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.
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].
Updates: COVID-19
Hello fellow trivia enthusiasts! By now I am sure that most, if not all of you, have been affected by the virus that is quickly spreading around the world. So have we and our kids and spouses. We are all staying home and driving each other crazy 24/7, looking for something to entertain us until this is all over and we can resume our regular lives. We appreciate you choosing our site as your form of entertainment and learning resource. This means a lot to us and is the reason why we are continuing to maintain and improve the site and database. We have noticed an increase in traffic, e-mails, submissions, and general social interactions, and we are trying to address/respond to each one as quickly as we can. After all, we are human and there is only a couple of us. Please be patient if you don’t see your submissions approved or questions or corrections addressed immediately. We are doing our best!
Speaking of submissions…once they are approved and released into the world, you may not see your questions so easily because there are now well over 20,000 unique trivia questions. Don’t believe us? Keep an eye on the question counter accessible through the About page:
Each of the submissions goes through a vetting process. Each of the questions we come up also goes through a vetting process. BUT because we are simple humans, we too could make mistakes. We do our best not to but it happens. If you see an error, or want to discuss, or dispute a question or an answer, or there is a spelling mistake, please report the error to us and we will address it as quickly as we can. To report an error, simply open the site’s menu and click on the link at the bottom. Alternatively, you could send us an e-mail at [email protected].
Thank you for visiting our site and stay safe out there!
The Random Trivia Generator team
Image credit: Wikimedia
December 2019 Recap – The Random Trivia Generator by the Numbers
Hello dear readers and fans of the Random Trivia Generator and welcome to another monthly update. 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, we have not done one of these in about a year so many apologies. Personal lives have been busy with our daytime jobs, family, kids, learning new things, resting, and making small tweaks behind the curtain.
New Questions
Since the last monthly recap in November I added 208 new questions to the main Random Trivia Generator website. As of this post, the site is sitting at 20,408 trivia questions. Not that many in a year but the vast majority of our time was taken up by addressing various technical issues and making small tweaks to improve usability…all boring things that cannot be seen but are necessary to maintain the site and the database.
I want to thank everyone who sent in questions and corrections.
New Developments
We are still experimenting with the old site (Version 1.0) to see what works and slowly rolling out improvements to the current site (Version 2.0). Right now, you can dispute science questions directly by clicking on the actual question itself. A link appears at the bottom which takes you to a form where you can tell us why the question, or answer, could be incorrect. The form logs the question ID so there is no need to open your e-mail application, send us screenshots, or remember the exact question. Just let us know what could be wrong and we will fix it.
Stay tuned for even more questions next month.