Happy New Year and a 2022 Recap
On a personal level, the past couple of years have been very busy so I haven’t been keeping up with the blog. Many apologies. We added a new family member, moved across the province, completely renovated an older home, and more, including pouring a lot of time and resources in Random Trivia Generator. Over the course of 2022, the site was re-built from scratch with React to improve performance on newer devices and browsers. The rebuild also allows for additional features with 2 being finished and deployed in 2022. The site now has a search features and tags! Oh, and another 5,000 new questions.
Search
Searching sounds so simple…and it is. But simple search functions are dumb and spit out lists of mostly useless results. Custom search functions are not easy to implement. Look at Google. There were dozens of search engines when they emerged on the market but by developing a useful engine, they became the leader, and still are. I am not comparing Random Trivia Generator’s search feature to Google but it took a while to develop a mostly useful custom search engine based on tags, categories and a crafty filter. I say mostly because it is better than the default search feature the back-end database has, but still can’t read your mind and give the exact result you want. You should now be able to find questions a lot easier!
Tags
Tags are finally here! What are tags? They are like sub-categories, and sub-sub-categories that can better organize questions by more specific themes. The tags page is not randomized, but it rather shows the questions that have tags in order they appear in the database. With close to 30,000 trivia questions, I have only been able to tag about 6,000 of them so far. But I am continuously tagging questions so the entire database should be tagged soon enough for your browsing pleasure. Give tags a go by clicking on the menu and navigating to the tags page.
New Questions
Since the last update, about 2 years ago, approximately 5,000 new questions have been added to the database. A big thank you to all who have submitted questions! I have another 1,000 to review and approve. It shouldn’t take long to cross the 30,000 unique questions mark, thus making this database one of the larger ones online. None of the questions have been obtained through scraping or an API. All are either written by me or submitted by users.
December 2020 Recap – The Random Trivia Generator by the Numbers
Hello dear readers and fans of the Random Trivia Generator and welcome to another monthly update and the first of 2021. Happy New Year, by the way! The purpose of these posts is to provide a peek behind the curtain and all the action that takes place to bring the tens to thousands of trivia questions to users.
First off, what a year 2020 was. I hope you were all safe and continue to be safe. I hope 2021 treats us all better so that soon we can huddle in our favorite pub and enjoy some in-person trivia. Boy, do I miss my work team. We made it work with Teams and Zoom but it just isn’t the same.
New Questions
We received tons of new questions, corrections and suggestions in 2020. Thank you all. There was one especially dedicated user who sent us thousands of new questions. Thanks, Marty!
As of this post, the total question count is 24,566 unique trivia questions.
I want to thank everyone who sent in questions and corrections.
New Developments
We rolled out an error reporting link which has now been used thousands of times. Thankfully the overwhelming majority of submissions were grammar and spelling corrections which were all addressed. Since we are humans and are bound to make mistakes, we did have to fix a few questions/answers. Again, thank you all for your submissions.
We reached out for help to implement a few new features based on user suggestions. We are still in the process of procuring quotes but as soon as everyone is back from the holidays, and we have those quotes in hand, we will be starting work on new features. Watch out for those.
For now, have a great 2021.
The Golf Round
Time flies when you are quarantining yourself with kids and still trying to work a regular day. Where we live, there are still many restrictions on what activities we can do. Golf, fortunately, is one of those outdoor activities that saw the least government restrictions. Unfortunately, because of the rise in interest (also, lack of any other outdoor activities), finding a course that wasn’t booked for months became difficult. Here is a trivia round while I am waiting my turn.
1. How many PGA Tours did Ben Hogan win in his career?
64
2. What is the standard diameter of the hole?
11 cm or 4.25 inches
3. Which type of golf club is subdivided into mallet, peripheral weighted and blade styles?
The putter
4. What device is used to measure the speed of a golf course putting green?
A stimpmeter
5. Where did the modern game of golf originate?
Scotland
6. The world’s oldest tournament, “The Open Championship” is also known as what?
The Open or the British Open
7. A lost ball results in a penalty of how many strokes?
One
8. During a stipulated round, how many clubs are allowed in a player’s bag?
14
9. The number of strokes a skilled golfer is expected to need to complete a hole is referred to as what?
Par
10. The term is used to refer to a score of four strokes under par?
Condor
Content and image credit: The Left Rough
Random Responses #6: API Integration?
Howdy users. We are back with another set of random responses. This edition is an interesting one. A user submitted the following question:
“question”: “Do you guys offer api integration?”
“answer”: “V”
Great question, V. We do not at the moment but this has been on our list of features for a few years. The issue is that we are not programmers so things take a bit of time while we figure out how to program various features. If you know someone interested in helping, let us know at [email protected].
How does the Random Trivia Generator work?
I was recently going through user submissions (a big “thank you” to all who contribute by the way!) when I came across the following question/answer:
“question”: “Bu nasıl işliyor?”
“answer”: “Bakalım”
According to Google Translate, the language above is Turkish and translates to:
“question”: “How does this work?”
“answer”: “Let’s see”
This inspired me to write a brief blog post on what happens with submissions, error reports, and e-mails.
New trivia submissions
When a user contributes a question/answer, the submission is entered into a temporary, private database which requires approval before the question is added to the public database for all users to see. I have not enabled alerts so I usually set aside some time each week to check the database and approve the submissions. The great thing about trivia lovers is that the submission is already in a great format so all I need to do is a bit of research to verify the question/answer before approving it. Some questions require a bit of editing, such as formatting or spelling. Another group are the questions with incorrect answers, which get updated and approved. I have nothing against incorrect answers because they go through a verification process and once fixed, they are a great addition to the database. And there is the last group of questions which are more posed as corrections. I don’t mind those either and treat them all very seriously.
Error Reports and E-mails
Both of these end up in my inbox and I get an alert on my cell phone. If I am not busy with work, or the family, I try to respond to those as quickly as I can.
So that’s it – everything is still manually done by humans. Although it would be awesome if there is some bulletproof AI that writes new trivia, verifies submissions and fixes existing errors. If you know something like this, or can do this, let me know!