A teammate, SatchelPooch, had the following Twist today: 'Curse of the Celebrity Last Name'. For each answer, she was to match the person's last name with a rhyme, and was specifically told that she needed to use apostrophes.

For instance (not one of the actual questions), the clue would be:

Mark's Grey matter

The answer would be:

Twain's brains


She has sent me a screenshot of her answer page. They all look correct, and all match FT's answers. Her apostrophes appear to be identical to FT's apostrophes. Yet, every answer was marked incorrect.

I know that this has been discussed previously, but nothing seems to have been done about it. Not everyone reads these Forums, so many aren't even aware that there may be a problem with their particular keyboard.

Is there truly nothing that can be done to fix this?

Did you also check for any extra internal spaces? I think the system now ignores excess opening and finishing spaces (but am not 100% sure), but internally they are considered characters, and two instead of one is detected as an error because the characters being checked do not appear in the right spot. In your example, an extra space between the words would make a space appear where b should be, a b where r should be, etc.

Can you tell the difference on here between ' and `?

FT's answer fields can, and if the player used the latter instead of the former, then all fo them would be wrong.
This is one of the reasons we no longer allow punctuation in FITB quizzes.

The screenshot she sent to me doesn't look like there are any spaces. She is a long-time member of FT, has played many Brain Twists, and is unlikely to have inserted stray spaces in all ten of the answers.

Kyle, the apostrophes look the same, to me.

But, even if they are different... and I've read that they can be... shouldn't this be fixed? How many people are using the 'wrong' apostrophe, and are not complaining, but are just sighing and moving along? Isn't this rather off-putting?

The former shares the button with " on my keyboard; the latter shares the button with ~.
We also have issues with hyphens and dashes, on occasion, when quizzes are copied from certain word processing programs/versions. I don't know if there's an easy fix for these-- especially the dash/hyphen thing because the characters still do have a place. In the meantime, our fix has been to avoid punctuation in FITB.

Between these issues and others we've faced with punctuation simply being problematic as the site has evolved (weird back-end stuff rom years ago) it made sense at the time. I don't even want to get into international characters with accents. :p

Wouldn’t it be fair to exclude these quizzes from the Brain Twist? I’m sure we have more than enough alternatives available. Losing the Brain Twist has a significant impact on the GC and I feel players shouldn’t be penalized for this issue.

I know about the apostrophe problem and have fixed it on my laptop but I have lost points when I’ve played on my phone. I’m sure I can fix it on my phone as well but I haven’t done it yet.

To me, they both look like the vertical apostrophe that is with the ". They don't appear at all slanted. She is in the U.S., so is likely using a U.S. keyboard on her device.

What concerns me are all the people (like my teammate, who has been on the site for over a decade) who don't read these Forums, and don't even know that this is an issue.

I think excluding these quizzes from the brain twist is a good idea, and we can look into whether that is possible.

I was under the impression that those quizzes had already been modified to some extent, though, to allow for an excluded apostrophe, and that the hints said that. I'll look into that further.

The possible answers that were given to my teammate did not show any without the apostrophe. Most of them showed answers capitalized and not capitalized, but still with apostrophes, nor did the instructions say that the apostrophe was not needed.

Her instructions:

"This quiz was written several years ago when punctuation was allowed in Fill in the Blank quizzes. This means you WILL need to include apostrophes in the answer if appropriate."

The current rule in Brain Teasers, and the other categories where I edit, and probably site-wide, is that if an answer requires punctuation to be correct, it may NEVER be the answer to a fill in the blank question. The older quizzes are still there under the "grandfather" rule.

The reasoning that I have always used is that to accept

Twains brains

would be to give credit for what is in reality an incorrect answer.

If there is a way for these older apostrophe-laden quizzes to be pulled from the Brain Twist rotation I'm all for it, but I think that is something Terry needs to answer.


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Spanishliz, Editor in Brain Teasers, Geography, Movies and Crosswords

I had that same quiz today and put in apostrophes without a problem.

Unless any of these quizzes were overlooked, they do accept the answer without an apostrophe, even though they are grammatically wrong that way.

Excluding a specific quiz from Brain Twist based on what answers look like would be a very difficult process - it can't really be automated well and manual exclusions would still suffer the overlooking problem.

I don't know how feasible it would be to do so, but eliminating any punctuation from the answer check in the Brain Teasers category might be the solution. It would let grammatically incorrect answers count (Twains Brain's would match Twain's Brains) but in my opinion that would be the lesser evil compared to effectively removing a whole class of quizzes from consideration. It would also restore the ability for them to be written.

If I may, the symbol that shares a button with "~" is not an apostrophe, but a stress (or accent), which is used as a diacritic mark to write in those language that use those signs on top of vowels (or occasionally consonants). The "~" serves a similar purpose in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese. Therefore, I am not surprised the answers were marked as incorrect.

Wesley, if the instructions say to use an apostrophe (which they clearly did), then how would a player know that it was O.K. to leave them out, entirely?

The player is from Oregon. She did not use a 'accent' mark. She used the vertical (') that is under the (").

I've read that certain keyboards are a problem. How is the average player to know what is deemed acceptable?

This is not necessarily true. The original "fix" was to simply state that apostrophes MUST be used. Accepting grammatically incorrect answers (to some of us at least) is an enormous evil, and not something to be done lightly.

It also wouldn't be a "whole class of quizzes" but a few older quizzes written before the punctuation ban went into effect.



As an editor I would be very uncomfortable condoning incorrect answers on a wide scale.

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Spanishliz (Editor in Brain Teasers, Geography, Movies and Crosswords)

It occurs to me that there is already a way to write such quizzes in future, without accepting incorrect answers or fearing that the apostrophes won't be accepted.

The answer is to use the Match format, which doesn't create the same problem. I've used it myself to enable the use of punctuated movie titles, which are also excluded from fill in the blank answers.

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Spanishliz (Editor in Brain Teasers, Geography, Movies and Crosswords)

The idea would not be to condone wrong answers, but to not penalize a player for what is effectively a technical problem (computers using different things for the apostrophe). Ignoring the punctuation during evaluation would let a player get the score regardless of which character they used - and it would in my opinion rather present less "condoning" than the current way some quizzes allow the non-apostrophe answer (which shows as an "other accepted answer" in the solution screen). If the punctuation is ignored only for checking, the player sees one correct answer: The one that has the correct apostrophe in the correct place.

I'm fine with the system being made to ignore the punctuation if it can be done, but not with being asked to allow "Twains brains" as an alternate answer. Those quizzes that exist that do condone these answers predate my time as a BT editor (or were added by the quiz author after the fact).

If it can be made so the punctuation is ignored at evaluation stage it would solve everything, and would be great! Meanwhile, using the Match format would allow such quizzes to be written with no problems.

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Spanishliz (Editor in Brain Teasers, Geography, Movies and Crosswords)

I wonder if the system we already have in place to exclude specific questions from games would work to exclude these quizzes, if we were to use it for every question in the quiz? Or would it be simpler to just get Terry to manually remove these few older quizzes from the pool for Global.

I understand and sympathize with Liz’s reluctance to encourage what are essentially wrong answers, just to get around this problem. And it really would be a question of encouraging them - if we didn’t say, plainly “do not use apostrophes” players who happen to have the “wrong” keyboard would not know to omit the apostrophe. Because, of course, most players don’t know anything about the ptobkem, or know what kind of keyboard they are using.

Getting these quizzes out of play for any games where it the score matters really does seem to be the best fix, however we go about it.

I've looked into it a bit further, and have got some ideas on what to do about this, and have sent Terry a note. Hopefully he can solve the problem reasonably easily.

You're 100% on the money.

From Correction Notes sent in over the years, this has been one of those issues I've seen a lot of. Obviously, the intent to get it right is usually still there, but they're hitting the wrong key. It's a lousy way to be penalized, but that's the risk that gets taken making and taking a FITB quiz.

PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard, or "user error") is a seductive diagnosis for sticky technical problems. However, in this case this diagnosis is incorrect.

I took the Brain Twist quiz in question on an iPad, on which I don't even know how to access a diacritical mark -- I think that requires a flick gesture? I typed a standard apostrophe, available on the standard iOS symbol keyboard, in each answer.

With great respect, the fact that the system can't recognize the apostrophe I typed on my iPad as an apostrophe in the quiz answer is a bug. I am quite willing to believe that it is a bug that is difficult-to-impossible to resolve, but it is still a bug.

And that is exactly why punctuation is now banned for Fill in the Blank questions. What your particular device sends to the universe when you hit that apostrophe is not coded to be the same as the symbol that the template is looking for. There are a number of ways in which the difference can arise - use of a diacritical mark is only one of them. Others relate to the settings in your devise that determine which character is linked to each symbol on your keypad. Some of these are under the control of the player (if they know how to change the setting - but they may not); apparently there are some which are not adjustable, especially on Apple devices. And even if the player can fix it on their end, they won't realise there is a problem until they have already encountered it in a game.

It's a recognised and ongoing issue that the site has been working on for quite a while,as you can see from the earlier entries in this thread. (I might point out that my suggestion of extra spaces was just trying to cover all possible reasons for an entry that looked right to the naked eye being marked incorrect by the system. The all-too-familiar apostrophe-that-isn't-the-same-apostrophe issue was always the most likely explanation.)