Hey All,
The Sporcle Blog has moved to http://www.sporcle.com/blog
Please update your links as necessary.
Thanks!
Sporcle
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
New Challenge Features
If you've been receiving challenges lately, and you've been frustrated by your friends only sending you challenges that seem impossible to beat, you should try our latest new challenge feature, the Blind Challenge
All you have to do is go to the challenge page, select the friends you want to challenge, and the quiz category you want to play, and suddenly, you've entered the Sporcle Thunderdome.
Something else you may want to try is challenging multiple friends to a random category. Using this, you can get yourself up to ten random quizzes to play, which is perfect for an afternoon Sporcle Marathon.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Quizmaster Rankings
You may have seen a few changes with Sporcle in the last few weeks. We've made some tweaks to the look of the site here and there to help keep things organized.
We've also added a new feature that we've been working on for a while, Sporcle Quizmaster Rankings. This is a brand new leaderboard that ranks Sporcle users using a super-secret BCS-like formula based on contributed quizzes and gameplays (Amongst other things). The overall leader-board will change daily, so we encourage everyone out there to keep making great quizzes in order to improve your ranking.
To check out your individual ranking if you're not in the top 100, just click on your username when you're logged in and you'll be able to see your ranking right on your profile.
We've also added a new feature that we've been working on for a while, Sporcle Quizmaster Rankings. This is a brand new leaderboard that ranks Sporcle users using a super-secret BCS-like formula based on contributed quizzes and gameplays (Amongst other things). The overall leader-board will change daily, so we encourage everyone out there to keep making great quizzes in order to improve your ranking.
To check out your individual ranking if you're not in the top 100, just click on your username when you're logged in and you'll be able to see your ranking right on your profile.
Friday, February 11, 2011
All About Egypt
We just thought we'd take a short break out of all our stimulating diversions to talk about something we think is really important: the current political situation in Egypt. For many people, Egypt brings to mind historical feats and massive pyramids, but in more modern times, Egypt has had as much turmoil as any country in the middle east. It certainly made us here at Sporcle, despite being a quiz and trivia based site, realize how little we knew about the country beyond just the facts of our quizzes.
In the past, we've published a couple of quizzes on Sporcle about Egypt, one as it stands today and another about it's ancient mythology. We're glad to see that the people of egypt Egypt were able to receive the change they asked for, and if it helped a few us around the world see beyond our preconceptions, and look at the day-to-day problems of people in a foreign land, that can only be a good thing.
Have a great weekend everybody!
-Sporcle
In the past, we've published a couple of quizzes on Sporcle about Egypt, one as it stands today and another about it's ancient mythology. We're glad to see that the people of egypt Egypt were able to receive the change they asked for, and if it helped a few us around the world see beyond our preconceptions, and look at the day-to-day problems of people in a foreign land, that can only be a good thing.
Have a great weekend everybody!
-Sporcle
Monday, January 24, 2011
New Sporcle Challenge
A couple of weeks ago we released a new set of features aimed at allowing you to challenge your friends. We also challenged everyone to a round of '3 Letter Body
Parts'
If you haven't challenged your friends yet, now would be a great time to follow a couple of friends on the site and start challenging away. Our Sporcle team has been challenging each other since the release, and though some of our records are better than others, we've been having a great time.
To get started, just play a quiz (or pick a quiz you've already played), click the challenge button at the bottom of the quiz, and choose the friends you'd like to challenge.
You can also check out the new Challenge section in your Activity Page, so you can keep track of your open and completed challenges, and keep track of your overall challenge stats.
Parts'
If you haven't challenged your friends yet, now would be a great time to follow a couple of friends on the site and start challenging away. Our Sporcle team has been challenging each other since the release, and though some of our records are better than others, we've been having a great time.
To get started, just play a quiz (or pick a quiz you've already played), click the challenge button at the bottom of the quiz, and choose the friends you'd like to challenge.
You can also check out the new Challenge section in your Activity Page, so you can keep track of your open and completed challenges, and keep track of your overall challenge stats.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Embed Sporcle Quizzes on your Website
We here at Sporcle have just launched an exciting new feature that allows you embed quizzes directly onto your blog or website. When you're logged in, just go to our embed page and sign up. You can embed up to ten different quizzes on three separate domains.
The only restrictions to embedding are that certain quizzes (such as maps or image quizzes) are not yet allowed to be embedded, and you must also have FTP access to your site in order to upload a required HTML file.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns over at our Feedback page.
The only restrictions to embedding are that certain quizzes (such as maps or image quizzes) are not yet allowed to be embedded, and you must also have FTP access to your site in order to upload a required HTML file.
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns over at our Feedback page.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
New Feature: Ability to block users following you
We have recently implemented a small, but much requested feature update that allows users to block others from following them. If a user begins following you on Sporcle and you'd rather they not see your updates, you can now go to your user profile (www.sporcle.com/user/USERNAME) click on the Connections link, look for the follower, and click the word Block. Their name will be crossed out, and they will no longer be allowed to see your updates in the activity feed, nor compare their scores to yours.
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Sporcle for Android
The Android App For Sporcle Provides New Realm Of Mentally Stimulating Diversions
Procrastination has never been so fun with new trivia app for Android Enabled Smartphones
SEATTLE – December 15, 2010 – Sporcle today released their first ever Android app for mobile and handheld devices using the Android mobile operating system.
With the Android app Sporcle users now have access to hundreds of challenging trivia games they can play anytime and anywhere. Be it sports, movies, television, music, or geography– Sporcle’s entertaining quizzes will engage trivia fans of all ages.
The Android app automatically delivers Sporcle’s latest brain-engaging quizzes to Android enabled devices every time the app launches.
Sporcle’s new Android app also enables people to share their favorite quizzes with friends. Using Facebook Connect, people can now sign into Sporcle through Facebook and post favorite quizzes on their Facebook wall.
Sporcle’s Android app is an extension of Sporcle.com, a social gaming web site that offers over 130,000 short trivia and educational games. To date, these games have been played over 400 million times. Over 95% of the games on Sporcle are user-generated, created by people who use the site’s tools to generate quizzes that show off their knowledge and expertise.
Sporcle is currently the #1 iPhone trivia app, ahead of apps from such trivia giants as Jeopardy!, Trivial Pursuit, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, and is one of the App Store’s top 100 paid apps overall. Sporcle released a new version of its addictive iPhone trivia app on May 25, 2010.
Sporcle’s new Android app is available now through the Android Market for the introductory price of $1.99.
About Sporcle:
Sporcle is a social gaming company that offers short trivia and educational games through the Sporcle.com web site and a mobile app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Sporcle was founded in 2007, has been profitable since its inception, and has never raised venture funding. Sporcle is based in Seattle and San Francisco.
For more information, contact:
Ali Aydar, Sporcle
Click HERE to download screenshots of the app.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Nominate Sporcle for the Crunchies
The nominating process for Techrunch's 'Crunchie Awards' have started, and if you're a big fan of Sporcle it would definitely help us out if you traveled on over to their site and nominated us for 'Best Time Sink ' and 'Best Bootstrapped Startup' (or anything else you feel like).
It'd mean a lot to us over here at Sporcle to be nominated for one of these awards, so make sure to vote daily to get us right to the top.
It'd mean a lot to us over here at Sporcle to be nominated for one of these awards, so make sure to vote daily to get us right to the top.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
DonorsChoose.org
You may have noticed the DonorsChoose box on our homepage the last couple of weeks and wonder what it's about. DonorsChoose is a website that allows donors to give directly to a classroom project in order for teachers to purchase classroom supplies.
If you go to our donation page at DonorsChoose.org, you can see the project requests that we've included. You can either choose to give to any of our pre-selected projects, or donate an amount of money that will be given to the most urgent project.
Please let us know at our feedback page if you have any questions or concerns.
If you go to our donation page at DonorsChoose.org, you can see the project requests that we've included. You can either choose to give to any of our pre-selected projects, or donate an amount of money that will be given to the most urgent project.
Please let us know at our feedback page if you have any questions or concerns.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Sporcle College Rankings have arrived
You might have noticed a new feature that popped up on Sporcle last night. While you've had the ability to add your school info to your profile for some time, we've decided to incorporate that data into a wonderfully complicated BCS-style ranking system. Check out the top 25 for the week here.
If you haven't yet added your college to your profile, it's pretty easy. When you're logged in, simply click on Settings, find the word 'School', click 'Edit', search for your school name, then click Submit.
As per usual, if there are any features or changes you'd like to see, please let us know via our Feedback page.
If you haven't yet added your college to your profile, it's pretty easy. When you're logged in, simply click on Settings, find the word 'School', click 'Edit', search for your school name, then click Submit.
As per usual, if there are any features or changes you'd like to see, please let us know via our Feedback page.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Controversial Answers: Roy G. Biv Edition
In our continuing series of blog posts that we hope fosters discussion on a few of our more controversial quizzes, we're tackling a deceptively simple quiz that has generated a lot of discussion: The Colors of the Rainbow.
The point of issue is that many people learned the acronym Roy G. Biv (or the more dramatic Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain) to describe the color spectrum. As you may notice, these include the first letters of seven colors. This group of colors is exactly how Isaac Newton first described them. Newton wanted to align the color wheel with musical notes, the known solar system (which is edging closer back to 7 as the years go on) and the days of the week. While this is a pretty great idea for fans of the number seven, it's not a terribly accurate one, as modern research has proven the color indigo is almost impossible to distinguish from either blue or purple.
In our quiz, we accept either indigo or blue for one of the answers as well as both purple and violet for another, so we're hoping to at least give you credit if your description of the color is accurate. In the future just remember the Sporcle mnemonic device: Richard of York Grew Bulbous Vegetables, and things will work out just fine.
All that being said, we're open to suggestions here, if you want a Roy G. Biv quiz to relive your elementary school days, shoot us a comment and let us know why.
The point of issue is that many people learned the acronym Roy G. Biv (or the more dramatic Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain) to describe the color spectrum. As you may notice, these include the first letters of seven colors. This group of colors is exactly how Isaac Newton first described them. Newton wanted to align the color wheel with musical notes, the known solar system (which is edging closer back to 7 as the years go on) and the days of the week. While this is a pretty great idea for fans of the number seven, it's not a terribly accurate one, as modern research has proven the color indigo is almost impossible to distinguish from either blue or purple.
In our quiz, we accept either indigo or blue for one of the answers as well as both purple and violet for another, so we're hoping to at least give you credit if your description of the color is accurate. In the future just remember the Sporcle mnemonic device: Richard of York Grew Bulbous Vegetables, and things will work out just fine.
All that being said, we're open to suggestions here, if you want a Roy G. Biv quiz to relive your elementary school days, shoot us a comment and let us know why.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Making Sporcle Even Better
You may have noticed that we had a little downtime last Saturday night, but as you can now see we updated the look and feel of Sporcle. (Look at that shading!) We've also recently updated our Editor's Picks page to a much more robust version. You can now click through and see all of the editor's picks from each category sorted by date, rating or number of game plays. This feature actually came directly from a user suggestion, so if you have a great idea for Sporcle, or you want to let us know what you think of the new changes, make sure and contact us at our feedback page.
A Scary Sporcle Halloween
As you may have noticed, Sporcle had some problems on Halloween. You may have experienced some strange issues where your quiz results were displaying improperly, or a quiz you attempted to play was out of order or garbled in some way. We believe our Halloween haunting has been solved, but if you see any further issue with a game you've played or created, please contact us immediately using our Feedback page.
Regards,
Sporcle
Regards,
Sporcle
Friday, October 22, 2010
The Daily Dose
You may have noticed that we have a new feature on our website called The Daily Dose. At Sporcle, we're always trying to come up with great new ideas, and this is our answer to folks who just need to get their Sporcle fix a little bit faster. Here's a little more detail about each game:
Minute Morsel: We know that sometimes you only have a couple of minutes before that next meeting or class and there's no way you'll be able to finish one of our longer quizzes. The Minute Morsel was created just for this. It's basically a small slice of a quiz already published on our site. If you happen to be in the mood to try the full quiz later, the link is right there below the morsel.
Missing Word: This is a quick fill-in-the blank style quiz that we're hoping is a fun mind-jogger Every day we'll have you filling in the blanks of various subjects. So far we've had subjects like movie and song titles, but we're looking for even more great ideas for future quizzes.
Scrambled Word: This quiz is designed to put a Sporcle twist on the old word scramble games from your morning paper. With this quiz, you might be unscrambling a celebrity name, or figuring out the answer to a joke.
While the Minute Morsel is compiled from existing published games, the Missing and Scrambled Word games are currently done by the Sporcle editors. However, we know that our community suprises us again and again with creative, excellent quizzes, so we definitely want to see a lot more user contributions to this part of our site. Think of it this way, with two new daily quizzes every day, these new quizzes are one the best ways to get yourself published on Sporcle.
Minute Morsel: We know that sometimes you only have a couple of minutes before that next meeting or class and there's no way you'll be able to finish one of our longer quizzes. The Minute Morsel was created just for this. It's basically a small slice of a quiz already published on our site. If you happen to be in the mood to try the full quiz later, the link is right there below the morsel.
Missing Word: This is a quick fill-in-the blank style quiz that we're hoping is a fun mind-jogger Every day we'll have you filling in the blanks of various subjects. So far we've had subjects like movie and song titles, but we're looking for even more great ideas for future quizzes.
Scrambled Word: This quiz is designed to put a Sporcle twist on the old word scramble games from your morning paper. With this quiz, you might be unscrambling a celebrity name, or figuring out the answer to a joke.
While the Minute Morsel is compiled from existing published games, the Missing and Scrambled Word games are currently done by the Sporcle editors. However, we know that our community suprises us again and again with creative, excellent quizzes, so we definitely want to see a lot more user contributions to this part of our site. Think of it this way, with two new daily quizzes every day, these new quizzes are one the best ways to get yourself published on Sporcle.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Controversial Answers
Hey Everyone,
In what we hope will be an ongoing series of posts about controversial answers on Sporcle, we're tackling a subject that raised some questions in the comments of the Safe Cracker Quiz.
Part of the quiz concerned naming the planet's Oceans and many users expressed surprise or outrage at the inclusion of the Southern Ocean. A lot of people on Sporcle (us included) learned of only 4 Oceans (and 9 planets) in school, and we understand the confusion.
So here's the deal: in the year 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization designated the area from the coast of Antarctica north to 60 degrees south latitude as a new ocean, which they called The Southern Ocean. In some places, this area is also known as either the Antarctic Ocean or the South Polar Ocean. Not everyone on the planet agrees with this stance, but we believe it should be included as the answer in our quizzes.
Most importantly, we want everyone to be having as much fun as possible on our site, not becoming frustrated when it might seem like we're making an arbitrary stance on a particular answer.
We're hoping to continue the discussion on some other topics in the future, and maybe make a few more posts celebrating some of our more frequent answers (Kyrgyzstan and Vinny Testaverde anyone?), so check back often (or subscribe to our feed) to hear more from your pals at Sporcle.
Thanks,
Sporcle
In what we hope will be an ongoing series of posts about controversial answers on Sporcle, we're tackling a subject that raised some questions in the comments of the Safe Cracker Quiz.
Part of the quiz concerned naming the planet's Oceans and many users expressed surprise or outrage at the inclusion of the Southern Ocean. A lot of people on Sporcle (us included) learned of only 4 Oceans (and 9 planets) in school, and we understand the confusion.
So here's the deal: in the year 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization designated the area from the coast of Antarctica north to 60 degrees south latitude as a new ocean, which they called The Southern Ocean. In some places, this area is also known as either the Antarctic Ocean or the South Polar Ocean. Not everyone on the planet agrees with this stance, but we believe it should be included as the answer in our quizzes.
Most importantly, we want everyone to be having as much fun as possible on our site, not becoming frustrated when it might seem like we're making an arbitrary stance on a particular answer.
We're hoping to continue the discussion on some other topics in the future, and maybe make a few more posts celebrating some of our more frequent answers (Kyrgyzstan and Vinny Testaverde anyone?), so check back often (or subscribe to our feed) to hear more from your pals at Sporcle.
Thanks,
Sporcle
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Friends and Activity and other changes
You may have noticed a few changes this week at Sporcle. We have been busy working on new features for the site, here is a rundown of recent changes:
Friends - Find (or invite) your friends on Sporcle. If you and a friend "Follow" each other, you can compare how you did on the games pages.
Follow - Follow people on Sporcle and see their Activity. This is a list of games they have made, played or commented on.
Follow Sporcle: We have tweaked the follow Sporcle buttons to make room on the home page. This is now a handy little box at the bottom of the page.
User Created Games in Stats - You can now see your stats for all the games that you have played on the site, whether they have been published or not.
Favorites - If you have a long list of favorites, you can now remove those favorites right from the Favorites Page.
By Difficulty - The Difficulty page was updated to show the range of difficulty across all categories.
Create Page Updated - We added sortable columns to the list of games on the Create page as well as some more information here as well.
Whew! There were also a few nips and tucks along the way with many more changes to come.
Enjoy!
Sporcle
Friends - Find (or invite) your friends on Sporcle. If you and a friend "Follow" each other, you can compare how you did on the games pages.
Follow - Follow people on Sporcle and see their Activity. This is a list of games they have made, played or commented on.
Follow Sporcle: We have tweaked the follow Sporcle buttons to make room on the home page. This is now a handy little box at the bottom of the page.
User Created Games in Stats - You can now see your stats for all the games that you have played on the site, whether they have been published or not.
Favorites - If you have a long list of favorites, you can now remove those favorites right from the Favorites Page.
By Difficulty - The Difficulty page was updated to show the range of difficulty across all categories.
Create Page Updated - We added sortable columns to the list of games on the Create page as well as some more information here as well.
Whew! There were also a few nips and tucks along the way with many more changes to come.
Enjoy!
Sporcle
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Audio and Video Quizzes
We have been getting reports of some problems with some of Sporcle's quizzes which contain audio clues. We are hoping to get to the bottom of things, but first we need to do some troubleshooting.
The audio quizzes are embedded from YouTube. If YouTube videos don't normally work for you, they won't work on Sporcle. A good way to test this is to try playing the clip below:
If the above clip doesn't play, then it is likely there is a setting in your browser that is preventing embedded YouTube clips from playing.
If it does play and you are only having trouble on Sporcle, then we need to know your browser type and version, what OS you are on, and any other relevant information you can give us.
One more thing to keep in mind is that clicking the start button the Sporcle quiz will only start the timer, you must also click the play button on the audio bar to play the audio.
Thanks!
The audio quizzes are embedded from YouTube. If YouTube videos don't normally work for you, they won't work on Sporcle. A good way to test this is to try playing the clip below:
If the above clip doesn't play, then it is likely there is a setting in your browser that is preventing embedded YouTube clips from playing.
If it does play and you are only having trouble on Sporcle, then we need to know your browser type and version, what OS you are on, and any other relevant information you can give us.
One more thing to keep in mind is that clicking the start button the Sporcle quiz will only start the timer, you must also click the play button on the audio bar to play the audio.
Thanks!
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Follow Sporcle
Over the last few months we have added several ways to follow Sporcle, so it seemed a good time to try and capture them all in one handy post to the blog.
Email:
We now offer a few different email options on your Sporcle Profile page.
You must be a registered user to take advantage of these options. Click here to register if you haven't already done so.
You can choose to get Daily or Weekly digests of the quizzes we publish to the Sporcle home page. If you contribute quizzes, you can also be notified if one of your quizzes gets selected to be published on the home page.
Facebook:
Sporcle has more Facebook fans than the populations of many small countries. Like Sporcle on Facebook and help us get bigger than the population of Italy!
Twitter:
Every game gets sent out via a Tweet. Follow Sporcle on Twitter to get the latest games, news, and tweets from the Sporcle team.
RSS:
Get the feed - click here to subscribe.
iPhone:
Download the Sporcle iPhone app and get the games on a daily basis to your iPhone or Touch.
As we add more ways to stay on top of your favorite quizzes we will add them to this post.
Enjoy!
Email:
We now offer a few different email options on your Sporcle Profile page.
You must be a registered user to take advantage of these options. Click here to register if you haven't already done so.
You can choose to get Daily or Weekly digests of the quizzes we publish to the Sporcle home page. If you contribute quizzes, you can also be notified if one of your quizzes gets selected to be published on the home page.
Facebook:
Sporcle has more Facebook fans than the populations of many small countries. Like Sporcle on Facebook and help us get bigger than the population of Italy!
Twitter:
Every game gets sent out via a Tweet. Follow Sporcle on Twitter to get the latest games, news, and tweets from the Sporcle team.
RSS:
Get the feed - click here to subscribe.
iPhone:
Download the Sporcle iPhone app and get the games on a daily basis to your iPhone or Touch.
As we add more ways to stay on top of your favorite quizzes we will add them to this post.
Enjoy!
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
New Sporcle app for iPhone & iPod touch
Get Smart with Sporcle’s New Trivia App for iPhone & iPod touchSporcle delivers new quizzes daily, making the iPhone’s #1 trivia app better every day; Procrastination has never been so fun
SEATTLE – May 25, 2010 – Sporcle today released a new version of its addictive trivia app for the iPhone and iPod touch, with a decidedly non-trivial feature: the app automatically delivers Sporcle’s latest brain-teasing quizzes to the iPhone every time the app launches.
With this new feature --a first for an iPhone game-- Sporcle gets better every day.
Sporcle is already the #1 iPhone trivia app, ahead of apps from such trivia giants as Jeopardy!, Trivial Pursuit, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?, and is one of the App Store’s top 100 paid apps overall.
Sporcle’s app for iPhone and iPod touch gives people access to hundreds of challenging trivia games they can play anytime and anywhere. No matter what they’re interested in --be it sports, movies, television, music, or geography– Sporcle’s entertaining quizzes will make three minutes (or three hours) fly by.
Sporcle’s app is an extension of Sporcle.com, a social gaming web site that offers over 90,000 short trivia and educational games. To date, these games have been played over 260 million times. Over 95% of the games on Sporcle are user-generated, created by people who use the site’s tools to generate quizzes that show off their knowledge and expertise.
“Sporcle lets people kill time without wasting it, knowing that they’re learning while they play, ” said Ali Aydar, Sporcle’s chief executive officer. “Our new app delivers fresh games every day, turning everyday procrastination into a daily learning opportunity.”
Sporcle’s new app also enables people to share their favorite quizzes with friends. Using Facebook Connect, people can now sign into Sporcle with their Facebook credentials and post favorite quizzes on their Facebook wall.
Sporcle’s new app is available now through the Apple App Store for the price of $1.99.
About Sporcle:
Sporcle is a social gaming company that offers short trivia and educational games through the Sporcle.com web site and a mobile app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Sporcle was founded in 2007, has been profitable since its inception, and has never raised venture funding. Sporcle is based in Seattle and San Francisco.
For more information, contact:
Ali Aydar, Sporcle
Click HERE to download screenshots of the app.
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