New features

Sporcle Badges

  •  Posted by mariek  •  2 Comments

You asked. We delivered. The result? Sporcle Badges.

With Sporcle badges, you have one more way to strut your Sporcle-success. You’ll have new motivation to master the Countries of the World, the U.S. Presidents, or maybe just play a quiz from each category. Each new badge on your profile page is like a public pat on the back, a bonus for all the hard work you’ve done, and simply another reason to love Sporcle.

Badges aren’t only for expert quiz-playing, but they’re also for expert quiz creation. When you get a quiz published on the homepage–get ready for your Published badge. Want the ultimate quiz creation challenge? Set your sights on the Crazy Ivan, awarded when you’ve published a quiz in each category.

Current available badges:


Sporcla Cum Laude – We know you have school pride, and now you can show it with Sporcla Cum Laude. Set a school in your profile and get ready to represent.

 

Published – What could make the joy of your first published quiz even better? A badge, of course. Have a quiz published on the Sporcle home page and the date will forever be remembered by your badge.

 

Crazy Ivan – As the name suggests, this badge is reserved for Sporcle radicals. Get a quiz published in each category, and you, Crazy Ivan, will have joined the ranks of elite Sporclers.

 

Challenger – It’s the simple joys that make our lives sweet–win a challenge against another Sporcle user and this badge will crown you the victor.

 

Blender – Show off your blender-love by getting at least 9 right (50%) on Blender Settings. Celebrate by making yourself a smoothie.

 

Quite Presidential – Even if you’re not from the United States, further your political history know-how by learning all the US Presidents. Get 100% on the quiz and start planning your trip to the presidential libraries. Consider Sporcle your honorary sponsor.

Around the World – This Sporcle quiz is as classic as it gets. Get 100% on the Countries of the World and you’ll set yourself up for geo-Sporcle success. Even if you never visit each country on the globe, at least you’ll know it exists.

London Calling – Faithful Brits and Anglophiles around the world, test your knowledge of London with this mix of Sporcle quizzes. We’ll reward your commitment with…you guessed it…a badge.

Sporcle quizzes required for London Calling:

Sampler Platter - The Sampler Platter is awarded to users whose thirst for knowledge has no bounds. Play a quiz from each Sporcle category, and prove that you truly are an all-around trivia-seeker.

 

Badges will be displayed on your profile page.To see all possible badges, check out the SporcleAdmin profile. We’re starting small, but the possibilities are endless. So don’t get comfortable–more badges will feed your hunger to succeed.

Notes: Backfilling

  • We’re still backfilling to account for your past accomplishments–so if you’re missing a badge that you know you should have, don’t worry.
  • If you’ve achieved a multi-task badge in the past, your badge will show the first date the badge was available.
  • Single task badges will show the actual achievement date.


If you have questions or suggestions, write to us at feedback@sporcle.com. Or join the discussion on Sporcle University. In the meantime, get going! There are badges to be won!  

New Clickable Feature

  •  Posted by mselby  •  1 Comment

We’ve been making small tweaks here and there to Clickable quizzes since we released them just a couple of weeks ago. We’ve also had quite a few feature requests, and this new clickable option will hopefully be the first of many more:

Introducing: Hide the Previous/Next Button

This feature functions much like ‘force order and hide the next clue’ in our classic quiz type. The idea is that a user will not be able to movie forward or backward, and will only be able to follow the path that you lay out for them in the quiz. This could be used for Clickable Bunker type quizzes or strange new ideas we haven’t thought of yet.

Please let us know if you have any questions in the Sporcle Blog comments section.

Sporcle’s New Clickable Games

  •  Posted by mselby  •  10 Comments

Today we’ve unleashed an entirely new quiz type on Sporcle. The ‘Clickable’ quiz. We’ve long had users ask us for ways to make Sporcle more accessible and we think the new clickable game type will help the poor spellers, poor typers, and mouse enthusiasts among us. Check out the below screenshot below to see what we’re talking about.

This new quiz type features a host of options similar to other quizzes on Sporcle, and allows wrong answer, answer in order, and something we like to call ‘decoy’ answers, where any bonus answer featured in the quiz will be displayed as a ‘decoy’ on the screen. (i.e. Somalia in the example above)

Check out some example games below, and an entire How-To guide after the jump.

Adds up to 11

State Abbr. Button Blitz with Booby Traps

Numbers in Spanish (Clickable)
Read more

Check Out our New Challenge Features

  •  Posted by mselby  •  Comments Off

We’ve been making changes to our challenge features over the past few months and now we’ve reached a major milestone in the evolution of Sporcle Challenge with some exciting new features that makes creating and receiving challenges even easier.

If you’ve ever wanted more control over what type of challenges you can receive or want to be able to receive challenges from anyone on Sporcle then you’re going to love this new update. We’ve created the idea of open challenges so that you can challenge any random user from across the site to a random quiz and see how you match up. We’ve also made numerous enhancements to the design so that you can more easily challenge all day long. Check out more detail of all of the new features after the jump.

Read more

New Look Challenge Page

  •  Posted by mselby  •  Comments Off

You might have noticed that we’ve updated our challenge page in the past week. As we make changes and added features to our challenge over time, we thought things were looking a little cluttered, so we cleaned up the look and made it easier to view your challenge history.

We’ve also made it much easier to see which challenges you’ve won and lost at a glance. Currently, we’re limiting how far back you can see in your Sporcle history, but in the future we’ll allow you to view your entire history. We’ve also changed how your score displays, it’s now as a percentage instead of a straight number. Keep in mind though, we haven’t taken the actual score away, and you can still see it by hovering over the percentage.

As usual, we love hearing feedback on the challenge feature. It’s one of our favorite features to play internally, so if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please let us know about them in the comments.

New Blog Look and Feel

  •  Posted by Sporcle  •  Comments Off

We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes on a new blog template, and we finally had the opportunity to release it today. We put some major elbow grease into this one and we’re going to continue to add small tweaks and features to make this as useful a part of our website as it can be. If you have any problems viewing the site or any page looks funky, don’t hesitate to drop us a note at our feedback page and we’ll look at getting it fixed as soon as we can.

Find Your Friends

  •  Posted by Derek  •  2 Comments

Hi all, we recently gave a couple of older features nice new face-lifts. We just re-launched the Invite your Friends and Find your Friends features on Sporcle.

Invite your Friends lets you type in email addresses of your friends and invite them to join you on Sporcle. You can also post to your Facebook wall or send a Tweet. So go ahead and invite as many people as you want.

Sporcle is more fun with friends, but sometimes it may be hard to find the people you know. The Find Your Friends feature can help with that. Find your Friends lets you follow other Sporcle users or connect to your Facebook friends who are also on Sporcle.

We added buttons to these features to your profile page for easy access, try em out!

Spread the word about Sporcle and as always if you have questions, comments, or suggestions, drop us a line anytime!

Enjoy!

“Wrong Answer” Quizzes

  •  Posted by mselby  •  5 Comments

Today we’ve released a really excellent new quiz feature. There is now an option to enable wrong answers on quizzes. For example, now you can create (or play) a multiple choice quiz and you only get one try to get the answer right. We’re hoping that this makes for some really exciting new quiz styles, and we’re eagerly anticipating what our users will do with this new feature. We’ll be adding some information to our F.A.Q. here soon, but after the jump we’ve created a guide to show you how to make a wrong answer quiz of your own.

Read more

Extreme Makeover: Category and Tag Page Edition

  •  Posted by Sporcle  •  2 Comments

We didn't even need to enlist the help of Ty Pennington.

You might have noticed some smaller tweaks to the design of our category pages over the last few months, but today we’ve released what we think is a pretty significant upgrade to the way you interact with our 15 category pages, as well as dozens of our most popular tag pages across the site.

If you go to the History category for example, you’ll see a variety of changes, mostly notably, Editor Picks are highlighted much more prominently and we’ve added more information on challenge win leaders in each category. So if you’ve always suspected you were the best of the best at Geography quizzes, you can test yourself against the current leaders. We’ve also highlighted comments that have been voted up the most. Now, if you make a great comment, you might just end up a little more famous on Sporcle.

The updates to the popular tag pages are just as exciting. If you check out any popular tag, like MLB for example, you can see that we’ve updated these tags to look very similar to the category pages, and so they are now in effect full-blown subcategories that have as much information as a regular category. Our editors can now nominate quizzes for an Editor’s Pick in a specific tag as well, so it’s now much easier for our editors to nominate a niche subject and not worry about whether everyone in a category might be a fan. We think this is great for certain tags that user’s have requested we separate out in to their own category in the past. For example, Harry Potter or Premier League Football.

Please let us know at our feedback page if you have any suggestions or comments about the new look.

Quiz Rating Guidelines

  •  Posted by Sporcle  •  Comments Off

Something we get a lot of feedback about here at Sporcle is quiz ratings, and what to do when you believe your quizzes has been unfairly targeted with ratings abuse, or if your account has been blocked, and you’re not sure why.  With over 160 thousand quizzes on the site, ratings are a very important way for the Sporcle staff (and editors) to discover great new quizzes. We’ve had users in the past rate many quizzes a 1 in order to remove it from the ratings chart to give their own quizzes a better shot, and that’s something we don’t tolerate. If we feel you’ve been abusing our ratings policy (outlined below) all of your ratings will be removed and your ability to rate, comment and create quizzes will be blocked. Alternately if you feel like you’re quizzes have been targeted with undue low ratings, please notify us at our feedback page.

To give you a better idea of what we’re looking for in different ratings on a quiz, we’ve compiled a few guidelines that you should follow when rating quizzes.

5- Great quizzes: Well laid out, well constructed, fun and challenging to play. These
quizzes are creative and original or a clever twist on an old idea. The creators of these
quizzes are responsive to user comments. Worthy of a nomination and a front page
publication.
4- Good quizzes: A step below the best, these quizzes are still fun to play and well
constructed. Many quizzes in this category are still worthy of a front page appearance.
3- Average quizzes: Education and Entertainment value is undermined by errors in quiz
construction, mistakes in answers or questionable subject matter.
2- Poor quizzes: Significant errors, poor design/layout and poor execution.
1- Abysmal quizzes: No redeeming value. Quizzes are unplayable, based on
inappropriate subject matter, personal information or minutiae. This rating should not be
used to target specific individuals nor to attempt to remove successful quizzes from
leader boards. Misusing this rating may result in the disabling of your Sporcle account.