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.
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!
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.
November 2018 Recap – Random Trivia Generator by the Numbers
Hello dear readers and fans of the Random Trivia Generator and welcome to another monthly update.
October 2018 Recap – Random Trivia Generator by the Numbers
Hello dear readers and fans of the Random Trivia Generator and welcome to another monthly update.