We are a couple weeks into have the user generated games available and so far things are going well. A few folks have written in and want to know what it takes to get a quiz noticed or played. Here are a few tips we can pass along.
Quality
The surest way to get your game played is, well, to make a good game. Original, topical, and playable games will bubble up to the top. If nothing else, the Sporcle Admins are more inclined to publish games that are of high quality. So what makes high quality? Here are a few guidelines:
- A credible source.
- Good game layout.
- Playability and accepting plenty of alternate acceptable answers.
- It’s fun to play.
Posting
If you feel that you have a high quality quiz on your hands, there are mechanisms out there to get your quiz noticed.
Here are a few ways in which you can ratchet up the plays on your quiz:
- Post it on your blog
- Post it to relevant user forums of sites that might be interested.
- Put it on your wall on Facebook
- Tweet it on Twitter
- Email it or text it to your friends
What not to do:
While trying to get your quiz noticed, keep in mind there are sure fire ways to NOT have your quiz published. These include but are not limited to:
- Don’t attempt to artificially inflate your quiz by posting a ton of comments on it or trying to game the system.
- Don’t email the Sporcle admins demanding that we publish your game.
- Don’t spam the comments of other unrelated games with your quiz.
At the end of the day, we ask that you basically be a good Sporcle citizen.
Lastly, hang in there. This is a new feature and we have a lot planned on the horizon. We have ideas on how to make games more discoverable, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, I hope this helps. If you have other ideas, please post them in the comments to this blog.
It would be great to hear what other tools and ideas people have.
I just recently discovered the user created content. Is there any way to find user quizzes that you've taken, but aren't showing up in the contributed list (i.e. they aren't popular or highly commented on or rated)? I've taken some random quizzes and offered suggestions and I'd like to go back and see if any changes were made.
I've tried searching for them and looking at my stats page but they aren't showing up.
There are a whole lot of quizzes that aren't really general interest, like "name everyone in our homeroom class" or the like. I wonder whether it makes sense to have a category like "Personal Interest" that would separate these quizzes from the more "general population" quizzes?
So we added a search option to the contributed page at http://www.sporcle.com/games/contributed.php – that should help.
Also, people can mark quizzes are private by unchecking the Sporcle publishable button. That should help in terms of more of these personal type quizzes
how do you make a quiz and submit it?
http://www.sporcle.com/games/mattymat/nflteams60