Hi, I've just finished authoring a quiz on HTML but have encountered a problem. Upon trying to submit it, I was presented with the following line of text:


I believe I received this message because in my intro I noted that the "'<' and '>' symbols have been dropped to make the tags visible." So the site thinks that I am trying to use HTML in my quiz and won't let me submit. I would just refer to the symbols by their names (greater than and less than symbols), but that takes up quite a few of the precious 250 allotted characters.

I do see, however, that in this quiz, the author made almost the exact same note.

I appreciate any and all help!

Just to be clear the "this quiz" text in my post is a link.

Guru, the quiz you are referring to is quite old - the HTML filter was likely very different then.

Have you tried switching the symbols around, listing the ">" first?

The quiz that you refer to -- which uses < and > in its introduction -- is a very old quiz, with a last-modified date of 2002. The banning of HTML in quizzes is much newer; if memory serves, the ban started as tournaments and timed games started taking off, since HTML code made questions much less flexible for different display modes. (I don't think the ability to play a quiz in Flash mode was even available yet at that time!)

The older quizzes -- which include a few Brain Teasers that use color text for some words -- are sort of grandfathered in. If the author came in now and tried to save the quiz (presuming it weren't archived), it would be yanked offline automatically with exactly the same message you receive. The algorithm for identifying html code is, as you say, pretty simple and does yield some false positives. I have two suggestions for finishing up your intro:

1. I'm not sure exactly how the html code-checker works. If it looks for a matched pair of brackets -- a < occurring before a > -- then reversing the order (> before <) might help.

2. There is a shorter name for these symbols which will probably be more familiar to HTML programmers anyway: calling them "angle brackets" will take up fewer characters than "greater than and less than symbols".

Guru, the quiz you linked to was written in 2002. In those days, HTML was allowed. If that quiz was to be edited today, it would not be accepted with the "<" ">" coding in it.

I have a few quizzes with HTML, mainly carriage returns ( <br > ), that I have had to replace over time.

OK, I figured that's why the symbols were in the old quiz, but back to mine...

I tried WesleyCrusher's and CellarDoor's suggestion, and I'm still getting the same message. Here's an idea: would it work if I used HTML symbol codes? Those work in other areas of the site (see my funtrivia profile comments) where greater than and less than signs are not allowed to stop people from using HTML.

Have a look at the alterations to Q1 .. does that help?

Thanks! It doesn't appear to have a problem with that. Now I can drop the problematic part from the intro, and do the same to all the other questions.

AH! I did it with the rest of the quiz, and although it works in the questions, it does not work in the interesting info sections.

I don't think you need them in the info. It should be clear to players that are you referring to the tags without the symbols.

In that case problem solved! Thanks!