I have been running the private tournament, Wit's End (#37636), since 2007 with a mix of custom and preset categories. In the last couple months, we have been plagued by a new glitch. A couple of the custom categories we selected on two separate days in November (Ruth and 1 & 2 Kings) are showing up repeatedly without being selected. I will clear all selections and enter a new custom category, and at some point over the course of the next day, the system randomly inserts one of these previously featured pools into the mix.

Today, for example, our custom topic is The Oscars: Best Supporting Actor. Some time over the last few hours (because I checked last night to confirm the absence of interlopers), 1 & 2 Kings was added so that players are receiving questions from Best Supporting Actor and 1 & 2 Kings. I don't understand how or why this is happening. My only recourse has been to check in multiple times per day as I am able to make sure the quiz is running as expected.

I have just done a few interactions with the interface and it all seems normal.

Have you possibly changed the custom category while it was active for the day? That could prevent it from clearing out properly, since it would leave a question pool of 0 which could obviously crash the game.

Please try changing today's category to any of the premade ones, save, then edit the custom, crosscheck and reactivate your custom. That might help.

Edit: Just to be sure, it would probably be best if you temporarily removed the custom from your lineup entirely, i.e. from all seven days. Maybe choose difficult baseball as the stand-in, don't think many would try and play that to cheat

Wouldn't say I'm doing anything differently than I have the last 14 years. I typically run a custom custom pre-built rotation.

Today Ruth jumped back in after I set Walt Disney last night.

I'll play around with it a little more now (try some of your suggestions).

Something is clearly stuck internally, which can happen in a database if locks somehow conflict due to multiple users doing something - in this case, playing and changing the entries.

My suspicion is that this might have caused an unusual glitch that prevented it from properly clearing - such as changing things while a player was actively playing a set or even, in a freak coincidence, in the middle of generating questions. This might have caused your customs choices to get partially locked. By removing the custom category entirely and then resetting it (on a day it was not due anyway), you might be able to reset everything to a proper blank slate.

Basically, with my technique I am trying to ensure that EVERYTHING that could conceivably cause a lock on your custom category is out of the equation, so that you have the chance to force a proper clear.

If that doesn't work, Terry will have to reset it for you.

Oh, another possible option - we had something similar in quiz editing a while ago: Make sure you don't accidentally somehow have a forgotten browser tab somewhere in the background that you used to edit the game. If you close your browser and restore tabs on reopening, it will reload those pages - and if that page happens to be the result of your "add Ruth as a custom topic" call, it will reexecute that command (since it's hidden in the page address/data). Might want to fully reboot your machine(s) once!