I hope you’re doing well. First and foremost, I want to express my appreciation for the exceptional platform you’ve built. It has been a tremendous asset in enhancing the quiz experience for both myself and the participants.
As someone who has been running quizzes for over 17 years, I have encountered a recent challenge that I believe could be addressed through a few additional features in the software. I’m reaching out to propose the implementation of an anti-cheating mechanism and enhanced monitoring tools to help maintain the fairness and integrity of our live quizzes.
Proposed Features:
Real-Time Tab/Screen Monitoring:
Implement an indicator or alert system that notifies all teams when a participant navigates away from the quiz tab or app during an active quiz round. This could serve as a deterrent against using external resources for unfair advantages.
Temporary Submission Penalty:
Introduce a 10-second penalty where participants are unable to submit answers immediately upon returning to the quiz tab after navigating away. This delay would discourage participants from Googling answers during the allotted time for each question.
Participant Activity Tracking:
Add a feature within the Question Manager area to provide real-time data on participant behavior. Specifically, a spreadsheet or dashboard that shows how many times each team or individual navigated away from the quiz tab during an active round. This data, excluding breaks between rounds, would be invaluable in identifying patterns of potential cheating.
For instance, I’ve noticed one participant who consistently wins by large margins. He participates alone and often types rapidly, even during multiple-choice questions. This has raised concerns about the fairness of the competition, as these behaviors suggest possible reliance on external sources.
Detailed Post-Quiz Reports:
Generate reports after each quiz that summarize the tab or app activity for all teams, indicating how often and when teams left the quiz interface during active rounds. This would allow quiz hosts to review potential cheating incidents and address them accordingly.
These features would not only enhance the fairness of the competition but also preserve the social aspect of the quiz, allowing teams to engage in discussions and debates without feeling pressured by excessively short timers.
I greatly value the platform and the experience it provides, and I believe these enhancements would further contribute to its success by ensuring a level playing field for all participants.
Thank you for considering this request. I’m looking forward to your thoughts on how we can continue to improve this already fantastic software.
Copy all on your feature requests. My response to all of these is that they are all a bit overkill.
If you just enable Decreasing Points Timer and make your trivia question times short - like 10 - 15 seconds - it highly eliminates the possibility of cheating by leaving the game and Googling. As any time spent doing that will greatly reduce the amount of points earned and/or not allow answering of the question at all due to time running out.
Many players actually have credible reasons for switching tabs/apps/etc. on their devices during the game. Like responding to or sending a text, phone call, etc. I don’t really think getting super-paranoid about their activity is going to help much. Or punishing them for leaving the game by delaying their interaction.
I will also add this: We at Crowdpurr have run many regular games over the years. Many with lots of returning players. The same players alway win. And it’s not because they’re cheating. It’s because they’re really good at trivia. Like savant-level good. You even see this at live trivia nights.
When we were doing our weekly live streaming Trivia Night show that had a $150 prize each week… the same two or three people always won and/or ranked in the top three out of 100+ players. I was convinced one of them was cheating. So I emailed him accusing him of cheating in so many nice words and he responded with the fact that he was a former Jeopardy champion, had all these awards from various trivia competitions, and specifically seeks out online money trivia games because of his trivia talent. He could back up his trivia ability. And he was telling the truth. There are just some players that are super, super good. Without any cheating.
Now, if your question times are really long… then there’s more of a possibility to Google. Or if someone is using a very sophisticated hack/AI/bot type mechanism, then that’s a different story. But in a live setting at your local bar for bragging rights… that’s highly unlikely.
I’ve never heard of any reports of anyone using a hack/bot on Crowdpurr games. We have had several holes we needed to patch up in Crowdpurr that were leaking the correct answers early (or indicators of the correct answer) but those have all been fixed for many years. The correct answer is literally not identified on the phone in any way until you click Show Correct Answer (C). So any cheating would have to come from the ability to query for the answer to the question.
Hi guys…chiming in here.
Even if there was a way to track people jumping off to google stuff…the hack that cheating teams would simply use is that a non-answering member would be doing the googling and how would you track that.
I believe the cream always rises to the top and the good teams/players will consistently win.
If I see someone maniacally typing while our questions are live (we only give 30 seconds for the majority of our questions and 15 on a few…), what I announce is “if anyone typing like crazy while the questions are live we can only assume one thing. …this is a general warning…the next time I’m going to point the person out”. It usually gets a cheer or a chuckle as most people want to play fair.
That usually does the trick! LOL
I wouldn’t be overly concerned with cheaters…as they come and go.