We let you comment. Now we ...
Our development team set up a commenting system for our quiz(zes) outside of Facebook (sorry Deadliners ...). It's currently on our "general" news quiz, but it will also be a feature on our Entertainment Quiz and Sports Quiz (coming soon!). The commenting system allows users to comment on individual questions. There was quiet a bit of thought put into how long comments should be and how we'd manage foul-mouthed $*#(@^%)!#%.
Censoring user comments happens on every major news site, though strategies differ. Other than b****, f*** and a**, is there really a consensus on what is horrible enough to be censored out? For example, the NYT mobile app used to censor out the word "gay," but we left it in. And you b****** are so clever, you'll find hundreds of ways around our censoring anyhow. (BTW, we settled for using $&#(*!) symbols for our bleeping, instead of asterisks)
Currently, the general news quiz can be found on newstrust.net. We didn't get too many comments, and surprisingly(!) few obscene ones. There were even a couple instances where users responded to each other's comments.
We were hoping for feedback on the news quiz, and we got some. A user complained about there being too many entertainment questions, while another user asked "why not call this 'sports quiz'?"
We love the feedback (... really, we do). We scaled back the number of sports and entertainment questions in the general quiz (very similar to the Deadline quiz), sticking to only big events (freebie: yes, the Super Bowl will be in BOTH quizzes).
Sometimes, we get user complaints about being too US-centric. About a year ago, when we really dove into the news quiz as a product, we tried to scale back our US questions and remove sports coverage. But as a company, we've really come to grips with the understanding that you really can't please everyone, and our target market is mostly in North America.
We definitely aren't trying to alienate anyone. There have been more US-based questions, mostly because of the US election/inauguration; now that they're over, the flood of Obamarama questions should slow and lead to slightly fewer US questions.
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