Quizity is 2 years old !

Published on March 1st, 2012
Happy birthday to Quizity and all Quizityians ! Our website is 2 years old today !

This year will have seen our take-off, we now have more than 2000 quizes and almost 5000 registered members ! More than 300 000 games have been played over the last 12 months !!

We enter our third year with a clear objective : to become the first French-speaking quiz website by the end of the year. And that will only be the first step ! As you know, we work hard everyday to improve the website and many projects are on tracks :) See you in a few days for the announcement of our next evolution, which should make life easier to all our regular attendees :)


0 comment - Leave a comment

The moderator's tool

Published on February 28th, 2012
Last week, we had the visit of a few spammers ! The kind of people who want to become your friend and then ask you to send money in cash to Africa. As a consequence, the sending of new comment alerts by e-mail has been disturbed.

These spammers have been promptly caught in our anti-spam system, but still they were annoying. And since we now have hundreds of visitors everyday on Quizity, the probability that such events reoccur is rising. But fortunately it is still rare because Quizity truly has a great, nice and welcoming community !!

Anyway, for the sake of safety, we decided to adopt a new moderation system to react even more quickly and efficiently to spam or abuse. It also means that one day if we need it, we may offer some of you the possibility to become a moderator on Quizity ! Since our new interface does not require technical skills, anyone can use it. Finally, let's just remind that this is not censorship at all, we just try to garantee true Quizity members' peace of mind :)


0 comment - Leave a comment

New : anti-spoilers !

Published on January 27th, 2012
You probably happen to play quizes on TV series ? You play, then you watch comments and read : "This series is awesome, especially when Bob dates Janes in the last season" ! And that's it. You've been utterly spoiled. You have compulsive murder urges and consider throwing yourself out of the window.

To preserve your mental integrity, we have just implemented an anti-spoiler feature on Quizity ! By definition, you can use it to avoid a spoiler on the quiz subject, but also to be quieter when you have a comment that gives a question away.

And for those who will open the spoilers before they play, to get a better score : this is wroooooong ! We'll tell Santas Claus you cheated and there will be no more gifts for you ! ;)


0 comment - Leave a comment

Arrival of the API and Pubsub

Published on January 17th, 2012
During the past month, we have been working on an invisible but important features for Quizity, called an API and a Pubsub system. They will be rolled out progressively in the coming months.

In the facts, they will be used to allow deeper interaction between Quizity and other websites. To begin with, mostly webmasters and our profesional clients will benefit from the system. However, we'll use it later to offer you new functionalities like a powerful alert and notification system, for example to warn you everytime your favorite authors create a new quiz !

We also improved Quizity on two other points. The first is when you log in on the website from two different computers. It used to disturb the points system and display erroneous counts, and you had to disconnect and log in again for everything to be back at normal. But now Quizity will detect the change and automatically synchronize your data between computers !

The other point was raised by Waoouh and is about the grayscaling system for quizes you already played. Above a thousand played games or so, the browser couldn't deal with your history anymore ! Now it works, provided you use a modern browser such as Chrome or Firefox (or IE8 at least). Thanks Waoouh ! And if you detect anything else that looks suspicious, tell us and we'll fix it ASAP :)


0 comment - Leave a comment

Happy new year 2012 !

Published on January 14th, 2012
Happy new year everyone !

The Quizity team wishes all the best for you in 2012 ! Especially you Boise, although this is not the right place to answer your message either ;) We'd like to thank you for your loyalty and we hope you will be successful in this new year.

In 2012, we'll keep on bringing new features to the website and try to develop a strong commercial offer built on top of our services. Our goal is to have more resources to go faster in Quizity's development, as well as to keep a site pretty much free from advertising, like now !

And as we were telling Harryheat in private, we made a resolution for the new year : almost everyday we'll update the homepage gallery with one or more new quizes ! It's not always easy to make time for this, but it's important that we stress Quizity's community's dynamism :)

And what about you, what would you like see happen on Quizity in 2012 ? Tell us in comments below !
Talk to you soon !


0 comment - Leave a comment

Your quizes are safe

Published on December 11th, 2011
To make a good quiz takes time, and nobody wants to see his hard work lost. In order to minimize this risk, we just set up a new automatic and daily backup of Quizity's database.

Every night, your new quizes are saved in two distincts spots accross the globe. Even in case of a nuclear war nearby our servers, they'll be safe ! Unfortunately if it did happen, there probably wouldn't be many players left nor any admins to manage the site. But your quizes would live forever, that's better than nothing !

We also improved the way we handle your pictures when you create a quiz. You will not see the "uploading" logo spinning endlessly ! Apart from that, we are currently working to allow Quizity to handle even more traffic at rush hour. The objective is to reach a level of reliability that will meet even our most demanding clients' expectations. We'll give you figures when it's done :)


0 comment - Leave a comment

Working at Quizity is serious business

Published on November 23rd, 2011
You may have wondered how a website like Quizity is built ? Of course you need a little imagination and technical skills, but not only. You also need a good methodology ! And that's what we're going to talk about today.

To get organized, we use so-called "agile" methodologies. One of the tools they give us is a big board to stick post-its on it. Every post-it is a task we have to perform for the website. As you can see on the picture, we're not running out of work with all these post-its ! And yet, there's hardly half of what we've planned for the coming months on this board.



So the board is both a kind of agenda and a backlog for all future evolutions. Horizontally, we sort the post-its by categories : tasks to perform on the server, bugs to fix, new functionnalities, communication and so on... Then we sort the post-its in columns by priority : what's currently being developped, next week's assignements, and the rest for later.

As you can see, you have no reasons to worry for the future, we have a lot of surprises coming next ! This week we improved a dozen points after the release of the new design. For example, as we promised two months ago, automatic links will now work in comments you leave on the site ! And comments will paginate very smoothly too, you can see for yourself at the bottom of Maddax's quiz for example.

We'll keep you updated on the next evolutions :)


0 comment - Leave a comment

A new design for Quizity !

Published on November 10th, 2011
Hello all,

after three months of hard work, we are pleased to unveil the new version of Quizity !

First of all, it's a new design and we hope you'll like it ! We wanted Quizity to become as beautiful as it's rich in functionalities - and good quizes ! The previous design was made a few years ago already, this time we wanted to add more space and clarity to emphasize your creations.

But we have also thought some pages through, like the home and quizes pages. New quizes are introduced in a nicer way, browsing the website is easier and we hope the pleasure of the game will be even higher. Profile pages have also been simplified and you'll find the full list of one's creations.

That's not it : the new website also uses the latest web technologies - CSS3 and HTML5. It means Quizity is not only better looking, it's also way faster : for example the homepage loads three times faster in average ! However, to benefit from these design and technologic improvements, of course you'll need to use a modern browser like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. Users of Internet Explorer, whatever the version, may encounter minor display issues. Anyway, write to us if you find any bugs !

Voilà, leave us comments below to tell us what you think, we're eager to know ! And have fun on Quizity.


0 comment - Leave a comment

Automatic links in explanations

Published on September 22nd, 2011
Hello everybody,

we're now in late September and the new stuff is still not here, sorry ! As you'll see pretty soon, it's quite something we're doing and it requires work accross the whole site. Be patient...

To help you keep waiting, we still have a small new functionality to announce. From now on, the URLs in quiz explanations and text blocks will be directly converted into links ! For example, "http://www.youtube.com" will be converted to "http://www.youtube.com". Reminder : a URL must begin with "http://".

To use this, there is nothing special to do, URLs are detected and converted automatically provided that they start with "http://".

However, if your URL has a space in it, you'll have to add a little markup like this : [url]http://www.example.com/my file.pdf[/url].

And finally, if you'd rather add a link on some text, like "here is a nice Youtube video", just write "here is a [url=http://www.youtube.com]nice Youtube video[/url]".

This system will soon be implemented for comments too :)


0 comment - Leave a comment

On the path to success

Published on August 16th, 2011
It has already been 3 months since we wrote our last article on this blog. Not that we have abandonned Quizity, not at all !

As promised, we put all our efforts communicating about the platform, so we could be always more numerous having fun together. Promise kept ! The traffic has been multiplied 10 times in the last couple months :) We've had up to 4500 simultaneous players, accounting for tens of thousands of played quizes. To support our growth, we are now getting the Quizity servers ready for... hundreds of thousands of daily players !

New quizes appear everyday and they are just great (almost) everytime :D Keep up the good work ! To thank you for your loyalty and efforts, you should know we have plenty coming. Our next evolution is well on its way, you should appreciate... See you in September to discover it and tell us what you think about it ! Till then, enjoy the last days of summer :)


0 comment - Leave a comment