Sporcle
 |
|
|
Type of site
|
Quizzes |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | Sporcle, Inc. |
| Created by | Matt Ramme |
| Slogan(s) | Mentally stimulating diversions |
| Website | http://www.sporcle.com |
| Alexa rank |
 3,763 (February 2017[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | January 30, 2007 |
| Current status | Online |
|
Content license
|
Copyrighted |
Sporcle is a trivia quiz website launched on January 30, 2007. Anybody with a Sporcle account is able to create a quiz. According to website founder Matt Ramme (Username "Matt"), the name of the site is inspired by the words sports and oracle. Offices for the website are located in Seattle, San Francisco, and Southfield, Michigan.
The website was founded in response to Ramme's desire to learn trivia and his accompanying frustration that there was no existing website suitable for his needs. Sporcle's mission statement is, "We actively and methodically search out new and innovative ways to prevent our users from getting any work done whatsoever."
Many games on Sporcle require the user to name all of the items within a given subject — such as presidents of the USA, Best Picture Oscar-winning movies, or countries whose names are also legal words in Scrabble. Items can be named in any order and the user has a preset time limit. In some games each answer corresponds to a specific question or hint from a list, and in many such cases they must be answered in order unless the user explicitly skips to a different question. In other games questions are not revealed until previous ones have been answered, and there are other variations as well. Quiz times can range from 30 seconds to 20 minutes. After 7 seconds, under the timer the words, "give up?" appear. The player can then click it and it will reveal all the answers but the quiz then ends.
In most quizzes, wrong answers are ignored for scoring purposes but must be deleted by the user from the answer box before another answer can be typed, whereas a correct answer clears the box automatically. Two alternative formats were introduced in April 2011, suitable for questions or quizzes with a limited range of answers (e.g. US states, multiple-choice questions): a wrong answer to a specific question can prevent a second try, or any wrong answer can end the quiz (nicknamed a "minefield").
In March 2012, Sporcle released the "clickable" quiz, which is played by selecting the correct answers from a given set of choices, all displayed continuously, rather than typing. When specific questions or hints are used, they appear one at a time in sequence after the user selects the answer to the previous one. In this case only the answer corresponding to the specific question is accepted; buttons marked NEXT and PREV allow the player to postpone or return to a question, but a wrong answer prevents a return. In other quizzes the correct answers must be selected in a particular order without specific hints. Still other quizzes allow the correct answers to be clicked in any order, but some of the choices offered are wrong answers. If the quiz is not a "minefield", then the number of clicks is limited to the number of correct answers. Still another variant, introduced later in 2012, requires choices from two or more different lists to be correctly associated.
...
Wikipedia