After a four-week break, we are live again and the new season will begin shortly. However, we are back with some rather significant changes. They are: 1) There will be no more winner announcements, nor will there be any tie-breaks in case of a tie.
The most important reason for this is, that it simply takes too much time and puts too much strain on my family life. It is simply not possible to take every other Sunday out of the calendar to run tie-breaks and write long posts that few of the quizzers actually read.
The other reason for ending the winner announcements is that I always get a lot of comments about people cheating. I must admit that there have been cases where cheating was so blatantly obvious that I confronted the quizzer, but most of the time I just l let it fly because I had no smoking gun. I know that some of you will be frustrated with this change and some of you might even quit the quiz because of it, but I think that most of you are taking part in the quiz to get a daily question and have a bit of fun with that. At least I hope so.
2) I have decided to put a stop to Clash of Countries. The reason is the same as mentioned above. It simply takes too much of my time.
3) There will be no regular news posts every season. That means that I will not even announce the new quizmaster. This does not mean that I do not appreciate the efforts all you guys put into making great questions, but nobody reads the post. How do I know this?
First of all, the numbers of views/reads are not exactly impressive, but these past few weeks I have received numeous messages asking why there were no new question or if the “I missed something” because there were no questions. Well, it was stated quite clearly (I think) in the news post that there would be a four week break and it was the last post on the facebook page and on the blog on the the website, so I would think that people would go there, if something appeared to be out of the ordinary, but unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case.
My hope is, that if news posts are not a rutine thing, then people will actually stop and read them. I am aware of the fact that they haven’t exactly been exciting to read, so I can’t really blame anyone for not reading them. Hopefully, “real news” will be more interesting to read. 4) I will continue to correct answers that are sent to me via Facebook and Instagram but answers submitted here will not go on the leaderboard. Therefore, if you want your name on the leaderboard, please submit your answers on the website or in the app. There are exeptions to this, of course. If there is some kind of bug on the website or something else prevented you from answering the question, you can always reach out to me and I will put your points on the leaderboard. But I will not put the answers into the system on a daily basis.
I am aware that this change might cause some of you to stop participating in the quiz, but again, I think that most of you are here to get a fun daily question, not to go on the leaderboard, so I hope that most of you will stick around.
These changes should give me a lot more time of my hands. Time that I can use writing questions (which is fun) instead of writing lenghty posts that nobody reads (which is tedious) and I will have more time to read the questions I get from you guys, edit them and have a back and forth about the changes. I hope that you will all feel that I go back to focusing on the core product – great questions – and leave most of all the fluff behind.
If you strongly disagree with my decisions and if the changes will make you stop playing, I hope you will contact me before doing so. These changes are not set in stone and if I sense a lot or support for some of the features that I have just cut, I will re-consider. But I hope you will continue within the new framework. With that said, I hope you are already for a new season... Game On!