We are often asked here at Sporcle, what is the best way for a quiz to get published to the home page? While there are a number of factors that go into what is published and why, sometimes the best way to get published is to keep in mind what NOT to do.

The How To Make A Bad Sporcle Quiz is not for everyone. If this quiz were your first experience to the site, it would be frustrating and might not make much sense. However, for the Sporcle faithful, those that have slogged through many a user contributed quiz or tried to make a quiz and found the end result less than satisfying, this quiz is genius.

It might take a few times, but play this quiz all the way through. At the end, use it as a checklist for quizzes. It is amazing how often people take the time to put together a quiz, but then don’t take the extra little bit of time to actually play their own quiz. The devil is in the details when it comes to quiz creation, and paying attention to some of these little features as highlighted by the ‘Bad Sporcle’ quiz can really bring things to light.

Remember, there are resources as your disposal as well. The FAQ has some good answers to questions and while somewhat dated, the original Game Creation Cheat Sheet still has good tips and tricks.

Of course a quiz has to be interesting and playable, but if you can avoid the pitfalls that the ‘Bad Sporcle’ quiz highlights, chances are you might see your quiz on the home page before you know it.

Got other tips and tricks or things to avoid? I’d love to hear em!

The goal in writing this post is to get people to appreciate the work and artistry that go into creating good word ladders, and help people to start making their own since mini word ladders are now part of the Sporcle Daily Dose.  Hopefully, this will inspire Sporclers to try and make little ladders of their own.

History of Ladders

Word ladders were first popularized by Lewis Carroll but he had two ways of doing them. You could change exactly one letter in the word, OR you could add/subtract a letter from the word to make a new one. So in his word ladder, the lengths changed all the time. That’s fine do to, but he always indicated what type of process was happening. The sporcle user Caramba has made a solid example of the classic Lewis Carroll ladder, where he also added anagramming the letters.

There have also been puzzles for a long time that asked you to use common words to link two words together in the shortest path.  That’s hard to do without clues, and often there are multiple possible paths. However, Sporcle user Flick did an excellent job of making a Sporcle version of the shortest path ladders.

Word Ladder “Rules” and “Guidelines”

A) Word ladders can be done for 4-letter and 5-letter words. 6-letter words can be done for a small sequence, but not for long, just due to the nature of words. Also, if you come up with something good, you might be able to make a 3-letter version, but it also starts to get a little too easy with really short words.

B) In a Word Ladder, exactly one letter changes from word to word. If more than one letter changes, it really starts to be hard to go from step to step.

C) In a Word Ladder, the position that changes must be different each time.

• Rationale:  LOVE -> ??? -> ROVE
• So, let’s say you have three clues:: Amor in English, American Poet Laureate Rita, and Bush Politico Karl.
• Since LOVE and ROVE only differ by one letter, there are 24 possible letters that can be ?OVE and if you don’t know who Rita Dove is, you have a lot of annoying guesswork. So, that’s why we avoid changing the same position twice in a row. Then you only have 2 possibilities to try.
• For example, LOVE -> ROVE -> ROTE
• So now, if you don’t know who Karl Rove is, but you have LOVE and ROTE, you know the two possibilities that go in the middle are ROVE or LOTE.

D) To make a good and exciting word ladder, inflected forms should be avoided at all costs, unless a theme traps you but try to get out of them fast. Inflected forms of words are things like plurals, participles, and past tenses.

• Example: HOGS-> DOGS -> DIGS -> PIGS
• Is a VERY boring word ladder. It looks like it is really 4-letter words but in actuality it is a bunch of plural 3-letter words. This happens a LOT if you try to make 5-letter ladders because they are SO hard to make in the first place.

E) Etymology.  It is bad form to put two words next to each other that come from the same word, since that’s really cheating and inelegant. For example: BORN ->BORE or LIFE -> LIVE

• LIFE -> LIVE is hard to fix but you could clue LIFE as the board game, and LIVE as the band. Additionally, with BORN -> BORE you have a way out because there are other meanings that are not related. BORN can mean “having given birth to” or it can be “Last name of Physicist Max”

F) Word ladders alone are just fun. You can see that the first bunches of word ladders on Sporcle were just strings of interesting but unrelated, and those are fun, but it is a lot cooler if they have themes. There are several ways to make themed word ladders:

1. Have the beginning and ending words be related to each other in some way (opposites, part of a phrase, part of a set, etc.)
2. Have all (or most of) the clues in the ladder be related to a topic (math, music, Super Mario Brothers, etc.)
3. Have the ladder contain a bunch of related words or a complete list (all the 4-letter countries, Michael Jackson hits, etc).

G) Don’t use a word again in the ladder.  However, there is a corollary to this if you want to start and end back on the same word.  Also, if your ladder is unthemed, you want to try to make sure that the ladder cannot be “jumped” meaning that you could actually go from the 3rd word to the 17th word, and cut out a big chunk. This is actually useful though, to ramble around and make a really short ladder a little bit longer.

• For example, WORK -> PORK -> PORE -> WORE.  In that case, you could have just gone from WORK -> WORE in one step.

H) Try to have the letter patterns vary, as that makes the ladder more interesting. Most 4-letter words are CVCV (consonant vowel consonant vowel). So trying to shift the patterns around makes for a lot more interesting words.  There is a great word ladder that goes from OHIO to IOWA, and it isn’t easy to move the vowel patterns around like that.

I) Now, having an interesting but less common word in a ladder is cool. People learn new things. However, if you have a lot of new/obscure words in a row or near each other, it makes that part of the ladder almost unsolvable, so watch out for that.   Also, if you have hard words at the beginning or ends of ladders, there is a lot less help to getting that answer, so avoid that unless it is part of a theme or just an awesome word.

J) How much time does a ladder need? A good rule of thumb is that for every 10 words in a ladder, Sporclers will want a minute. For the Daily Dose, ladders that are 1-3 minutes (and on the shorter side of that) are ideal if you’re trying to get published.

K) Formatting the ladder is a good thing to do to make people happy when playing it, but that can always be fixed after.  If there are fewer than 25 “rungs/words” in the ladder, on the style page, set “Number of columns” to 1. Also, make sure the column widths are done so that the clue gets most of the space, 70/30%, for example.  Try to make the font size at least 9 point, because that is the most readable.

L) Now, there are no set rules, as these are just guidelines to make them the most fun to solve, but sometimes the themes are very constraining, and you might have to ‘bend the rules.’ Finding words for a ladder can be hard.  Connecting to HATE is easy; connecting to ONIX is hard. Most online dictionaries will allow you to use wildcard searches, or this site is just da bomb for making ladders, but it only contains non-proper nouns.

M) When writing your clues, make sure they are parallel.  Meaning if you’re cluing a verb, define it as a verb, if you’re cluing a plural, define it as a plural, etc. Use the internet to help you find good and correct definitions. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary is awesome for this.

LEAF: Good clue “Place where photosynthesis takes place.” Bad clue: “Things found on trees” [Singular versus plural]

HATED: Good clue: “Despised.” Bad clue: “Does not like” [Tense doesn't match]

N) Now you’re ready to start, and you can search all the word ladders that have already been made so that you can make sure you’re not repeating a theme, or reconnecting the same two words again.

If anyone makes a ladder and wants feedback, or is stuck and needs help, feel free to email me at SproutCMSporcle AT gmail dot com and I’ll help out.

Not this kind of of filter.

Hey everyone,

As you know, we’re always trying to add great new features to Sporcle, large or small. This week we’ve had a couple of new filter options, one for quiz creators and another that helps customize your activity feed.

The first feature is something we’ve heard quite a few requests for. In every quiz we filter common text (the/a/and/&) by default. This can cause problems when a user wants to use one of those four as an actual answer in their quiz.(Figure out the Lyrics, is a good example). In the past, only an admin could remove those filters by request, but now we’ve added a new checkbox on the game creation page, that will allow you to remove them yourself (if necessary). If you do remove the default words, we’d recommend giving quiz-takers a heads up in the game notes section.

The other filter-related improvement can be seen on your activity page. In the past, all you could was the entire activity feed for everyone you followed, but now we’ve given you a few filtering controls, so if you’d only like to see what the people you follow have been commenting, or what games they’ve been creating, you can easily do that by selecting the appropriate checkboxes. If you have any questions or comments, please make sure and drop us a note.

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.

Right off the bat you’ll notice that there are two new options in the game creation center (as well as a slightly modified layout).

The first is ‘Bonus/Hidden Answers become wrong answers’. Checking this box enables the wrong answer mode. If a user enters a wrong answer with just this box checked, the answer will be counted as incorrect, but the person taking the quiz will still be able to guess other answers. Checking the second box ‘Wrong answers end the quiz’ means that when a wrong answer is entered, the quiz is immediately ends just the same as clicking the ‘Give Up’ button.

So How Does This Whole Thing Work?

As you might have inferred from the the box above, this type of quiz works by counting what we traditionally use as bonus (‘ee’) answers as incorrect. This means in a ‘wrong answer’ type quiz, that bonus answers will not work correctly. In this scenario the hint for the answer and its corresponding wrong answer must be the same. Here’s an example:

Lets say you’re creating a multiple choice quiz where the user has to guess an answer out of four, and your first question is. What is the capital of the United States?

As you can see, just like in a quiz where you have grouped categories, the hint has to be the same for both the correct answer and it’s corresponding incorrect answers. In a larger quiz, these bonus/wrong answers must also be sorted to the end of the quiz for the stats to tabulate correctly.

Final Thoughts
There are plenty of exciting options you can use for a quiz in this format, it can be as simple as a multiple choice, or even true false quiz, but it can be made much more complex with the addition of alternate answers (Alternate incorrect answers are accepted) and the ‘Wrong answer ends quiz’ option. In our testing, this option added a certain amount of drama to the quiz, as you really had to think about your choice before entering. As usual, please let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback.

Editors Note: Sporcle curator hscer posted the following post on his personal blog recently, and we liked it so much we asked if we could post it on the official blog. We appreciate hscer allowing us to to share his advice with all of you.

With over 180,000 unpublished contributed games, even if the Game Creation feature were shut down today, at the current rate of 57 publications a week (9 each weekday and 6 each Saturday and Sunday) it would take 3,158 weeks–that’s 61 years–for Sporcle to publish every game. Given these numbers, it’s easy to get discouraged if you have a hard time getting your quiz published. I know there are a lot of folks out there in that situation, as I have seen it in many a comment on many a quiz. There are plenty of things you can do besides lash out in a comment to increase your publication odds. I’ve layed out some helpful hints after the jump.

1. Read the Game Creation FAQ: The folks at Sporcle have done a wonderful job explaining their expectations to their users. The first step to getting published is making quality quizzes, and the F.A.Q. can help you do that.

2 – Don’t make this Quiz: This quiz is such a classic that it has already been covered in the Sporcle Blog, but it bears reemphasis. Essentially, don’t do anything you see in ‘How to Make a Bad Sporcle Quiz‘.

3 – Make Daily Dose games: A full third of published quizzes now are word ladders, mixed word, and missing word games.

If you have read the F.A.Q. and, avoided the pitfalls from “How to make a bad Sporcle quiz” you are on your way to Sporcle success. You may even have a quiz or two with thousands of plays and a great rating, and yet, you still feel that you are being ignored. Stay tuned, as this leads to my last tip, which may be the most important.

Before we get into all that, let me be the the first to say that I am familiar with Sporcle discouragement. I was lucky to have 3 quizzes published during the first 11 months of the Game Creation feature, but had many more games that I wanted to share with the greater Sporcle community. So I finally followed my last tip, and it has paid huge dividends–I am now at 16 publications. This can be you! (although I can’t quite give you a money-back guarantee). So, my last tip is this:

4 – Make yourself heard: You may know about the feedback page. It’s a great resource for a great variety of matters, but it’s probably not the place to go to call attention to your quizzes. However, the editors are! You may think the editors are unreachable, picking quizzes from high aloft in the Sporcle hierarchy and enjoying near-daily publication. If you do, safe to say it is a misconception: two thirds of editors have their emails in their profile. And every single editor I have contacted is responsive, kind, and understanding. When I finally contacted about a half dozen editors in September last year, I was getting published semi-regularly within a week. So if you have a quiz (or quizzes) that you think is a winner, go email the editor of the section your quiz belongs!

There are some guidelines to doing this; you have to be willing to accept constructive criticism and make any necessary changes to your quiz or quizzes. It helps to contact the editor armed with plenty of questions to go along with whatever quiz you might be trying to show them.

And remember, any suggestions an editor has are in everyone’s best interest: yours, because it will make your quiz better, and makes you a better quiz author; theirs, because it helps them do their task of making Sporcle better; and Sporcle itself, since those other two things make the whole experience better for everyone on the site.

Despite the caveat, if the editor you email responds to you the way they responded to me–and I have no reason to believe that they would not–you will hear back, and that editor may even give you some other tips that I did not cover in the first three sections of this post. So whether your quiz is in Sports, History, Miscellaneous, or whatever–go ahead, bite the bullet, and give it a shot.

The surest way to get noticed is to make yourself noticed. The editors are the people to go to.

You can also email me at hscer.sporcle@gmail.com and I will do my best to reply quickly.

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)

So you want to make a Clickable game?

Creating a clickable game is much like creating the classic game type on Sporcle, with a few small changes.  When you go to create a new quiz, you’ll now have two options for game creation “Classic” and “Clickable”. As you go through the game creation process, you can toggle between them if you decide you’d like to switch up the game type.

Once you select Clickable Games as your game type, your options for the game change quite a bit as well. Lets go over them.

Wrong Answer Ends the Quiz

Just like with a Classic Game, this is set up using Sporcle’s Bonus answers. In a Clickable game, bonus answers will be displayed. With this option turned on, these bonus answers can be considered “Mines”. If a user clicks one, the game will end.

Use hints and force answers in order
This quiz type cycles through the hints and forces users to answer one click at a time. Great for memory quizzes. The random option allows you to cycle the hints through in random order.

Randomize order of answers
By default, answers will display in the order you place them in the data tab, with bonus answers appearing at the end. This option will randomize the order of both regular and bonus answers.

Put answers in alphabetical order
Another option that just changes the display of the answer boxes. This is helpful for incorporating bonus answers into a quiz seamlessly.

Let us know if there are any features you’d love to see follow this format in the comments below. Thanks!

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.

Color: it’s a beautiful thing. Imagine if our world were simply black and white? Or even worse, if Sporcle quizzes were only black and white??

So far, you’ve done a good job of using the color options provided by Sporcle’s quiz creation tools. But in your quest to up the quality of quiz presentation, you’ve been asking for more. For example, why does the entire answer column have to be the same color? We honestly couldn’t think of a reason why not.

Which is why, we’re proud to announce: COLORFUL ANSWERS! As of today, you can choose colors for each individual answer cell. We’re excited to see the ways you’ll find to use this new feature. For more details on how to use this, please see the guide below:

1. Create a new Sporcle quiz, or edit an older one. (Note: This feature is not available for Clickable quizzes)

2. Under the GAME OPTIONS tab, check the box that says “Use extra column for color values”

3. Under the DATA tab, use the “Extra Info” column to fill in the colors that you want each answer cell to have. (Note: Using this feature allows you to only have one or two column quizzes)

Inputting colors:

Enter colors using either HTML color names or HEX values. This helpful list is a great reference. Both color names and HEX values will work, and the values do not have to be consistent for the whole quiz.  Have fun creating mixtures to find the perfect color to go with your quiz.

Your finished quiz could look something like this!

As always, write us at feedback@sporcle.com with any questions or concerns you have. Have fun with this new feature!

We’ve been playing around with a few fun concepts at our Sporcle R&D Labs (aka the line at the local taco truck) and we came up with a fun variation on the Clickable format that has now become a reality: Clickable Matching Games.

So How Does it Work?

If you’ve ever just wanted to be able to match answers in a Sporcle quiz, without the quiz being in a forced order, the Clickable Matching game is going to be your best friend. As you can see, it divides the normal clickable game interface into hint and answer sides. Just click each the pairs that match, and the answer box will turn green (hovering over an answer box will show both matching pairs as yellow).

Matching quizzes also have a default “Study Guide” option that will allow you to guess until you have all the answers correct.

How do I Make a Matching Quiz?

Creating a matching quiz starts off just like creating a Clickable quiz, however, when you get to the Options screen you must select the new matching options:

Selecting the “Match hints with answers’ box enables the matching mode, but the quiz taker can guess as many times as they like. If you’d like them to only be able to guess as many times as there are answers, then you also must select ‘Track incorrect answers”.

Additionally, ‘decoy’ answers can be added by using ‘ee’ in the ‘extra’ column. If you want to add a decoy answer on the left side, just add the decoy to the hint column (and leave the answer column blank). If you’d like the decoy to display on the right, add the decoy to the answer column (and leave the hint column blank).

As a further twist, you can also enable the option to end the quiz on a wrong answer (minefield style).

What’s next?

We’re sure you’re going to have some suggestions and feedback on this new option, but rest assured we have some plans for future iterations of this type of feature, so stay tuned!

A few months ago we introduced a variation of Clickable quizzes that we like to call ‘Matching’. While we were developing these Matching quizzes, we had some ideas about games where you could match more than 2 columns, sort of like the Slot Machine quizzes we’ve featured on the homepage in the past.

It took us some time to iron out the kinks and we allowed the Sporcle Editors to test them out for a week, but today we’re pretty excited to release them to the entire Sporcle community.

How does it work?

In order to enable this format, you must go to the Options tab of a Clickable game. You’ll see a heading titled Matching.

Multi-Column Match Options

Select Multi-Column Match from this section, then decide how many columns you’d like to match (up to 6). You can also choose whether or not a wrong match will count against the total, or if the player will be allowed to guess as many times as they’d like.

Other display options for this type of quiz are similar to other Matching and Clickable quizzes with regards to display order and button size.

Data Tab

Example of the data tab on a multi-column match quiz.

In order to implement this feature we had to change the way you input data for just this kind of quiz. Depending on the number of columns, you need to separate them with slashes individually. For 3 column quiz your data column answers would look like this.

Answer 1/Answer 1/Answer 1

Answer 2/Answer 2/Answer 2

The number of slashes is dependent on the number of match columns, for example, on a quiz with six columns, you need to add six answers on each line in the data tab.

Answer 1/Answer 1/Answer 1/Answer 1/Answer 1/Answer 1

Answer 2/Answer 2/Answer 2/Answer 2/Answer 2/Answer 2

As usual, please let us know if you have any questions about Multi-Column Match at our Feedback Page or Sporcle University.

Hey everyone,

One of the top requests and something we planned from the beginning is to allow incorrect answers on Slideshow quizzes.  We’ve released the feature in an update today, and here’s a quick guide on how they work.

1. Much like a classic quiz, the hint columns for the correct/incorrect answers need to match, and the wrong answer must have ‘ee’  in the third column. See example image below:
2. You do not have to enable wrong answers, like Clickable quizzes, all bonus answers are considered wrong answers.
3. “Wrong Answers End the Quiz” can be enabled on the options tab.

As per usual if you have any questions or comments, leave them in the comments section below or visit our feedback page.

Slideshow quizzes have been out for a couple of months now, and so far we’ve received a few questions about what we look for when publishing one of these quizzes. The post that follows is a series of guidelines that can be followed in order to make the best use of our Slideshow game feature.

1. Consistent Image Sizes

Slideshow quizzes (unlike Picture Box) can include any size images you want, but Slideshows with consistent image sizes are preferred. It’s a much less jarring experience for the user as they click through, and it helps the quiz feel more cohesive. If you must vary the shape of the image to varied sources, make sure that all of your images of a certain shape are the same size (Rectangles as 640×480 & squares at 480×480, for example)

2. User Larger Images

The maximum image size for a slideshow quiz is 640×480, but while you don’t have to max out the image size for every quiz, try to keep your images above 300×300,. If your source images are much smaller, the important thing is to use Rule #1 and make sure they are a consistent size.

3. Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs can be fun, but they may be hard to find and they can vary wildly in size. You’ll want to size them down if you can, as you want to minimize the loading time as much as possible. Anything over 2MB is going to take too long to load for most users.

A good example of this is the TV Intro Quiz, the GIFs are smaller than most Slideshow quizzes, but the size is the same from image to image, and they download quickly. It’s a trade-off, but makes for a well-crafted quiz.

4. Multiple Image Sizes

In certain cases you may be collecting similarly themed images from across the Internet, and you won’t be able to include a consistent image size. The important thing to do in this case is to group similar-sized images together. Check out this Misspelled Signs quiz for an example of how that might work.

5. Forced Order

Be very careful with forced order image quizzes. It can be frustrating for players when they are unable to advance further in a quiz, especially when they feel as though they might know other answers.

6. Advanced Stuff

Bazmerelda made these great example images (below) that demonstrate how to optimize your image size for a quiz with hints. Check out these slides for some visual examples:

Maximum Image Size

640×480 with a question – As you can see, some information is chopped off.

640×396 – Image sits between question and answer boxes.

Image sits above the answer box, but uses all remaining canvas

No question, but image not obscured by answer when revealed.

Map quizzes, your day has come.

While they’ve been a big part of Sporcle since the beginning, we haven’t allowed Sporclers to create them. Until today. Everyone who has access to creating Slideshow quizzes can now create Map quizzes as well.

Below is a guide to help you get the best out of our map quiz tool, so you can create something that is truly fantastic.

Note: If you have yet to sign up for Map/Slideshow access, go to your Create Game page and click the Request Access link.

Jump to a Topic

1. The Basics
2. The Options
2. The Style

Once you have access, you’re going to want to take full advantage of all the features a map quiz opens up for you. Here’s a step by step guide to create one from scratch. In this example, we’ll make the US States quiz from scratch.

The Basics

Here are the steps to get your quiz set up quickly.

1. Upload an Image

After the initially creating the game, you’ll start off on the Game Info tab. The primary difference here between a Classic quiz and a Map quiz is the Image URL field at the top.

First, upload the image you’d like to use to a popular image hosting site like Flickr, Imgur or Photobucket, and paste the URL of the image into this field. Images must be smaller than 400kb, and cannot be more than 920 pixels wide.

2. Enter the Data

Before you can start placing your map markers, you must enter all the answers you’d like to use in the data tab.

Note: The ‘Extra Info’ column has been disabled for Map quizzes.

3. Place Your Answers

Now that you’ve entered your data, go back to the Game Info tab, and click the Edit Map link above the Image URL.

On the ‘Edit Map’ page you’ll see all the answers you entered on the data tab in a box to the left and your image in the middle. Simply drag your answer to a spot on the map, and that’s where it’ll show up when someone guesses it. All changes are automatically saved here.

You’ll also notice that when you drag an answer for the first time, an orange ‘hint pin’ appears near your answer. You can choose to display these to your users or hide them using the Options screen. If you don’t want to deal with them here on the Edit map screen, just click the Hint Pins link at the top, and they’ll disappear.

Additionally, you can show or hide the answer boxes using the Answers link. If you’d like to line up your answers perfectly on the same line use the Grid option as well as Grid Snap which aligns your answer boxes to the nearest grid row or column.

After that, your quiz is all ready to play, and all that’s left is tweaking a few options so your quiz can be played just how you want it.

The Options

The options page gives you a chance to tweak your map quiz all you want. Here is an explanation of what each option does.

Accept last word only in answers
This option accepts the last word in the answer field as the correct answer. This is often used to accept last names without entering lots of alternate answers.

Accept single character answers
Single characters are ignored by Sporcle when accepting correct answers, this option allows single characters to be accepted on their own as correct.

Filter default words
Sporcle filters ‘The’, &, ‘And’, ‘A’ out of the answer field so that they don’t interfere with correct answers. If you’d like these words to be accepted, this option should be disabled.

Answers with the word ‘go’ display on Start
If you’d like certain answers to fill in when a player begins a quiz, just use the word ‘Go’ as an alternate answer, and those answers will be filled in automatically when this option is enabled.

Use hints and force answers in order
If you add something to the hint field, it will display near the answer box on a map quiz. This option also forces the quiz taker to answer questions one at a time in a specific order.

Hide the previous/next question
This option can only be enabled when forced answers is enabled. This removes the ability of the player to skip ahead in the quiz.

Randomize order of questions
This option can only be enabled when forced answers is enabled. This randomizes the order that the questions are cycled through each time the quiz is loaded.

Show answer text only (no checkmark)
Enabling this option removes the display of the orange checkmark when an answer is guessed correctly.

Show all answer locations
Enabling this option will display the location of all the answers before the quiz begins.

Animation Style
You have two options for how answers display to a player when a correct answer is guessed. The Zoom In effect causes the answer to fly to the correct position from the top of the screen, while the Fade In effect slowly fades in the correct answer at the proper location.

The Style

Once you have your game playing just how you want it, all you need to do to make your quiz really unique is to tweak the style. The style tab determines how the answer boxes display when they appear on the page. Here’s what you can tweak:

Answer Background Color
You can either turn this off completely or choose a specific color for the background of the answer box.

Font Settings
You can change the size, weight, style and color of the font in this section.

Border Settings
To change the settings of the border around the answer boxes, use this section where you can tweak the color and size of the border.

The latest quiz type from Sporcle is here, and it follows a much different ‘path’ than the others. If you’re curious about how you can make your own version of ‘What Type of Coffee Are You?’ or other personality quizzes, then this guide should help you get started. It looks a little confusing at the get-go, but once you get the hang of it we know you’ll wow us again with your creative and imaginative quizzes!

First off, there are three parts to creating an Interpretive quiz:

1. Creating the questions & answers
2. Creating the results section
3. Adding images to the results section

Creating Questions

In this type of quiz, you create a series of multiple choice questions, that when answered are totaled together to correspond with results. First, you need to add questions and hints to the data tab. A question should appear like this:

Example of a set of questions and answers.

For the question and answer to work together, the question must be the same for each of its corresponding answers. As you can see above, the question in the 1st column How do you like to style your hair? has four separate answer options in the 2nd column, along with the numbers 1-4 in the third column.

The numbers in the 3rd column represent the result number. These numbers determine what result you’ll get from taking this quiz. If a player guesses predominantly ’1′ answers, then they will get the result associated with ’1′, which you’ll define in the results section after you add all of your questions.

Continue to to enter as many questions and answers as you like. When you’re done, you’ll create the results data.

To recap creating Questions and Answers:

1. Enter your question in Column 1
2. Enter your answers in Column 2 (Make sure each answer has a corresponding question in the 1st column)
3. Enter the results number in Column 3

Creating Results

The results data should always come after the Question/Answer rows in the data tab. See example below:

Example of a how to input results info.

The results section is formatted differently than the questions and answers. The results numbers should now be added to the 1st column.

1. Enter your previously created results numbers to the 1st column (as opposed to the 3rd column for the Questions/Answers)
2. Enter the result you’d like to display in the 2nd column
3. Enter funny/interesting text to the 3rd column (Optional, but will appear under the answer)

Adding Images to Results

Use the following steps to add images to display with the results*:

1. Add the result number to the hint column as in the previous section
2. Upload the image to your favorite image hosting service (like Imgur)
3. Add the URL to the ‘Answer’ column
4. Put ‘ee’ in the third column
5. Go to the ‘Options’ tab and check ‘Bonus Answers Define Images’

To give your quiz some color variety, go into the Style tab and go to town! You are able to change the question colors, answer colors, and text colors from here.

Now get out of here and go make some snazzy Interpretative quizzes!

* Note: To include images, you must have access to slideshow/map quizzes. You can request access from the link on this page.

A Slip n’ Slideshow is a whole other thing.

So you might have seen some of the new Slideshow quizzes that have been appearing in our Discover area lately? Pretty neat, right? If you’re interested in creating your own Slideshow quiz, or already have access and want to learn some tips and tricks, this is the post you’ve been looking for.

1. How do I get access to creating slideshow quizzes?

Well, it’s pretty darn easy. When you’re in the game creation center, create a new game, and look for the link on the right hand side that says ‘Request Access’. Click “Yes, please” on the pop-up, and you should hear back from Sporcle in the next day or two with further instructions.

2. I have access to Slideshow Games, so how do I make one?

Congrats! It’s actually really simple to create a Slideshow quiz, but the tool works very differently than Classic or Clickable games. View the steps below for complete info and some tips & tricks.

• Create a New Quiz, and select Slideshow from the ‘Game Type’ dropdown
• The Game Info tab is very similar to one you might encounter for Classic/Clickable. Enter the game details here.
• The Options tab allows you to specify whether or not you force users to answer in order, or if you want them to skip ahead.
• The Data tab is where things differ from a normal Sporcle quiz. You must add the URL of the image you want to use to the HINT column (see example below)
• Images can be any web image format (GIF, JPG, PNG)
• You may use the Extra column in the data tab to display hints or other text.
• Though you can use any accessible image URL on the web, you may need to host your own images on a separate site. Image hosting sites like Imgur and Photobucket are free and very dependable, and we’d recommend using those. Sporcle does not provide image hosting.

We’d also love to hear any feedback you have on this brand new tool. It’s still very much in the early stages, so we hope to add some tweaks and new features soon!

Have you always been interested in creating a Sporcle quiz, but weren’t sure how to get started? This guide is for you! Read through the instructions below, contribute a quiz, and you’ll be a great quizmaker before you know it.

Getting Set Up

If this is your very first time, you’ll need to accept our quiz creation terms of service before you can start making your quiz.

Once you’ve accepted the terms, navigate to the Game Creation Center and click the orange ‘Create a New Game’ button. You should see a screen like the one below.

All you need to do is enter some basic information about the quiz you’re making.

Game Name
Start by typing in the name of your quiz.

Similar Games
If your quiz has already been made by another user, it will display in the ‘Similar Games’ box below.

Game Type
For ‘Game Type’ we’re going to choose ‘Classic’.

After selecting your game type click the ‘Create Game’ button.

Game Info

The Game Info tab has quite a bit of display information you can change. To keep things simple, however, we’ve outlined the most basic settings. The others are used for quizzes with more advanced formats.
Game Type
We’ve already set the game type to ‘Classic’ on the previous screen, but if you made a mistake, select ‘Classic’ in this dropdown menu.

Game Name
Game Name has also been filled-in from the previous screen, but if you’d like to tweak it, you can do so using this field.

Game Timer
Choose how many minutes you’d like your game to last before it ends. A good rule of thumb for a classic quiz is about 12 seconds per answer. This quiz has 17 answers, so 4 minutes is plenty of time. If you’re not sure how long your quiz is going be, leave it at 10 minutes (default setting.)

Description
By default, the words ‘Can you name the’ followed by your quiz title are filled in here. You may need to tweak this slightly for wording or capitalization, but you’ll want to make sure it’s clear what a potential quiz-taker is answering.

Category
Choose one of Sporcle’s categories your quiz fits into. If you’re not sure, Miscellaneous is a good default choice. You can always change this later if you’d like. After you’re done, hit ‘Save Changes’ and you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Options

The options tab allows quizmakers to customize the way a quiz behaves. Since we’re making a basic quiz, you can skip this tab for now.

Data

This is where you’ll input all your quiz information. Both hints and answers are entered here.
The left column is for hints, and the middle column is where answers should be put. No need to save, each field is saved automatically.

Alternate Answers
The most important thing to note about the answer column is that alternate answers/spellings can be added after a / symbol. For example, if Blade Runner had an alternate title of Blade Jogger, you would put the following text in the answer field: Blade Runner/Blade Jogger.

This way, someone taking the quiz can enter either answer and have it counted as correct.

Bonus Answers
If you want to put in an answer that is not part of the quiz, but you think may be guessed, you can add a ‘Bonus answer’. Bonus answers are not counted in the score, but they are triggered when a user types one in. To do this, enter the hint and answer in the normal way, but add ‘ee’ to the 3rd column. In this case, Star Wars was originally a two-word movie, but over time has been lengthened to fit in with the rest of the series, so it was added as a bonus.

Style

Sporcle quizzes have a basic color scheme by default. If you’d like to make a few tweaks, though, the Style tab is where you should go.

There are plenty of options here, but to keep things simple, we’re just going to add a little color to our hint background and answer background.

Hint Background
For hints, you’ll want to choose a dark background color, with white text, as that will be the easiest to read. There are many great color suggestion sites that can help you pick out a color that is complementary to your answer background. Here we chose a dark purple by clicking on the color code and choosing a purple from the palette.

Answer Background
To complement the darker hint background, it’s a good idea to use a lighter color on the answer column, which makes everything easier to read. Just pick a color using the palette again.

When you’re finished picking your colors, click ‘Save Styles’.

Tags

Some tags are added automatically when you contribute a quiz, but on this tab you can search for specific tags to add. This will make your quiz easier to find, and more likely to be played. Here we’re adding the Actor, Harrison Ford, and Movie Title tags.

Finish Up

When you feel like your quiz is finished and ready to be contributed, the Finish Up tab us where you go to make it happen.
You have two options when you’re finished with a quiz. You can release it as Public or Private
Private
A private quiz will not display on your profile, and can only be played when you send the link to another user. Quizzes you make for friends and family, or that are silly, should be made private.
Public
This quiz will be released publicly to the Sporcle community and you will receive lots of feedback whatever you do. It will display in your profile and notify any friends you have that you’ve released a new quiz, so make sure everything is as polished as can be before clicking that button.

Congratulations! It’s a Quiz

After all that work, you’ve contributed your first classic Sporcle quiz, it should look a lot like the one below.

If you’re interested in checking out further quizmaking challenges, be sure to read our other guides. You’ll be on the quizmaster leaderboards in no time.