FunTrivia

FunTrivia is the largest trivia website on the internet, with over 2.4 million registered users in over 100 countries. It boasts a selection of over 110,000 quizzes and over 1 million questions.

FunTrivia

Type of site	Trivia, quizzes
Available in	English
Founder(s)	Terry Ford
Slogan(s)	World's Largest Trivia and Quiz Site!
Website	http://www.funtrivia.com
Alexa rank	8,726 (June 2015)
Launched	September 1995
Current status	Active

Description

FunTrivia was the first trivia website added to the Yahoo directory and has been the largest trivia site on the web for over a decade, both in terms of traffic^[1] and content.^[2] FunTrivia is notable in that it was one of the first entertainment sites on the web in 1995 to use a community-generated content model to create all of its content, well before "Web 2.0" became hype.

It contains over 1,000,000 trivia questions in 90,000 quizzes, all submitted by over 4,000 different contributors. Quizzes are created and submitted by members of the community and placed online for anyone to play free.

FunTrivia also pioneered the "Ask a Question" model in early 2000,^[3] where visitors could ask a trivia question and receive answers from other guests, well before Yahoo answers or WikiAnswers existed.

FunTrivia's editing system is similar to Wikipedia's more recent model but has tighter editorial controls. New submissions are completely checked by their category editors before being published and prior accepted submissions may be modified without editor intervention. All editors on FunTrivia are volunteer community members who dedicate their time to ensuring that content is of high quality, as with Wikipedia. As of 2009, there were 40 volunteer editors maintaining the site's content.

User Features

Free (non-subscribing) members of FunTrivia may play most games on the site, such as the Easy game and the Daily game, and are able to play all user-created quizzes. However, scores are only saved for the first 100 quizzes. A free member is able to participate in the majority of hourly and daily trivia games. All players may create quizzes. Members may also join or create a team whose members all share a common similarity. For example, the New Hampshire State Folks team could include individuals who live in New Hampshire and/or like New Hampshire.

A subscription (Gold Membership) option is available for frequent players. A Gold Membership costs $20 for a 6-month and $38 for a 12-month subscription. A FunTrivia player that has paid to become a Gold Member has access to more activities than a free member. A gold star will appear by a Gold Member's account name whenever he/she posts on a chat board, makes a quiz, etc. A Gold Member can play as many quizzes as he/she desires and have the quizzes recorded and receive points. The Gold Member can also pick out a picture to have displayed on the chat boards when they post. There are numerous other features that Gold Members get that free members don't, such as quiz analysis options, no ads, and faster searching.^[4]

While exploring FunTrivia users can be on the look out for ways to get certain badges, badgelets, and maybe even find the coveted FunTrivia Treasure.

History

FunTrivia began at the University of Waterloo as the "Archive for Useless Facts and Trivia" in 1995, a simple website that allowed visitors to submit fun facts and information into a database. The owner, Terry Ford, contacted Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang and the website was added under a new "trivia" category in the Yahoo directory.^[5]

With the registering of its domain in 1999, the website became FunTrivia.com, and quickly launched into other areas of quizzing, now allowing online visitors from around the world to create their own topical quizzes.

Predecessor to Yahoo Answers & WikiAnswers

In 1999, FunTrivia introduced a free Question and Answer service "Fun Trivia Questions & Answers", which allows users to ask questions and get answers from community members in a searchable index.

Unlike the latter services, however, FunTrivia's questions must be trivia or factual, and the board does not allow questions of opinion or philosophy.

References