Though I have enjoyed serving as moderator of the trivia game and learned a great deal by doing so, I feel that the time has come for me to step down from that role.
I’ve been finding it harder and harder to find new questions to ask in the trivia game.
Meanwhile, it’s become apparent that many past players have dropped out of the game and no new players are joining. The number of people playing the game has become smaller and smaller, with the six who participated in Game # 46 represents an all-time low. (Though, let me hasten to add, I am grateful to the six of you for hanging with me.)
For these reasons, as I said, I have decided to step down as moderator of the trivia game.
If the game is to continue, we will need two things. We will need a new moderator, and we will need people who are interested in playing.
If, assuming a new moderator can be found, you are interested in playing the game, please enter a post in this thread stating your interest, and we’ll see how many potential players we can accumulate.
Likewise, if you are interested in serving as moderator, please enter a post in this game stating your interest in that position. Note that the new moderator does not have to run the game the same way I did – you can make up your own rules. If you want to have a daily question rather than five questions a week (years ago, that’s the way Mike Kendra ran the game), or if you feel some other system suits you better, you would be free to do so.
For the time being, I still have the moderator’s authority to approve posts to appear in this board. I will look in on this thread as often as I can and approve posts of those indicating an interest in playing and/or moderating, so that everyone can see how high or low the interest level is.
If a new moderator can be found and if that person feels that there are enough potential players to make it worthwhile to resume the game, I will then ask Mike to make the necessary administrative adjustments to give the moderator's authority to the new person and the game can go on from there.
Though I have enjoyed serving as moderator of the trivia game and learned a great deal by doing so, I feel that the time has come for me to step down from that role.
I’ve been finding it harder and harder to find new questions to ask in the trivia game.
Meanwhile, it’s become apparent that many past players have dropped out of the game and no new players are joining. The number of people playing the game has become smaller and smaller, with the six who participated in Game # 46 represents an all-time low. (Though, let me hasten to add, I am grateful to the six of you for hanging with me.)
For these reasons, as I said, I have decided to step down as moderator of the trivia game.
If the game is to continue, we will need two things. We will need a new moderator, and we will need people who are interested in playing.
If, assuming a new moderator can be found, you are interested in playing the game, please enter a post in this thread stating your interest, and we’ll see how many potential players we can accumulate.
Likewise, if you are interested in serving as moderator, please enter a post in this game stating your interest in that position. Note that the new moderator does not have to run the game the same way I did – you can make up your own rules. If you want to have a daily question rather than five questions a week (years ago, that’s the way Mike Kendra ran the game), or if you feel some other system suits you better, you would be free to do so.
For the time being, I still have the moderator’s authority to approve posts to appear in this board. I will look in on this thread as often as I can and approve posts of those indicating an interest in playing and/or moderating, so that everyone can see how high or low the interest level is.
If a new moderator can be found and if that person feels that there are enough potential players to make it worthwhile to resume the game, I will then ask Mike to make the necessary administrative adjustments to give the moderator's authority to the new person and the game can go on from there.
I would like to know what you think it might require, in your experience, to do the moderator/questioner role.
__________________ -
"It was a very peculiar time." - Franklin D. Cossitt
Ancestors in USA Army: 6th IA Inf, 11th IL Cav, 1st AL Cav; 122nd NY Inf; 6th MI Cav; 35th MA Inf; 100th IL Inf; 1st CO Inf/Cav; 22nd IN Inf
I am sad to see you leave the trivia game, you have done a great job!
So yes we are in the market for a new trivia mad, although Mike and I still haven't decided how we want to proceed, but I am sure if someone wants the job and the responsibility we woudl let you run the game as you want to.
But we need to find some trivia game players. all the work is not worth for just 6 players.
So once the trivia game is up and going again, we are going to need to go out and activly get some playing recruits!
I personally wish to thank you for your role as moderator for this board. You have made this semi-old cus' look for info I didn't even knew existed. I always knew though that in the past I've only hit the tip of the iceberg. Now that iceberg is easier to see. Thank you. Rad
Of course, a new moderator would not have to do things the same way I did them, but if you’re looking for a rough idea of the time commitment involved, here’s what I did.
For me, the part of the moderator’s duties that was becoming harder and harder and more and more time-consuming was finding questions to ask.
I tried to find questions each week that would be neither ridiculously easy nor ridiculously difficult. I also tried to avoid having all the questions in any given week focus strictly on the Union side or strictly on the Confederate side. I had several source books, but over the course of time I was using up more and more of the good questions and answers out of those books. It had gotten to the point that I needed to spend at least an hour or two poring through those books to be able to come up with 5-10 good questions that I hadn’t already used in previous games.
Once I had figured out which questions I wanted to ask for a given week of play, I prepared a Word document, with all the questions at the top and all the answers at the bottom, and saved the document with a name indicating the number of the game and the number of the week when I planned to use them.
In the Word document, I would generally preface the questions with the sentence “Here are the questions for week #...” and might add another sentence or two if there was any additional information I wanted to convey to the players. I always added sentences at the end indicating when responses to the week’s questions would be due and wishing the players good luck.
When Saturday night came, the first order of business was to review the players’ responses to the previous week’s questions. I would pull up the Word document with the questions and answers for that week, scroll down to the answers portion, and then compare each player’s answers to what I had on my Word document.
If a player’s answers all agreed with mine, I would mark the post as validated to appear on the board. If any answers disagreed with mine but the player had indicated an Internet source for his or her answer, I would try to check the source and see whether it did, indeed, offer confirmation that the answer was correct. If I couldn’t verify that an answer was correct, I would edit the post by typing the word “INCORRECT” next to such answers before validating the post. (If a player posted multiple answers, I would type in the dreaded “MULTIPLE ANSWER,” but no one’s done that to me for a while.)
After reviewing and validating all the posts, I would hit the “Save” button on the moderator’s panel and everyone’s post would then show up on the board for all to see.
After that, I would have to update the scoreboard. I had a spreadsheet set up to help calculate and keep track of everybody’s score.
After entering the information into the spreadsheet and getting all the scores recalculated, I would go back to the lower half of my Word document (the one with all the answers) and copy that and paste it into a new post, so that everyone could see the official answers. If I had found confirmation that there was another correct answer, besides my official answer, for a particular question, I would edit my answer to indicate that fact. I would insert comments at the beginning, such as who was leading the First and Second Divisions, and I would insert the revised scoreboard at the bottom. Then I would enter the post, and that would take care of that week’s scoring.
After that, it would be time to post the questions for the next week. This was generally fairly easy, since all I had to do was call up the Word document with the questions and answers for the coming week and copy and paste the top portion of that document (the portion with the questions) into the first post of a new thread.
In all, the Saturday evening work of preparing a Word document with the questions for next week, reviewing the answers and updating and posting the scores for the week just ended, and posting the questions for next week generally took at least an hour to hour and a half, depending on how many players had played that week.
During the week, I would take at least a few minutes every day or two to check into the website and see if anyone had entered any appeals based on the previous week’s answers, and to review the responses that had been submitted for the current week (the moderator can view those responses, even if no one else can).
If there were appeals based on the previous week’s questions, then of course I would try to check them out and make a post indicating whether the appeal was accepted or not and revising the scoreboard if the appeal was accepted. If I saw any indications that players were interpreting one or more of the current week’s questions in a way other than I had intended, I would enter a new post to try to clarify what I had been looking for in the question.
Perhaps someone more efficient than I could perform the moderator’s duties in less time than it took me, but I would say that I found the total time commitment per week to be at least two and a half to three hours.
rad2duhbone53 expressed my thoughts very well. I thank you deeply for the years you've made such huge contributions to this game and our education. If everybody would do as much, this site would be HOT with posts.
All i can offer right now is to continue as a player. I have a nephew age 14 who MIGHT be interested. I will see what I can do to recruit him. sockknitter
I just got a new PC and found the site agian so I would like to play the trivia if some one was to pick back up . As for you stepping down i can understand how much time that you had to put fourth and was greatly appreciaced by all . Thanks for all the good times.
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