Regarding the Dates for SporcleCon

To the Sporcle Community regarding the timing of SporcleCon 2022:

At Sporcle, we have three core values. Truth, Do Better, and Inclusion. We want to talk about all three of those here.

First of all, we’re sorry. We should have tried harder to be more transparent around the scheduling decisions/obstacles with SporcleCon 2022. We realize that the event ends on the same day as the first night of Rosh Hashanah, not allowing those who celebrate the holiday ample time to get home.

In the spirit of our core values—and in an effort to recognize the importance of truth and transparency in addressing systemic biases that lead to unintended harm—we thought it’d be useful to explain how we got here. When scheduling SporcleCon, we spoke to dozens of hotels in multiple cities. It soon became apparent that due to our unusual size, lack of previous events to point to, and format, we would have a tough time finding a hotel that would fit our logistical needs – both from a date and financial standpoint. More specifically, we asked over 50 hotels in multiple cities for proposals.

Once we whittled down the list to hotels that could take us from a space and budget standpoint, we were faced with the fact that most of them were fully booked with events rescheduled from 2020 and 2021. After reviewing every proposal, the only option we felt our attendees, and Sporcle HQ could afford in year one was the Washington Hilton. The only dates available were the weekend we chose.

This put the end of the convention simultaneously as the first night of one of the most important Jewish holidays. If we had had other options, we absolutely would not have chosen this date. It became either “have this conflict” vs. “not have the event at all .” Not wanting to ignore this issue, we sought to address it by doing three things differently from the TriviaCon schedule of 2020:

1 – Offer single-day tickets so that attendees could choose to come only Friday or Saturday if they chose to.
2 – End the Con at 4 PM on Sunday, before sundown. Despite these efforts, we overlooked the broader implications of travel time, and sincerely apologize for that.
3 – Make sure the most prominent events on the schedule are on Friday and Saturday. Over 75% of the events will be on Friday and Saturday, and most cash prize events will be on those days.

We didn’t do a good job of explaining our thought process around the decision to hold the event this weekend. And we definitely should’ve been more sympathetic to the people this most closely would be impacting. For that, we apologize from the bottom of our hearts. And while we cannot change the dates of the con, we can try to mitigate the unintended difficulty this conflict causes.

Here’s how we will do better:

While we cannot change the date or location at this point, we can do what we can to uphold Sporcle’s ideals of quizzing for everybody. We apologize again and commit to trying our best to find dates for any future SporcleCons that respect important religious holidays.