Would those who select the questions for the daily quiz PLEASE remember that the FunTrivia membership is GLOBAL and that questions should reflect that!! The topic for my division today was Sport. The range of sports which COULD have challenged our knowledge is practically limitless, yet today's quiz scarcely strayed out of the confines of American baseball and American basketball.
That would certainly have pleased many Americans amongst us, along with any others who follow those sports. However, for those of us - American and non-American - whose interest in them is cursory at best, the predominance of questions on them today was UNFAIR!!

At first I was going suggest that the reason why was because most sport quizzes were on these two sports but when I looked at the amount of quizzes for different sports I am not really sure. There are 656 soccer quizzes, 176 cricket and 183 Rugby (142 League and 41 Union) and 88 Aussie Rules Football quizzes. Therefore I think about 1/4 to a 1/3 of the questions should have been on non-American sports.

I don't do the daily quiz if its on sports. Luckily today I got "Animals"

The odds are less than that. There are just over 1,000 Cricket, Soccer, Aussie Rules, Union and League quizzes - which is 1/5 (not 1/3), of the 5,000 odd quizzes online. The weight of numbers will determine (have an input into) the questions e.g. there are 3,200 quizzes in these "North American" categories: Baseball, Gridiron, Basketball, Hockey, USA Mixed, College , Nascar .. you and I have got two chances of answering those questions correctly, none and buckley's.
(the other 800 quizzes are from all over the place)

The whole process of selection is automated, no one sits down and selects questions for the Daily Quiz. Terry, who is the only one privy to the actual mechanics, gave an outline of the procedure back in Jan 03 - see the last post of this thread: Big Daily Quiz Changes

I wouldn't worry too much about where questions come from, as the programme does not discrimate for or against North American quizzes .. worry about our pommy mates on Saturday night, I am

"none and buckley's"? What does that mean?

I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the questions posed today in the Daily Quiz were weighted heavily in favour of American members. How can I seriously believe otherwise when there were NO questions on tennis, soccer, the rugby codes, cricket.......? Whatever system was used to select the questions obviously didn't work. At a trivia night, if there were ten questions on sport, the quizmaster would not limit himself to one or two sports. If he did, the complaints would come long and hard and he would be forced to widen his repetoire. Well, I'm complaining now - so how about it, Terry?

(Correct me if I'm wrong, George/Terry)

I'm under the assumption that there isn't a PERSON choosing the questions. That it's a random sampling of the questions in the database. Therefore, anything could come up - if all that came up were American questions, that was the "luck of the draw", so to speak. It's not that someone deliberately chose American only questions - unless you're angry at the computer (and, trust me, that doesn't do much good - I've wanted to throw mine out the window many a time. Does it care that I'm angry with it? NO! )

Again, I could be wrong, but that was what I always thought about the way it works.

I think Linda's right about how it works... Also, I think Terry weighted it so only the more highly-rated and highly-played quizzes will have questions pulled from them. So therefore, if there are 100 quizzes on Squash (out of 200 Sports quizzes) but no one really played the Squash quizzes, you won't see many (if any) questions on that sport.

I hope that makes sense... I think I wrote a run-on sentence there!

If you choose fruit randomly from a hat, sometimes you're going to end up with nothing but apples.

Another reason for removing cagegory-specific daily quizzes entirely and having them ALL "mixes".

T

I'd like to vote for keeping the category-specific questions.

I use the quizzes for learning as well as getting as high a score as possible. So, I may not know much about some obscure subject, but that doesn't mean that I don't have fun playing the quiz. I can use it to better my mind!

I realize that some people use QLand as a way to get a high number next to their name. And, that's fine if that's the way that you choose to use it. But, there are others who use it for the purpose of learning something new. Both ways of approaching the place are fine.