@CJ You gave me my biggest laugh of the day lol! Some think we're finished in our 70's. The other day someone was surprised I whipped out a cell phone LOL!
@Alan Mendell - Welcome to the party! :) To me it's more of a "Senility Test" than a "Trivia Quiz". If I can average 75% or more it means that my soon-to-be 73 yr old mind is still working. ROFL
Hi Duff. I stumbled upon your Website and gave the quiz a whirl. You were always thinking up innovative ideas and cool stuff. And that was 60 years ago. Hope you are well. Alan Mandell
Just finished the quiz in second place...Full transparency: took it twice before, about 2 or 3 weeks ago unregistered. First time got about 72% right, second time got a little over 96% right, then waited 2 weeks, registered and took a third time on the record. No cheating, just relied on memory. Hardest part: still can't get most of Monopoly square colors right. Watched lots of TV as a kid so got most ad slogans right. I'm a musician so got almost all music stuff right. Took 5-6 hours to complete all questions. (FYI: born in SF 1952) Thank you, BBeM!
Posted by Duff at 2:33 pm (PST) on Thu November 14, 2019
@CJ - As you suggest, it's hard to predict what a question's difficulty will be. However, once several dozen players have encountered a question, its difficulty can be determined by the percentage of players who have gotten it correct. That's why I display that percentage for each question. And, as they say, your mileage may vary.
@Rockin Ronnie - after you've gone through all the questions in the quiz, you can clear your history and play them all again, this time with an added time limit on each question. We've got some really dedicated players here, and some of them have reset their history several times in order to get high on the leaderboard. Obviously, after playing the quiz once, you may remember many of the correct answers.
Posted by CJ at 5:10 pm (PDT) on Sat June 22, 2019
@Duff - Looking back on the earlier comments, specifically the ones concerning difficulty ratings - How can one assign a difficulty rating to Trivia Questions? It depends on the individule and their area of interest, etc.. for example a sports buff would find find questions related to who played for what team very easy whereas someone like me who was never that into sports find them extremely difficult. When my wife and I played Trivia Persuit as a team we rocked. She was great at art, literature, and "high-brow" music while I killed at science, technology, music from the 40's-70's. We both sucked at sports. LOL
My first time doing this Trivia Quiz, but I find the top 10 scores Dubious to say the least. Very good questions that test your memory on things gone by.
Right, CJ. People will always find a way to cheat, whether with Google in another window, or another method, such as registering twice and using one ID to try the new questions and the other ID to supply the correct answers once they're known. Time limits help, and I turn them on if you complete the quiz, clear your trivia history, and play again. But I'm reluctant to impose time limits for the first run. My advice: Ignore the leader board.
Posted by CJ at 11:19 am (PDT) on Tue June 2, 2015
I noticed previous comments concerning scoring of the quiz. As for me, the only one I'm interested in is what percentage I got right. The "Leader Board" doesn't impress me though. If I wanted to see my name at the top of the leader board with 100%...I could have had the question opened in one tab and google the answer in another.
For some obscure reason, the group immediately preceding the Boomers is known as the Silent Generation. My wife is quick to point out that many of them were far from silent!
A baby.... Seriously, the whole BB designation is nebulous. It describes people coming home from the war and creating babies. That started earlier than 46, as folks were being rotated out, or coming home for medical issues. They may have been injured, but in most cases they would marry and raise families. I guess 1946, being the first official post-war year, is a good place to start.
John and Mousey, Baby Boomers are commonly defined as people born between 1946 and 1964. Most of the questions here deal with the '50s and '60s, although a few do dip into the late '40s. Sure, if you were born in 1960, say, you're definitely a Boomer, but you're not likely to have personal memories of the early '50s... except for TV reruns. That's why many questions focus on the '70s and late '60s. I guess the ideal birth years for this quiz would be something like 1948-1952. I should analyze the quiz logs and member profile entries to see how true that is.
Hey Mousey. Let Duff know of any that appear to be pre-BB. Take notes, and if possible, explain why. He will fix them if they're too old. Of course, a boomer could be 70 this year if born in 44, but not 80!
Elsa Forever - if you see something that doesn't make sense, let Duff know. He's very good about making changes if necessary, or offering explanations for the questions and answers. Be sure to let him know which entries you question.
Um, geminibitch? Nobody's blocking you from playing the quiz again...once you've run through all the questions. We just add a time-limit element to such replays. Also, there's no "generic" quiz; Visitors and logged-in members receive questions from the same collection (which currently numbers 1083 questions). They're presented 20 at a time, either randomly (with recently-added questions first) or sorted by difficulty.
I don't think people should be blocked. I like to review or re-do quizzes with my grandkids, but can't if I get blocked, except for the same generic quiz I get if I don't log in. If we're nuts emough to want to do them again, you should let us!!!
Hi, rw45. There's no provision for visitors to search for particular questions in the trivia quiz. But if you saw an ad with a car wheel, maybe it was this question. Yes?
Hi, eurogarth. Yes, I've considered factoring question difficulty into the scoring, but always run into a few wrinkles, such as:
- A question's difficulty can't be determined ahead of time, but is based on actual player interaction. It can swing wildly for the first 50+ players. Therefore, a default mid-range difficulty would need to be used for each newly-added question. - Two players could thus get different scores for answering the same question correctly, depending on the question's current difficulty. - The site's user database keeps track of whether a player answered a question correctly (or partially correctly), but not of the question's difficulty at that time. A player's score can currently be computed from his/her trivia right/wrong log, but this technique would result in fluctuating scores if each question's current difficulty had to be factored in. - The top slots on the leader board are held by players who have answered nearly all of the questions in the quiz correctly, so the work needed to make this change would seem to have very little benefit.
While the new scoring/ranking system is surely a step in the right direction, is there a way of including a "degree of difficulty" into the scoring the diving and other sports in the Olympics are scored? Should one person scoring 20/20 on questions where the avg is 75% or better get the same ranking as another player answering 20/20 correct of questions whose are avg is say, less than 50%?
Posted by Duff at 11:23 am (PDT) on Sat September 21, 2013
Recently, someone suggested using the percent-correct as part of the scoring for the Leader Board. I've been giving this some thought, and agree that it's a good idea. Rather than ranking players simply by how many questions they got right, rank would be based on a formula:
Given C = number of questions answered correctly and P = number of questions played
Score = C2 / P
For example: Currently, a player who got 800 correct out of 800, and one who got 800 correct out of 1000 would be tied with scores of 800. With the new formula, the former would score 800, but the latter's score would be 640. That seems reasonable, no?
Posted by Duff at 12:59 am (PDT) on Sat September 21, 2013
Okay, I've turned on the time-limit feature as we've been discussing. It's activated when you clear your trivia history, and the option to do that now appears ONLY when you've exhausted the supply of questions in the quiz.
Have fun, and please let me know if you encounter any problems!
Posted by Duff at 10:56 am (PDT) on Sun September 15, 2013
I've been wrestling with one fly in this timed-quiz-if-you've-reset ointment. Namely, a player can reset at any time... so if one does so after answering just 20 questions, the timer would be active not only for the 20 questions he/she has seen before, but for all the rest of them as well. That seems unfair.
But what if I offered the "Clear History" option ONLY when a player has exhausted the supply of questions? That, it seems to me, would remove the last conceptual obstacle. I'll work on this over the next couple of weeks.
I think that is a great idea, Duff. I am just about to start over for the first time as I have never wiped my score and started again, and I want to retake the whole quiz. You should remove the memory of the high score when you restart to make it more of a gamble just as you said.
Posted by Duff at 11:49 am (PDT) on Tue September 10, 2013
And I could shave a few (5?) seconds off the question timer each time a player resets his/her quiz history, so the game would actually get harder each time you played it. Sounds like fun to me!
One thing, though... Currently, I retain players' high scores, and their Leader Board positions, when they clear their history, so they can strive to surpass their previous high score without losing their position on the Board. I'd like to remove that feature, so that clearing one's history also removes the Leader Board entry. This would make clearing one's history more of a gamble or challenge. What do you all think?
A time limit is a good idea. You should breeze through all the answers you remember with the occassional pause to ponder the hard ones you previously had trouble with.
Posted by Duff at 9:23 pm (PDT) on Mon September 9, 2013
Ah! So maybe the time limit should be imposed only when a player has cleared his/her quiz history and is replaying the game. I'm thinking in terms of 60 seconds for most questions, more for hard, long-winded, drag-n-drop, fill-in-the-blank, and audio-based questions.
It can be a whole other challenge to remember the right answers for all the previous questions you got wrong. A whole different mental exercise. I like to challenge myself that way.
Posted by Duff at 12:05 am (PDT) on Mon September 9, 2013
I wrote the code to support timed questions a few weeks ago and came *this* close to turning it on. But there are no prizes being given, it's just for fun, and I let players reset their quiz history and play again (now presumably knowing most of the answers). So what would be the point?
The percentage idea has some merit, but which statistic would take precedence? A user who scored 95% when there were 500 questions in the quiz, or one who scored 85% more recently, when there were 1000?
Maybe the leader board should indicate how many times each player has cleared his/her quiz history and replayed the whole thing; some have done so more than 20 times! That's commitment -- or madness; take your pick.
I agree with the previous poster in that I believe a time element is a great idea, and I think a reset of the board is in order. Call me old fashioned but I have never taken the time to research answers as I am taking the quiz it just smacks of cheating to me, and therefore takes the fun out of it for me. And yes, I did know Ian Fleming wrote "Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang". :-)
Hi, Omo. Thanks for your note. Adding a time element might indeed be a good idea, for the reasons you point out. The drag-n-drop questions, and the ones containing audio clips, would need additional time. I've also toyed with the idea of assigning points to the questions based on their difficulty. Either approach would probably force a reset of the leader board and everyone's trivia history.
Having collected trivia since 1959 and having my own massive collection of trivia questions, I found the fun in "triviating" is diminished when time allows someone to find the answer online or even running to an encyclopedia or other reference book. I find the most challenging opponents are those who know or can recall an answer rather than knowing where to go to get an answer. That being said, I would like to see something like a 30 or 40 second timer put on the questions when they pop up. If it is answered after the time elapses, then no point is awarded to the contestant. It becomes then a challenge of either you know it or you don't rather than how fast can you find the answer.
Thanks for your note, eurogarth. The quiz, as well as the entire site, is definitely U.S.-centric, 'cause that's what I know best. But there certainly shouldn't be questions whose answers are wrong if you look at them from a Canadian perspective. I've reworded the Visa question accordingly; do you recall which others need clarification?
Someof the answers are only correct in the U.S! For example, the Visa question,where Bank of America never operated in Canada, Visa was originally called Chargex!
Great fun.I likehow some answers have a link to follow up and have learned to keep a notepad handy to remind me to look up others after i'm done here.A great way for us ole folks to keep the synapeses flowing and stay sharp'
Not bad at all, Shado. That's better than many actual Boomers do. To what do you attribute your mastery of the Boomer era? (My daughter was born in '94, but she knows many of the answers 'cause I subjected her to lots of TV reruns and olden-molden-golden-oldies when she was growing up. How many 18-year-olds do you think there are today who grew up with Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Monty Python, and songs by Elvis, Tom Paxton, and Tom Lehrer?)
For being born in '73 and missing the baby boomer title, I'd say a cumulative score of 189.9 correct out of 340 (56%) isn't all that shabby! This is my first time visiting....can you tell I'm already hooked? lol
This brings back memories some of these questions, quotations, cartoons. Just seems like yesterday all of these were on TV. I am truly enjoying this game.
Duff, I do remember receiving that "close enough" response when I erroneously spelled "kemosabe" as "kimosabi" and receiving full credit, but on another question I accidentally misspelled "superman" as "suuperman" by hitting the "u" key twice in error, and not getting full credit. This is the type of situation I'm talking about. Thanks for your prompt reply.
Thanks muchly for the kudos, Thegimpman. I do check for likely misspellings, and also use a "sounds like" algorithm where applicable. Matches in those circumstances result in the message, "Close enough, we were looking for ..." If you saw that, then you did get full credit.
This is a great game and is so much fun to play, but I think you should still get full credit for a misspelled word as long as the answer is actually correct and is only off by one letter, because it's so easy to accidentally hit the wrong key. Regardless, it's still a very enjoyable and entertaining game! Thanks for creating it! :-)
Posted by Duff at 12:19 am (PST) on Wed December 12, 2012
Hi, Michael. I'm open to suggestions if you've got some in mind. (Please send via the Contact Us form to keep them private.)
On the "then lived" field in the user profiles... This web site is focused on the '50s and '60s, and when I set it up, I figured it'd be interesting to know where the users lived during that time, and where they live now. I thought it'd be fun to see which regions do better on the trivia quiz, etc. I ask for birth year and gender for the same reasons. As it turns out, many users choose not to divulge this information, and the then/now lived info is less than useless, 'cause people enter the text in all sorts of different ways. There've even been people who typed in their street addresses, but no town. Real useful.
Hi, Spirit. The quiz now has over 950 questions and is still growing. The questions are presented 20 at a time, but you can choose to keep going if you like. The leader board shows the 10 users who've answered the most questions correctly, and at the moment, "hansumjim" is #10 on the list, having answered 709.3 questions correctly. So you'd need to beat that to appear on the list. Go for it!
Posted by Duff at 8:49 pm (PDT) on Mon September 24, 2012
Hi, Raejean. The site is the Baby Boomer eMuseum, and baby boomers are generally defined as people who were born between 1946 and 1964. Thus, the site is focused mostly on the '50s AND '60s, and (considering that those born in 1964 were only 6 years old in 1970) also creeps into the '70s and even the '80s.
Hi Duff! Just discovered your site by looking up Dugan's Bakery. Love your BBEM! I was born in 1947. Just finished my first 20 questions and only answered 67% correctly, but had a great time doing it!
Glad I found this site. It brought back some fond memories. Old commericals, Old shows and cartoons. I have one for you. What was Crusader Rabbits side-kick called. hint; (he was a tiger)? As Bob Hope use to say..."Thanks for the Memories".
Hi! I think you should do one for the 70's as well. This was really fun, The new questions were challenging. hey i had to guess on the sound ones because my computer doesn't have speakers. ha.
This has been a lot of fun so far, in spite of being born in 1965. Definitely shows I watched a lot of TV as a kid. Thanks Duff, looking forward to continuing with the quizes.
Hi, chill. At present, there are 839 questions in the quiz, and 9 of them rely on media (just audio at this time).
On the quiz's start page, there's an audio test button and a checkbox so you can omit media-dependent questions if the test doesn't work for you. The audio feature relies on HTML5 features that are implemented in only the latest versions of the various web browsers. I've tested it successfully in
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
- Google Chrome 18
- Mozilla Firefox 11
- Apple Safari 5
- Opera 11
If your browser is one of these, but you're using an older version, try updating to the latest version. (It's not typically an operating system issue.)
Posted by pano at 7:17 am (PST) on Mon February 27, 2012
c'est bien
Posted by Duff at 3:44 am (PST) on Mon February 13, 2012
Thanks, mousey. I'll keep adding 'em as I think of 'em. If you think of any ripe topics, please let me know... And kindly help spread the word, okay?
My husband and I really enjoy these trivia questions. Makes us really think of the past. Keep the questions coming, even though we don't get all of them right we have fun doing them! My husband has a better memory of the past than me and he gets more right than me, even though I watched more TV than him.
I want to sit back and watch all the television shows of the 1950's, please bring them all back! lololol hahahaha weeeeee you will know me....I will laugh to death now....hahahah!
I did fair, 68% overall. Most of what I missed were the questions looking for "what is NOT on this list of..." and of course the really hard ones. But great fun, and it's true, you should usually go with your first instinct. I missed a number of them by over-thinking them.
Grand fun! I appreciate your efforts. I have done this on my own, with the exception of the few times I've gotten my wife to join in. Now I'm hovering around 8th or 9th on the leader board! I can remember things from 40 years ago, but not what's on my 'honeydo' list for today. I just enjoy the heck out of trivia. Keep up the good work.
That's actually a hard one to answer, Dennis. The site has about 1130 registered users, but you don't have to be registered in order to play. The quiz now has just over 600 questions and is still growing, I do keep statistics on the number of times each question has been asked and how many of the responses to it have been correct. Totalling those up, I find that 448,699 have been asked so far, and 290,641 (64.8%) of the answers have been correct. Also, about 12,000 game sessions have taken place -- some long, some short, and some by returning users. So the number of unique players is probably around 11,000, and the average game length is about 40 questions. The trivia quiz start page now has a table with the latest overall quiz statistics.
I am sorry but I cheated on most of the questions. I went to my other computer and looked them up, then I clicked on the right answer. I know I am bad. LOL But it was fun.
And I thought I was pretty good at Trivia. I only scored 42% on the hard ones.
Posted by Duff at 2:04 pm (PST) on Fri December 10, 2010
Admittedly, the trivia quiz is very U.S.-centric, as is the entire BBeM site; that's the area I know best. If you can suggest other topics of interest, I'll see what I can do. I recognize that the quiz can't be too difficult -- if it's not fun, players won't come back -- so I monitor the overall statistics carefully. Here's a breakdown of the current difficulty level, based on actual player interactions:
As for the rest of the quizzes, I'm not sure what you mean. You've encountered 50+ questions here so far, and we have about 500 at the moment.
I think even people who were born in 1947, like me, would have a hard time answering some of the qs. Of course I moved from the Netherlands in 1956 so I missed a lot of action in the US. We never had a TV at home--part of my Dad's religious convictions--, nor did we have any magazines or newspapers (only some Dutch stuff we got in the mail). Listening to rock was listening to devil's music or jungle music. But when my Dad brought us to the berry farm to pick berries on his way to work, he had the local pop station on and seemed to know all the lyrics.
If you are born after 1970, you may need a course in archeology first.
Reminds me of instructions when taking the U.S. Air Force "entrance" exam in 1968. They said
to go with your first reaction. I didn't do that until the latter 20 questions. It worked...still! You know
more that you know that you know...y'know?
Its a great quiz. I enjoyed it and passed it on. Here is one I love. What Oscar winner made his first film appearance as the reclusive Boo Radley in the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird"?-Answer-Robert Duvall
Wow, I think I did okay, after all I was born in 1959. I miss those commercials, brings back happy and simple times. I have to admit, I even miss the cigarette commercials, Marlboro man? You bet...
Robin, from Tx
Posted by TJ at 10:08 pm (PST) on Thu January 7, 2010
This is the best trivia game I've played on Facebook. However, the Memorex question was not 100% right. The actual slogan was, "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
I'm so glad you enjoyed the quiz, wcgripko! It's been a lot of fun putting it together; both the programming aspect (not trivial) and dreaming up a mix of plausible and funny choices for the multiple-choice questions.
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There are 157 general comments for the quiz.
To me it's more of a "Senility Test" than a "Trivia Quiz". If I can average 75% or more it means that my soon-to-be 73 yr old mind is still working. ROFL
Alan Mandell
Mousey
Mousey
Seriously, the whole BB designation is nebulous. It describes people coming home from the war and creating babies. That started earlier than 46, as folks were being rotated out, or coming home for medical issues. They may have been injured, but in most cases they would marry and raise families. I guess 1946, being the first official post-war year, is a good place to start.
But what is someone born in 1945 called?
Thanks for the fun
- A question's difficulty can't be determined ahead of time, but is based on actual player interaction. It can swing wildly for the first 50+ players. Therefore, a default mid-range difficulty would need to be used for each newly-added question.
- Two players could thus get different scores for answering the same question correctly, depending on the question's current difficulty.
- The site's user database keeps track of whether a player answered a question correctly (or partially correctly), but not of the question's difficulty at that time. A player's score can currently be computed from his/her trivia right/wrong log, but this technique would result in fluctuating scores if each question's current difficulty had to be factored in.
- The top slots on the leader board are held by players who have answered nearly all of the questions in the quiz correctly, so the work needed to make this change would seem to have very little benefit.
What am I missing?
Really enjoy playing! Keep up the great work.
will be here a lot !
Given C = number of questions answered correctly
and P = number of questions played
Score = C2 / P
For example: Currently, a player who got 800 correct out of 800, and one who got 800 correct out of 1000 would be tied with scores of 800. With the new formula, the former would score 800, but the latter's score would be 640. That seems reasonable, no?
Have fun, and please let me know if you encounter any problems!
But what if I offered the "Clear History" option ONLY when a player has exhausted the supply of questions? That, it seems to me, would remove the last conceptual obstacle. I'll work on this over the next couple of weeks.
One thing, though... Currently, I retain players' high scores, and their Leader Board positions, when they clear their history, so they can strive to surpass their previous high score without losing their position on the Board. I'd like to remove that feature, so that clearing one's history also removes the Leader Board entry. This would make clearing one's history more of a gamble or challenge. What do you all think?
The percentage idea has some merit, but which statistic would take precedence? A user who scored 95% when there were 500 questions in the quiz, or one who scored 85% more recently, when there were 1000?
Maybe the leader board should indicate how many times each player has cleared his/her quiz history and replayed the whole thing; some have done so more than 20 times! That's commitment -- or madness; take your pick.
Frank.
Thanx,
Garth.
I am truly enjoying this game.
If you know of friends or family members who'd enjoy the museum or the quiz, please spread the word.
On the quiz's start page, there's an audio test button and a checkbox so you can omit media-dependent questions if the test doesn't work for you. The audio feature relies on HTML5 features that are implemented in only the latest versions of the various web browsers. I've tested it successfully in
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 9
- Google Chrome 18
- Mozilla Firefox 11
- Apple Safari 5
- Opera 11
If your browser is one of these, but you're using an older version, try updating to the latest version. (It's not typically an operating system issue.)
You did a great job creating this.
Please sir. I want more!
As for the rest of the quizzes, I'm not sure what you mean. You've encountered 50+ questions here so far, and we have about 500 at the moment.
If you are born after 1970, you may need a course in archeology first.
to go with your first reaction. I didn't do that until the latter 20 questions. It worked...still! You know
more that you know that you know...y'know?
And I TO WAS BORN IN 1961 !!!!!!!
Vern
Robin, from Tx
Now please tell your friends. Thanks!
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