Useless Returner Thought on Trivia

[Rin 138]

I need a .com article topic this week, so I figured I would "react" to trivia moving to a portal-based task these days. Does my opinion matter? Is it even interesting? Not in the slightest! But I'm going to look back on old trivia anyway.

 

Unsurprisingly, I think the move to the portal is the best thing that ever happened to trivia. "Back in the day," we used to have to send our answers to a designated trivia head, who would check the answers and award TPE in a week-ending thread that tagged everyone who was eligible for the TPE. Not only was this a grueling, time-consuming manual process, it also kept the door wide open for people to just cheat and share answers. See, everyone would end up receiving the same questions every week, meaning a lot of people would just rely on a buddy or a LR relaying the answers in order to get their free 2 capped TPE. While a good number of members knew where they should look to find answers to trivia questions, mostly everybody ended up being lazy and just submitted whatever answers were posted in a LR chat.

 

With things moving to the portal, though, you get a number of obvious benefits:

• Every user can get a unique set of questions, as the portal can just pull from a large bank of them and randomly assign two per week
• Nobody has to constantly check the answers received; the portal will do that automatically
• No claimable thread needs to be posted in order for users to get their TPE, and updaters don't have to clear the queue in order to award TPE. The portal can assign capped TPE automatically if questions were answered correctly.

 

So with the move to the portal, a LOT of overhead is simplified down into an automated workflow, making it so much more practical to both engage with and be rewarded by weekly trivia. Fantastic change, I always love to see something so overly complex brought down to a much simpler, cleaner method.