In playing a quiz yesterday:

Q: A song with a Biblical reference gave Huey Lewis and the News a number one hit in 1987. Name it.

Your Answer: jacob's ladder
The correct answer was Jacobs Ladder

When I entered a correction note requesting the addition of the apostrophe, I received the following response:

Punctuation : No punctuation of any description is allowed for an FITB question e.g. quotation marks, apostrophes, commas, full stops, dashes, colons etc.
The preceding an excerpt from the official FunTrivia rules for Fill in the Blank answers, so your apostrophe technically makes your answer incorrect. However, in the interest of fairness, the question will be changed by request of the editor.

Am I misunderstanding ? Are we supposed to enter answers in all fill in the blank questions without punctuation ? This makes no sense to me. It also means that anyone taking a quiz that has a fill in the blank question would have to have read the instructions for creating a quiz, specifically the information about fill in the blank, in order to know this.

Can anyone further explain this ?

Thanks

That was my fault - I should never have let the question go online. The question has now been modified.

However, if you had read the hint for that question, you would have seen that it said "No Punctuation!"

We do not allow punctuation in FITB questions, for technical reasons. If the player is not using an English language keyboard, he may get a false negative. This has been policy here for at least five years.

The person writing the quiz is not supposed to use answers that require punctuation as fill in the blank. But to me, that means 'don't use that as a fill in the blank answer', not 'just take out the punctuation'. I've had that happen before too, where I sent a correction notice on a FITB where the answer was a movie title that has punctuation in it, but the only correct accepted answer was the title with no punctuation. In that case, you should either allow both ways to be accepted, or make it multiple choice. I think usually editors will catch this, though, and add alternate correct answers, if they are going to allow it to be a FITB question.

I think there are exceptions in Brain Teasers, where if you say in the introduction DON'T USE PUNCTUATION, then you can put all your answers with no punctuation.

There are quizzes on the site with FITB answers that contain apostrophes, and the hints even remind you to use them. I can't name a specific quiz, but there are several by Minch, mainly about celebrity rhymes - answers like "Mel's smells".

Thanks everyone for the timely responses.

dippo, those are usually quite old quizzes.

Since it was a question in a quiz I submitted that we're talking about, I apologize for any confusion. I assume that people that play these quizzes know the rules, but that is no excuse. The question has since been modified to avoid further confusion. Mea culpa.

Not a problem Fred. As I don't normally play fill in the blank quizzes, and this was a fill in in the middle of a regular quiz, I was unprepared for the specific requirements for them.

If you find punctuation in a fill-in-the-blank answer, even if it is an 'old quiz', please send in a correction notice identifying the question. An editor can either fix it or change the question to multiple choice.
Although not all quizzers will identify it as an old or fairly new quiz, this helps keep consistency for the quiz player scores and fairness. Thanks.

I think this only applies to mixed-subject Millionaire-type quizzes in the General category.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm glad about that as my Millionaire quizzes seem quite popular.

Carol <><

The current QoH by quiz-a-matic is FITB requiring punctuation.

We know about no punctuation and the four-word answer limit in FMI. (Roy G. Biv HAS to go, BTW. Yes, I've submitted a correction.) What are the rules for FMI? Are there any other types of questions/answers which should be disallowed? As folks who play FMI know, I play it a ton, so I have seen a very high percentage of the questions in the FMI pool.

A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her.
-W.C. Fields

http://www.funtrivia.com/trivia-quiz/General/FITB-at-FT-303192.html

This quiz lays out some of the basics of writing a FITB. The problem is that you may find older quizzes where these rules are not followed.

Another trap for the unwary in FITB questions is spacing - don't hit it twice!