Playing your own quizzes

[Librarysquirrel]

I try to avoid playing my own quizzes.  I don't want to mess with the stats, so if I'm testing I'll try to close out before finishing.  I do, however, see some guys on my Activity Feed that play their own quizzes, and I was just curious for those out there that do, what reasons do you (or do not) play your own quizzes?  Testing?  Updating?  Just bored and wanted to see how you'd do?  Nostalgia?  Other reasons?

[PLKphoto]

I generally play each quiz once, right after posting, and force myself to read each clue carefully and think about the answers… No matter how many times I test it before putting it live, I still occasionally find mistakes by doing this. It's a bit of a test.

I know some people that play their quizzes, purposefully getting a poor or mediocre score, then issue challenges to their friends as a way of encouraging plays (you have to set an achievable goal). I haven't done that yet, but I don't mind getting notified of new quizzes this way - especially if they're the kind that interest me. :-)

[Charging Tiger]

I have friends who will do what PLK mentions: play their own quiz and then challenge other users to beat the score. Ideally, the quiz creator will make the score reasonably beatable, but I've seen some that clearly were not fair (that can actually be counter-productive as it causes an unfavorable impression in the mind of the person receiving the unfair challenge).

I always play my own quizzes once immediately after launching them. This is not supplemental to testing, which I do before launching. I guess I do this both to give the quiz a play and to add to my own stats. That may seem selfish, but I think I am generally entitled to play any quiz -- including my own -- at least once.

[Cryptus]

I play my own quizzes because they're generally on subjects that interest me (hence me making the quiz in the first place), and I don't know all the answers, so it's still fun for me. In fact, having just checked my stats, 18 of my 20 most played unpublished quizzes are my own quizzes, with a few that have a lot of answers and/or were contributed a while ago (so I've forgotten the answers from when I created it). 

[MoMosMoProblems]

Pretty much what everyone said.  Unless I really, really want to know how people are doing with it right off the bat, I will play my own game right away for testing, sometimes for getting 100% for a badge (I figure if I went to the effort to research it and create it, it's not cheating to use it to count towards one), and to add a play to the number.  As soon as you have a few plays, the stats even out, and if you can figure percentages, you know how many of the 100% results were on top of yours. 

As to the play it to challenge people, I will play those when they get sent to me, but I make it a point to check the Activity page, and I will play most of the quizzes from the people I follow unless I know I will be utterly useless at it, so I don't feel those challenges are really necessary, at least in my case.  But I confess that I did do that once because I wanted somebody who was an expert on the format and theme to play my quiz and they hadn't played other quizzes I made, so I figured this was the only way to get their attention.  And it worked.

[SproutCM]

I usually play a quiz before I post it many times to test things, but I'll usually play it one more time, just after midnight the day I posted it to give it one more final test (or if I post it early in the day, I play it shortly thereafter because I don't want to miss any errors).

That way, it also gets "advertised" once again in the news feed of activity on Sporcle among your friends.  I NEVER ever ever challenge my friends to quizzes I make, because I researched and made them, and now I have an unfair advantage. Though, most of my friends who are crossword champions still beat me at many of my own quizzes, and everyone I know beats me at my own lyrics quizzes.  My biggest pet peeve on Sporcle is if someone challenges me to a quiz they made; I immediately delete the challenge. For me, all my Sporcle friends are my real life friends with a smattering of Sporcle editors I've talked to or met in real-life.

If I want my friends to take my quizzes, I post them all on Facebook and Twitter, or I email them personally, but most of my close friends follow me or get alerts when I post quizzes.

Also, during the badge era, I've been making tons of quizzes every month to help me learn things I need to memorize for certain Sporcle badges, or I make quizzes in the categories and subscategories I need to play quizzes in to get other badges. And I'm also making these for several of my close friends who are also badge-obsessed.

I actually worry when I see someone who hasn't taken their own quiz, because I worry it hasn't been double-checked enough. Plus for me, just taking the 3,000 quizzes I've made got me a handful of badges :)

Chris/SproutCM

[JoeBeta]

When I first started to make quizzes, I always played my own quizzes after I launched them. Nowadays I don't officially play my own quizzes. I do log off and play the quiz to test it one last time and to check on things that might not display during the testing phase. I try to play the quiz as if I had not just created it and did not know all of the answers. At some point in the future after some time has passed, I do intend to play all of my own quizzes just to see how well I do compared to my friends. Like Librarysquirrel, if I feel the need to test my quiz because I've changed it after launch or because somebody thinks that there's an error, I just play most of the quiz and close out before finishing.

[El_Dandy]

I play each of my quizzes once (with some exceptions for fixes). I consider it a good luck charm after I post it, and it helps me figure out and problems that might be there. I try not to be one of those people that challenges others so that the quiz can be played, but I have nothing against it as a philosophy for getting plays.

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 9:26:58 PM UTC-4, Librarysquirrel wrote:

[iglew]

I play my own quizzes a lot, for various reasons.

For testing, I play the quizzes numerous times before they're launched, but frequently once or twice after launch as well.

Some quizzes I've made were primarily for my own use, usually because it's a topic that I want to memorize and the quiz is a useful tool for doing this. (Most of my poem quizzes are like this.)  Quizzes like that I end up playing over and over many times.  (There are also quizzes not by me which I've played dozens of time as a memorization exercise, too.)  A couple of these quizzes are fairly obscure topics with only a handful of plays, so nearly half of the plays are myself.

Also, I just like my own quizzes, or at least some of them.  From time to time I'll go through some of my old published quizzes from years back (such as word ladders) and I'll have a little bit of nostalgia that makes me want to play them again as a trip down memory lane.  Sometimes when I do this I remember to cancel before entering the final answer, so that the result doesn't register, but other times I finish.  (Also, on some of the quizzes I don't remember all the answers to I get less that perfect scores!)  It's the same idea as going back and reading my own published writings from time to time, which I also do.

I don't pay that much attention to quiz results, so I don't really care if my own plays are skewing the numbers (and if I did care, I could adjust for that in my head).  I would never play my quizzes to deliberate skew the stats, but I don't avoid playing them for that reason either.

[razorz]

It bothers me when I play a quiz and see that the friend who is ranked #1 for the quiz is also the maker of the quiz. This is why I stopped playing my own quizzes long ago.

[hscer]

Sometimes I play years-old quizzes of mine for fun, see how much I remember.

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 9:26:58 PM UTC-4, Librarysquirrel wrote:

[Lindsay]

Playing your own quiz doesn't bother me. Playing your own quiz, getting 25/25 in 1:15, and then challenging me...yeah, I think I'll be declining that challenge.

On Wednesday, July 29, 2015 at 9:26:58 PM UTC-4, Librarysquirrel wrote: