Firstly, Terry, the change you've made is brilliant. Thanks! I'm guessing the editors will be hoping they're not deluged with changes - I've 125 questions to go through, for example - although I guess any glut of changes would be a short term thing until 'historical' changes are worked through.

On your query to me, it's as Zorba Scank said - I could see the question itself in the 'My Contributions: Not Yet Rated' section of my QQ Overview Page (the mistake is in the wording of the question itself). I did write to an editor about it, but there was apparently nothing could be done unless someone put a correction notice in.

Now at least I can sort that one out first!

I am just thrilled and delighted, Terry and everyone, to see and use the new Question Quest system change. I am actually dancing in my computer room!

At this point, voicing any disagreement I have with Terry's philosophy of intellectual property would probably make me look like an ungrateful whiner, so I will hold back for now. I will say that I am in complete agreement with the idea of locking down material such that only a select few have control of it. This makes perfect sense. And I will happily accept the editors' ability to summarily change material, for better or for worse, without notice or permission, as a small price to pay for the joy of having my ideas made available to a wide and appreciative audience.

One more suggestion for "down the road": if it's an easy change to make, it would be nice to see (and request changes) on the "Your Accepted Contributions" page what category each of our single questions is currently in. More than once have I seen a question in a Mix quiz that definitely did NOT belong!

Thanks Terry! That is a wonderful addition! It is very nice to see a list of my questions in one place. Seeing the rankings also is a great guide to which questions work well with our players.

Glad you like it, CD.

"At this point, voicing any disagreement I have with Terry's philosophy of intellectual property would probably make me look like an ungrateful whiner, so I will hold back for now."

Oh, I'm open to hear your thoughts.

What we do is actually quite standard for user-content-contributed websites.

In effect, whenever you submit anything to our website (chat posts, quizzes, questions, forum posts, etc etc), you grant FunTrivia an exclusive license to do whatever it wants with your content (use it, modify it, print it, sell it, etc), and agree not to post that content elsewhere.

You will find that this is fairly standard, because anything other than this setup can get extremely complicated. Imagine if players were allowed to demand that posts of theirs be removed, and Google had already indexed our site and copied their text. Or players demanding their quizzes be modified in some particular way or they'll sue. Can of worms. While we certainly often honor specific requests (i.e. "I just made a fool of myself on the chat board, please delete the post for me"! (this happens now and then) ), we don't want to be in a situation where we are legally forced or obligated to do so.

With the way that Google and other robots suck up information on websites, whenever you post something to the internet, you must assume that it is the equivalent as yesterday's page 1 of the New York Times -- permanent. That is also one of the reasons that I recently reviewed the information that we encourage/allow players to post about themselves. I don't think some people realize just how permanent stuff on the internet is (see the wayback machine & google caching).

Also, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) is extremely important to websites such as ours, and the above arrangement along with that legislation protects us legally from damaging content that users may post.

Considering that what we do isn't "Terry's philosophy", but rather a fairly standard process, I'm not sure exactly what part you disagree with and attribute to "Terry"?

The only other applicable "philosophy" that I can think of is the open source / wiki / creative commons movement, which works well in some spaces, and not so well in others. First, FunTrivia existed well before this movement came into being. Our IP policies were in place before the Wiki movement even began. In fact, FunTrivia was one of the first large-scale user-contributed-content websites on the planet!

Second, I think you'd probably agree that FunTrivia authors in general would hate to have their quizzes appearing on 20 different wiki sites, or on competing trivia websites that simply copied all of our content. Or, as most wiki material ends up, appearing everywhere without attribution whatsoever. Creative commons / freesourcing of quiz content just doesn't fit our model, doesn't respect the community, and would make FunTrivia non-unique. Not a really good option, really. Creative commons works best in situations where those with expertise can build on prior work. Good examples of this can be found in the open-source software movement and wikipedia itself.

Back to what we DO do... I have always been very open to granting authors expanded rights to their contributions. I have even had a couple of authors in years past request (and I accepted) the ability to publish their FunTrivia quiz contributions in book format and sell them. I think that's great. It doesn't compete with us and it respects the original author. Everyone wins.

We just need to keep the IP process simple. Players submit stuff, we retain all (exclusive) rights to it by default, and are more than willing to share rights on a case by case basis by request with the original author. I think that's very fair. In our 10+ years of operation, I can't think of a single case where a FunTrivia contributor left us feeling cheated or disrespected. We have always respected them as contributors, even years after their contributions were made.

Terry

Thanks for the change Terry.

I can see that my question an editor completely changed makes sense because they also altered an answer option and my II as well. I would still have liked to make that change myself or at least been notified of it before it went online tho.

Oh well, I can monitor it myself now and see what is really going on with my questions

Thank you for your responsiveness on this issue, Terry. It really speaks well of your character.

Yes, thank you. It's a big improvement!

My phrase "Terry's philosophy of intellectual property" was hastily and poorly worded - sorry for the confusion. I didn't mean that you had originated a philosophy, Terry. I meant that it was a notion you you supported with your statement

"Editors have the right to completely change a question if they choose to."

What I meant by "philosophy of intellectual property" was the idea that editors can do whatever they want with authors' content, while the author's name remains on it. Since even minor wording changes can drastically alter the author's intent, it is possible - likely, even - that authors' words will be misinterpreted.

After a little reflection, I have come to believe that the core reason for my discomfort with the concept of editor supremacy comes from an irrational fear of having my quizzes and questions being misinterpreted, and as a result, players not taking me seriously.

What I expected was respectful communication between editor and author - something along the lines of "I made this change to your quiz because ..." and "Ah, but you see, the reason I worded it that way was ...." But after thinking about it, I suppose may not always be practical or reasonable. After reading Terry's and guitargoddess's posts, I realized that 95 percent of my content has gone through without a hitch. I need to remember that I can trust our editors to be gentle, thoughtful, and judicious. For the five percent of the time when I really didn't like the changes, I can learn to live with them. Like guitargoddess wisely said, my two options are learn the valuable traits of tolerance and acceptance, or to argue and have an unpleasant experience, possibly being banned for being a difficult and combative personality.

The points Terry made about how FunTrivia protects itself, as well as its authors and content through content ownership were well taken. I now realize that this is the simplest and most effective way to protect our contributors, and I am grateful for it. I hadn't thought of it that way before. Also, I feel much better about the issue after reading about the IP flexibility the site offers as you described:

"We just need to keep the IP process simple. Players submit stuff, we retain all (exclusive) rights to it by default, and are more than willing to share rights on a case by case basis by request with the original author. I think that's very fair. In our 10+ years of operation, I can't think of a single case where a FunTrivia contributor left us feeling cheated or disrespected. We have always respected them as contributors, even years after their contributions were made."

Hope this clarifies things - at least *I* learned something .

<<Editors have the right to completely change a question if they choose to. >>

I think there's a difference between what an editor has the RIGHT / ability to do and what an editor actually does do. I was speaking to the ability they have.

Editors have the ability to change anything, but they generally use this ability to clean up and make prose consistent. I'm sure that the occasional re-interpretation or misunderstanding of original intent occurs with edits, but that's certainly not the goal of the editing process. These get fixed through our correction system.

Absolutely, we do NOT want editors drastically altering quiz or question content. They don't want to do that, either. After all, they are (all of them) quiz authors themselves. They're not going to use another player's content to create new ideas of their own.

Terry

Wow - great addition. I love it!

I did have all of mine kept in a word document somewhere but this is fantastic - particularly being able to have a way to get them corrected.

I'm just having a bit of a glitch with the subsequant pages and wondering if this is unique to me or a problem in general?

I read the first page, press 'next 50', it changes pages but the first 35 - 40 questions are the last 35 - 40 from the first page so I have to scroll down and find the 10 - 15 new ones down the bottom and then it does the same on the next page etc. I hope that makes sense

Fixed now Midget?

It is - Thankyou. Much easier to read.

I love this new feature! Now when I see a question that I just *know* I posted back when QQ first began, I can go check the exact wording etc of mine, the date it went into the game, and do something about it, instead of just having to "grin and bear" someone copying my work

This is a great feature, Terry!

Wow! This is a GREAT new feature.

A clarification: are you inviting us new-question authors to modify older (say, over 8 - 10 months old) questions with low correct score percentages to make them easier and resubmit them? I'd love to give that a try on some of those questions rated as interesting - over 0.3, but scoring as too difficult for most - say, under 25% correct.

Related New Question Game frequency question:

I'm fairly new to the forums, although I've been playing on the site for years and years. The Question Quest feature, going on for over a year now, is fun both to play and to write-in individual questions.

A question related to this topic: Why has the New Question quiz gone from renewing every few hours to just a daily quiz? I loved the fact that, a few months ago, a new New Question Quiz could come up at any time, and the fact that my new questions would go on game within a few days of posting and getting them approved.

Now it takes weeks and weeks for a question to be used. It is fairly discouraging to keep authoring new questions when my queue is many questions long and they just sit there.

Why not go to a cycle like the Global Challenge, and do the New Question Quiz every 12 hours? It seems as though we have the backlog of questions to accomplish that.

Thanks,
Son of Saradoc

Would it be possible to ask QQ editors to give some feedback if they reject a proposed amendment to an old question?

I've had a couple of questions 'fixed up' under the new system which is great. However yesterday I put a rewording in on a question which had a 0.18 (average) rating and only 39% 'rightness'. I note now that the correction notice has gone from the question but no change has been made to it.

It may just be the editor has made the call that the change wouldn't make any difference, but it certainly wouldn't have done any harm to the question's playability and (I believe) would almost certainly have improved it.

In any event some feedback would be nice ...

Very, VERY nice addition. Thanks Terry.

Mmm ... I think so(?) I used the 'My Contributions: All Accepted Submissions' button to post a correction. That logged the fact that a correction had been posted. That 'log' later disappeared but no correction has been made. I may not fully understand how the system works, but - as this was last week and there's still no correction made - I'm assuming an editor has decided not to make one.

Hi

This isn't a complaint but a query:

I've got a single question that I think is stuck in the submissions. It's been there for a couple of months. In fact I've had several quizzes accepted and that question still stays there.

I've already got the badge for the single questions, but I like submtting them and wanted to get up to 200 accepted. Currently it remains at 199.

If there's something wrong with the question, could it be deleted please? And I'll just resubmit another in its place.

Creedy

What category is it in?

Hi Skunkee

It's finally gone through - but thank you.

I'll stop submitting them I think. It was probably a bit thoughtless to keep sending them in when I've already got the Badge, when there's others still trying to get their questions through for their own Badge.

Regards

Not at all! The idea is to build up a database of good, interesting questions - so if you've got 500 good, interesting questions, by all means, submit them!

Ok - will do. Thank you