interest.

What we don't need is those quizzes getting *more* exposure on the home page than quizzes that lots and lots of people want to play. They should be part of the mix, as they are now, but not seen with any more frequency than any of the others.

Another thing that could be very helpful in getting exposure to new quizzes is a more prominent link to this page, on the home page: http://www.funtrivia.com/special_lists.cfm?newest=1 It's not hard to find if you know where to look, but newer or more casual users might not even know the page exists, and it's the best place, I think, to see everything new in the order it came on. Anyone who has been away for a day or two can hit that page and make sure there is nothing of interest they've missed.

The front page is an ongoing work in progress.
Here's one idea Terry has been kicking around:


Homepage changes

Heh - about those discussions, when someone there says "I liked it better the old way" and I'm thinking "What was the old way? Can't remember what it used to look like".

Every time there is a change, people fight it, and then we get used to it, and wouldn't like the old way anymore if we could get it.

I agree that some sort of balance would have to be struck. To address the first point, perhaps it would be possible for players to not see the quizzes that they've already played as the random selection was selected? If random (or semi-random) selection were to be avoided, another option could be that players see the four most recent quizzes that they haven't yet played. However, I can imagine that system failing slightly when a bunch of quizzes go online in categories that a given player doesn't want to play.

I also agree that 'niche' quizzes shouldn't get special attention, the situation is more that the homepage '15 minutes of fame' means so much more to a quiz that won't garner too many plays over time, and thus I feel all quizzes should be given an equal chance to shine.

A little confusing there. How much attention should so-called niche quizzes get? Your answers look like: more, the same, less.

And, how do you define a niche quiz? A topic that hasn't been presented before? One that you don't know much about? Authors work just as hard on those as on any other quiz, why shouldn't they get an equal chance to get their work showcased?

Yes, an equal chance.

There was some suggestion that quizzes that hadn't yet got their ratings should be the ones to appear on the home page, and I disagree with that.

New quizzes should all get some time in the "spotlight" of the home page, so the discussion is how to do that in a way that is as fair as possible. As it stands right now, it is totally luck of the draw. Time on the home page can range anywhere from half an hour to ten hours, depending on who is editing and when, and what's in the queues.

I should say, as an editor, that since this problem was brought to my attention about a year ago, I now edit in smaller batches. I'll look at how long the quizzes on the home page have been up, and try to only knock off those which have had a few hours exposure. Then I'll come back two or three hours later and do it again. However, I'm not the only editor and sometimes it is inevitable that we'll step on each other's tails.

Oh, and I would define "niche" for the purposes of this discussion, as "quizzes that don't get much play due to the topic, rather than due to not having a chance on the home page". Some quizzes can be up for ten hours and still only get a handful of plays, because the topic is something that appeals to only a limited audience.

As I said earlier, I certainly don't disrespect those quizzes - most of mine would fall in that group. But if we arrange things so that that's all that shows up on the home page, we risk turning off the casual user.

On the other hand, how many niche-type quizzes show up over a given 24 hour period? For that matter, how many quizzes show up over a 24 hour period? As I write this, there have been eleven new quizzes in the past 24 hours. That part is dependent on how many authors submit quizzes at any given time and how many editors have time available to edit them. Sometimes there may be two new ones per hour; sometimes a half-dozen a day. That would have an effect on rotation.

And--a quiz may not get many plays at first. A quiz that Australians may love might go online at an hour when most of them are sleeping or working. It may only get 2 or 3 plays in its first few hours. Is this a niche quiz that needs to get shuffled to the bottom? What happens when the Aussies are online and the quiz get 90 plays in the next two hours? Is it redeemed? Initially, we can only label a quiz as niche according to our own conceptions. After days with little play we might be able to call it a niche quiz - or a plain failure. We don't know at first.

'Niche' argument aside, I think there's a good idea in better-featuring quizzes on the homepage to avoid quizzes from falling off the front page list too quickly. If I place seven quizzes online within an hour (as happens), the first few I edit aren't getting much exposure.

One of my earlier quizzes was featured for a few minutes only, I saw it go up when I refreshed the home page,after only a minute; I played it to make sure it worked, when I looked again it had gone.

That was at least a year ago; my more recent offerings have stayed up for an average length of time.

I think the idea would be that nothing was 'labelled' as niche or otherwise, it would just mean that all players get a chance to see more new quizzes, thus reducing the chance of the theoretical Australians missing a quiz that's right up their street, and the author from missing out on the ratings that they may otherwise have received.

I was thinking more upon the lines of useful links.

The catch there is that because there's so much to do on the site, those links are going to vary from person to person, not to mention that GMs already have a Favourites Bar.

If I were to have links there, I'd prefer them to be my team board, my Author Central page, and maybe the Author Lounge board. Someone else is going to want something completely different.

Since all of that is already available on the Homepage, I figure that simplicity is the strongest option.

I humbly suggest that the section used for Ask Funtrivia be replaced to showcase these quizzes. Or, at least, split the screen in two to show both.

I think the best way would be to have a New Quiz section that lists a random 10 quizzes or so from the past 3 days. Every 30 minutes or so it takes another random 10, etc.

That way over a 3 day period, all new quizzes in that period would have equal air-time on the homepage.

This would definitely be another solution that would work well. The only reservation I can see people having is that 10 quizzes would take up a lot of homepage space (not from me - new quizzes are one of the main things I access from the homepage!). I suppose there would also need to be a tab/link to get to the actual newest quizzes at any given time, though anyone that is searching them out for Early Bird/some other reason will presumably be willing to click once or twice to get to them.

In terms of attracting new players, I think that showing a random selection of recent quizzes would serve the site better than the current system. Due to the presumably large number of submissions, and the fact that it is much more convenient for an editor to work a batch of quizzes in a single session (as Kyle alluded to above), there are quite often three or four quizzes from the same category on the homepage. If a new player comes along and sees four quizzes in a category they don't care about they could be somewhat put off. A randomised system would make this much less likely.

Gold Members have the option to limit the "new quizzes" to a few categories they want to follow. For instance, I've used this option to get only quizzes in four categories (Geography, History, Humanities, Religion) in the "Newest Quizzes" list.

Will the programming change asked for by some members, affect this ability?