News !!! It is time for a bit of news. And this time it is not so uplifting, because over the last couple of seasons we have seen a dip in the number of active users per season. I have decided to share it with you, because I feel that there is a strong community built around Quizzypedia and a lot of you will go far to help us out to make our project succeed. The post is rather long, but I hope you will take the time to read it anyway (IF YOU DO NOT HAVE TIME TO READ THE ENTIRE POST, PLEASE GO TO THE BOTTOM AND READ THE TEXT IN ALL CAPS). Lately, I have seen that a lot of old regulars have stopped playing (some of them have been along for the entire four-and-a-half-year ride). I think there can be two major reasons for this 1) I started reading the questions out loud instead of leaving a picture that could be used as an extra clue to unlocking the question and 2) we migrated to the new webpage.
I will address the video questions first. This was in fact not a case of my megalomania, in fact I was quite hesitant about reading the questions out loud. But we chose to change this part of the concept for two reasons. First of all because we did not own the rights to those pictures and we were literally using other people’s property without asking for permission or paying for it. I felt that that was okay, as long as Quizzypedia was basically my own little hobby project, but now that we are trying to scale Quizzypedia into something bigger, we feel that it is not morally correct and we could potentially be hit by financial claims for doing so.
The other reason why we started making video questions was purely technical. Facebook’s and Google’s algorithms favor video content over picture content, so it was simply an attempt to reach a broader audience.
However, we don’t really sense that you like the video questions, and we have a feeling that most of you just skip the videos altogether and simply read the question instead. This does not mean that we will go back to the picture questions, because we simply cannot. But as you will see in the upcoming season, we have changed the videos to a version where I no longer read the questions out loud. This saves us a lot of time and I honestly do not think anyone will be missing them much. The second issue of the webpage is a more serious one. We have had a lot of feedback about 1) the problem that the page does not store passwords, so you have to log in every time you visited the website and 2) the site being excruciatingly slow (especially from mobile devices). We have now been working on solving these issues for the past couple of months and we have reached the conclusion that these issues are largely out of our hands.
1) If we look at the log-in issue, we actually know what the root of the problem is. When you click a link to the Quizzypedia website in Facebook, the site opens in a special Facebook browser. This browser will, in many cases, block you entirely from entering the site, and if it does allow you access you will have to type in your username and password every time. That is a huge pain – we get it. There is, however, a workaround to this problem. If you open the Quizzypedia site in your regular phone browser by typing in www.quizzypedia.com then you should have no access problems and your phone ought to remember your log-in information. After doing this, you can create a bookmark to the site and leave it on your home screen. Then you can just click the bookmark icon and it will take you directly to the website. If you have trouble doing this, you are welcome to reach out to me, and I will do my best to guide you. 2) That the site is extremely slow is another problem and one we do not have a fix to. It turns out, that the website provider we chose is great for making relatively simple webshop pages etc. But it is not built to handle sites with a lot of data and a lot of user interaction and that makes it slow. This is not something we can do anything about in the foreseeable future, because we have already committed to this provider and going to a new provider or building a custom made solution would both be very time consuming as we would have to build everything from scratch and it would be very expensive for us as we would we would either have to pay a new provider or hire someone to build the page from the ground.
That means that we are stuck with the page we have. Does that mean that there is no light at the end of the tunnel? Not at all! We are already working on a dedicated app (not just a website) for Android and IOS where you will be able to play the daily quiz and engage in one on one quiz battles against each other. These apps will be running smoothly and will be easy to use. But we are building the app from scratch and it will take time (months) before we will be able to release the first version. Therefore, we will have to ask you to be patient for a little while longer.
TO THOSE OF YOU WHO ACTUALLY LIKE THE QUIZ, BUT HAVE STOPPED PLAYING BECAUSE THE WEBSITE CAUSED TOO MANY PROBLEMS, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTINUE ANSWERING ON FACEBOOK (OR YOUR PREFERRED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM). I WILL KEEP THE SCORING FOR YOU.
AND I WOULD REALLY, REALLY, REALLY APPRECIATE IT IF YOU WOULD ALL REACH OUT TO ME (ON THE WEBSITE, ON FACEBOOK, ON INSTAGRAM, ON TWITTER) AND DROP A FEW LINES ABOUT YOUR HONEST THOUGHTS ABOUT THE WEBSITE. YOUR FEEDBACK IS CRUCIAL TO US.
That being say, I will really appreciate it if those quizzers who already migrated to the website will continue doing so. It lessens my workload a lot because I do not have to manually update every single answer. And to those of you who wish to continue with quizzing on the social media, if you would just make a profile on the webpage, that would make it very much easier for us, as we can continue only having one leaderboards. Thank you!
Oh, and there is actually one new feature on the website. You are now able to rate the individual questions. We hope that you will drop a rating, so we will have an indication of which types of questions you like and which questions you like to a lesser degree.
Okay, enough inside baseball now. The new season is just about to commence and I am happy to announce that Season 103 champion, Rishabh Gupta, has been kind enough to supply us with this round of questions. I hope you will like his set.