New Game Pages Are Here: Features & Frequently Asked Questions

(Last Updated On: April 17, 2015)

game-page-example1It’s here! We warned you about it just a few days ago, and we’ve just released the krak…err…new game page. There are tons of changes to the new page, and we wanted to highlight just a few of the new features as well as answer some common questions we’ve received. Without futher ado, let’s move on to some of the highlights.

New Features

  • ‘Challenge Your Friends on Facebook’ Option.
  • New Facebook Share buttons
  • Random Category & Subcategory link on each game.
  • Improved look and feel for embedded pictures & videos.
  • Updated ‘Popular Games’ today section
  • Restored the Hide Comments button.
  • Reduced time before the ‘give up’ button appears. Now 7 seconds instead of 17.
  • More room for game notes, including the ability to add HTML to a game note. (Tags accepted:<br><b><h1><h2><h3><h4><i><li><ol><strong><u><ul>)

Frequently Asked Questions

The game pages seemed fine, why’d you change everything?

We wrote out a few reasons for changing the game pages in our preview post from earlier this week. The short answer is that we wanted you see the most important pieces of the game page first, and to do that we had to make some major changes.

Where’s the link to the comments?

The comments link is now at the top of the page right next the number of game plays, and the rating. Clicking that link will open the comments section. You can also click the show comments link at the bottom of the page.

Where did the game notes go?

All game notes are currently displayed under ‘How to Play’. We’ve increased the number of characters that can be added to that section, and you can use limited HTML when creating games.

What are those little icons next to the ‘How to Play’ section?

We’ve simplified our game instructions and now they’re visual icons. Hovering your mouse over the icon will give you an explanation of what each of them does.

Why can’t I leave a note when I nominate a quiz?

The feature where you could leave a note along with your quiz nomination wasn’t used all that often, and many people thought it was a requirement. We’ve simplified the nominating process so now all you have to do is click the button. We hope this encourages more people to nominate the quizzes the love.

A quiz I made looks terrible in the new game format, what do I do?

Please report the quiz using the ‘Other’ designation and let us know what’s wrong. We’ll get it fixed.

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52 Comments

  1. I don’t like the fact that now in the “Friends scores” section you can only see 5 scores including your own wherever ranked yours is, while before it was 5 scores + your own if yours wasn’t in the top 5. I think that space should have been widened, not reduced.

  2. Will the size of the clickable quiz answer continue to change, or is this size stay for a while? I have a few quizzes that are highly dependent on the width of the clickable answer bank. With the changes, they do not work. I can adjust them to fit the new size, but I wanted to check that the current size is permanent and not just in flux.

    • It’s hard to say that anything is final, but we have no plans to further change the size of the clickable answer field. Thanks for your feedback and understanding!

  3. On some of the quizzes, the “random category/subcategory” links don’t show up. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a pattern to which quizzes aren’t showing it, but it happens fairly frequently. I’ve seen in three times now in about five minutes of casual browsing.

  4. New updates look great!
    I’m having issues with Google Chrome doing spell check on answers (it might be cheating, but it’s the only way I can spell Kyrgyzstan). Spell check shows up fine on Sporcle when using Firefox, but not Chrome. Hope I’m not just being computer illiterate right now. Just a thought for you!

      • I was just using the normal plug-in that Chrome uses. It works everywhere else except now on the new Sporcle design. I tried downloading other plugins today, but none are working with Sporcle.

  5. I really wish you guys had not gotten rid of the ability to see when you misspelled something and then right click – correct it. Sometimes I get an answer correct but I just misspell it.

    • Hi, Martha – That isn’t a feature on our site, but it’s probably related to your browser. What browser are you on? Are you aware of a spell check plug-in that you have installed?

  6. Most quizzes that used to create spaces (e.g. for logic puzzles) are now completely screwed up by the new pages. Is there a way to revert only a few, or do we really need to go back and fix every single one?

        • Browsers were Safari and Chrome on a Mac. Previously, though, the browser didn’t make a difference when it came to the [br] spacing. Thanks for the help, I can send the links!

    • Hi, Dave – Picture box quizzes were affected, and the fields for game notes and embedded content has changed. We’ll be going through and updating published quizzes, but you can feel free to send us links, as well. Post them here or write to us at feedback@sporcle.com. Thanks for the feedback.

  7. I am really not a fan of having to click a button to see the game notes/instructions on a quiz. I worry that many people who take my and others’ quizzes will skip that, since people (myself included) would sometimes forget to read the instructions when no extra step was necessary.

  8. Have you noted that when a “Map” quiz is scrolled up, such as countries of the world, the image covers a large part of the field where answers are entered? (At least in Firefox, not in IE)

    • Thanks for the feedback, Rockgolf. We were able to reproduce it on Firefox, and will hopefully get a fix out soon!

  9. Is there a reason why the box with friends’ scores is so small now? I can hardly read the time anyone finished in. It just seems weird that that box is so small, yet on the results page the statistics boxes have been re-sized to fit the frame of the quiz (leading to some really long % answered bars). And this is just personal preference, but I think it looks really weird that nothing is centred under the quiz.

  10. The site lags like crazy for me which makes it pointless to play games. A quiz will lag mid-question. This comment is lagging as I type it in! I have the updated version of Chrome with up to date Flash and Java. Help!!

  11. Sorry to double post, just noticed something when playing another quiz. Is it possible to have regular buttons for “previous” and “next” again? It’s no longer possible to hit tab and enter to skip to the next box; instead it highlights the link to Facebook.

  12. As a follow up to what Eli just said – the tab/enter for next is working for me, but unfortunately tab/space does not. The space bar instead scrolls the page down, when it used to select next just fine. If this is an impossible fix the enter would suffice, but I loved using the space bar for speed.

  13. Seconding the comment that having the game instructions hidden by default seems like a really weird and bad design choice.

  14. Can we move the friend scores and Facebook button out of the way? I have exactly zero interest in sharing anything with anyone, and it’s interfering with the page design. It should be at the bottom, below everything important, like the comments and related games. The rest of the design looks pretty cool, but the Facebook thing has got to move.

  15. Hello. Since the new format has been published the spell check feature within the games is not working. It works on this part of your sporcle site and all other sites but not the quiz pages. Can you please look into this issue? I have checked my plug ins and other browsers and all are have the spell check feature that the sporcle had prior to this change.

  16. Agreeing with Eli, PLEASE bring the regular previous/next buttons back! Pressing tab now takes me to the address bar (Opera browser), and tab/space was a feature that I used quite often. Instead of using my track pad to click on the next button, I’m more likely to click give up instead.

  17. Another vote for making game notes appear by default. Sometimes these are essential to game play, and hiding them will just lead to player confusion and low game votes.

    I also think the Facebook share buttons belong out of the way at the bottom.

  18. Wow. I’ve been deleted before I even post. That’s…I guess that’s goodbye, Sporcle. What a terrible shame. I’ve been a big fan.

  19. And by the way, I expected that, being signed in to Sporcle, I’d be able to leave a comment without linking to facebook. But that just underscores the fact that you’ve been bought.

  20. I’m not sure if you’ve taken it away, but I have it as a default in Chrome to let me know when I’ve spelled something wrong, and when I’m pretty sure I’ve spelled something wrong, it doesn’t tell me such in a quiz. Are you going to fix that? Because that’s incredibly frustrating to miss a question, when you know the answer, and don’t know how to spell it, and therefore can’t correct it, because the little red squiggle is gone. I realize, I could pause, go to Google, and search for the answer I’m looking for, copy, unpause, and paste, but that seems like a really round about way to get the answer I’m looking for. Any chance you’re going to fix that?

  21. Hiding the game notes until they are clicked is bound to mess up a lot of quizzes. People are going to easily scroll past it without realizing something important until they lose a quiz because of it.

  22. I’m sad that these issues stopped being addressed after the first few hours of the new design launch. The tab-enter thing in particular is really hurting my time on quizzes (not sure how Leann still got it to work, but for the record I’m using Firefox on Mac).

  23. Under the settings I have opted to received challenges on Geography only but ever since the new layout, I now get challenges from other topics as well. Has the feature to receive challenges from selected topic(s) disappeared and defaulted the settings to receive challenges from all other topics?

  24. I love the new look, but when I now scroll down using my slider on my touch pad, it takes me off of the answer box. I don’t know if it is the new design, but it didn’t do that before, and is immensely frustrating.

  25. Hey guys, I see we haven’t addressed a lot of your latest comments. We have continued to make tweaks and fixes to the game page based on your feedback.

    1. Spell-checking now works in Chrome
    2. The Previous/Next buttons have been restored to their former functionality.

    Thanks everyone!

    • Hey Matt, thanks for the response. However, the buttons still do not seem to be working for me. They still look the exact same and hitting tab just puts a dotted border around the Facebook link under the quiz. (I’m using Firefox on a Mac)

  26. I know it was mentioned by someone else, but I did not see a response to it…the “random category/subcategory” links don’t show up. For instance, when I was under “Movies”, next to Random Quiz, there would be a button for Random Movies. Can that be added back in, or am I just missing something?

    • Hi, Adam – This button has been removed from the category pages, but we are hoping to restore it. In the meantime, you can find a random category/subcategory link on each game page. It’s located in the upper right-hand corner near the game description. Thanks for the feedback.

  27. I didn’t have time to read all the comments here, so I’m probably not the first person to say this. But I find it quite annoying that you have to click the “How to play” button before the instructions show up. When I start doing a quiz, I often forget to look at the game notes for special instructions (or just think I can do the quiz without them), but before the changes, most of the time I would notice them at some point during the quiz (and sometimes a single information helps a lot). Now, when I forget to read them before I start, I simply just overlook them completely because I have to actively click on them. I don’t see why they couldn’t just be displayed from the beginning. I like the icons indicating game conditions such as minefield, though. That’s a nice idea. Maybe it’s also just a question of getting used to new formats, which is always hard!

  28. One comment that I’ve seen often but that still doesn’t appear to be addressed – I really, really, really would like to see the How To Play instructions shown by default. With everything else shown on the page that isn’t important to game play, it seems silly. Also, I’m not really a fan of the giant buttons for results, challenge, etc, along with the huge time clock. It makes it more difficult for me to get large quizzes (such as clickables) to fit on a page without zooming out to teeny tiny print that I can’t read. Overall, I’m a huge Sporcle fan, but the How to Play thing is really annoying me.

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