Also, it only lists general categories as the categories for the questions. It will never say "Greek Myth" for example, but will say "General Humanities" instead...

I drafted a new question and saw that it has been asked before. However, the answer given was wrong. How do I proceed?

You could try to find the quiz with the erroneous question and submit a correction.

E.g. your search string would be:
site:funtrivia.com "text of incorrect question"

Google (or whatever search engine you prefer) will search only funtrivia.com for matching text.

I got a question in the New Question game from a player that hasn't logged in for years. That seems like a contradiction.

Are "new" questions pulled from other sources than players submitting them as single questions? Maybe from old quizzes that are taken offline?

Ideas?

incognito101 asked:
What word connects the line that separates the light and dark areas of a planet or moon and a 1984 film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a cyborg from the future?

They never come from quizzes, only single question submissions. Sometimes, old single questions may be reused in the game.

Sometimes, the game runs out of questions. In those cases it'll pull out old questions as 'new'. It happened a few months ago, it may happen again.

A correction note on a question, whether it is valid or not, means an editor has to review the question and put it back into the rotation. The system then 'sees' it as a new question.

I wonder how easy it would be to add a piece of programming to ensure this didn't occur. I had an ancient question myself today (oddly enough, it was from Incognito101 as well), and it is a bit irritating when new questions are currently taking 3 months to appear. Well, mine are anyway!

I know patience is a virtue, but when you're edging slowly towards one of the the QQ badges, it is slightly frustrating!

In the currently posting "Minor Issues" thread, it is stated by several sources that Corrected NQ Game Qs aren't seen as new and go to the back of the line. To the contrary, they are placed back into the accepted Q database queue for the NQ Game at the top of the list (a reason why Qs are sometimes seen twice in a brief span of time). The times when a Q is returned to a database as if it was new and to the bottom of the list is after an editor has made a correction to a "Newly Submitted" Q, and at acceptance into the NQ or Question Quest database.

The explanation you are disputing was given by an editor. Both explanations in a vacuum make theoretical sense but as they are in conflict only one can be correct. One comes from working knowledge of the system (and though it held some uncertainty on some specifics it was clear enough on the main points, one queue only...no line jumping, no midweek additions are made to NQ). The other theory (correct me if wrong) comes from indirect observation/speculation only, which tells me this is resolved. I am just trying to understand how this is still disputed.

Bingo.

If a Q comes up a month later back in the NQ Game, that does not mean it was placed at the back of the line a month ago during its first NQ run. A possible scenario for wide times in NQ appearance could be that once out of the NQ dB and out in the other quiz world, someone found something wrong, generated a CN and after correction, reappears in the NQ because the editor felt it a sufficient change to warrant that new review.

I too have outstanding accepted Qs in queue from September and a few from the first 9 days of October. If a lot of Qs are going back and forth at the head of the queue, it does tend to hold up the rest of the line. So, I'd wish the system was to put bad Qs toward the back of the line. But how far back?


PS edit Q: What is indirect observation? My learning is that observation is direct or it's not observation.

I think in that other thread and maybe this one too, it was said that the Qs run is a set for a week then new Qs and sets are shown to us. That' can't be true. Do the math. Qs are getting 300 reviews (and not all players do reviews but we'll stick with the 300 number). There are 25-30 players assigned to a set. A week of that exposure only accounts for (7days x 25-30 exposures a day) = 175 - 210 ratings, not near the number of ratings Qs receive.

So, one of two things are at work here: 1) Qs are in multiple sets; or, 2) Qs are in review for more than a week.

I'm under the assumption is that 'indirect observation' is learning things through hearsay and bits and pieces without actually seeing how something works empirically.



This is not something the editors know nor, likely, the admins, since the timings and distribution were set by Terry and Terry alone. (Though Wes would probably have insight because he knows about these game things.)

My presumption is the former, though you have to take that with a huge grain of salt, since I'm not going to proclaim to know things I don't, even with the numbers right in front of me, mainly because I see how many questions are removed from the yet-to-be-played pool each week. And no, that's not a number we give out.

That said, I'm not sure why it's a big deal. As I've already said before, the game is in constant flux, and Terry has changed the rate of release of new questions before depending on the amount saved up. Sometimes we go through writing droughts and sometimes we go through high intake, so this is only reasonable to prolong the game and avoid running out of submissions. If the game is taking three months to get to your questions, then it should be an indication that we have quite a bit saved up. On one side of the coin, yes, it means a wait. On the other, it also means that we have more new content coming to the site at all times. More questions means more trivia.



This, I'm not sure is true. Editors do not see questions in the waiting cache, so if corrected questions float to the top, it's news to me. In other words, you know a lot more about the queue than I do. My assumption is that while questions follow a general order, they're picked for the game out of order depending on the needs of the question sets (eg. we don't want ten Entertainment questions in a row). So there's a lot more dynamic than you're letting on.



If these questions already have a suitable number of ratings and scores to be sorted into their designated pools, then I'd say the quicker they're revised and playtested, the better, if only to better fill the question sets we have for all the other games on the site that are going to use them.
That said, you'd probably get a lot of insight from knowing how many single questions actually come back with corrections for this game. Or any game. It's not as significant a number as one would expect. Questions with severe errors are pulled for fixes, and questions coming back for typos are just fixed up and tossed back in; why waste the time? Even if questions with one typo were thrown back into the mix, the ratings trend would likely continue, and the question would just end up in the exact same spot it was already going.

Thank you Kyle for the inputs. Merry Christmas. Michael

Be sure to put a pin into your Christmas table so that when the Angels come to help you celebrate, they have a place to dance.

Merry Christmas to you as well.

It seems to be that the rough order of going into the New Question Game is based on the question's original submission date. So yes, when an old question has a correction note, is revised and accepted again, it'll tend to float towards the top of the pile of questions waiting to be played, because chances are it was originally submitted much earlier than the brand new questions that are waiting. By the same logic, I've noticed times when a question will show up rather quickly in the New Question Game after it was accepted, because it had sat in the queue for awhile (like several weeks) waiting for an editor to accept it. It then went towards the top of the pile of questions, because of it's earlier submission date.

I obviously can't say I know any of this 100% but has been my consistent observation, of knowing when I accepted a question vs when I saw it in the New Question game vs how long it sat in my queue before being accepted. It also make logical sense to me based on how other things work or have worked in the past on this site (e.g. how quizzes used to become archived immediately upon going online because the template creation date was more than a year in the past; single questions with pending CNs also appear to show up in the QC queue in order of question submission date rather than in order of when the correction was sent).

That said and in any case, I definitely agree with Kyle that this is not the only factor as to the order of questions getting played.

Decided this was the best place to post my query which is that do the questions which have between 10 percent and 55 percent of players answering the question correctly but it's rating is 0.20 or above get used in Fun Trivia later on or are they discarded?
Also wanted to say that the queues for the New Question Game are more than 3 months long now, which used to be maximum 6 to 7 weeks a couple of years ago. Too long in my opinion.
I wonder if there is any solution to the extremely long queues i.e the duration of the question being accepted and then being played. I am not talking about editing here.

Those questions get used in the games which require more difficult questions - Obscurity and Who's the Smartest, for example. The ones that are too easy for the target get added to the Piece of Cake pool, I think. That intermediate target for the questions to count for a badge is to focus us on that vast middle ground which is most in demand of fodder.