[BETA] Quizzer

Goddchen · May 16, 2011

Hey everyone,
a user from the android-hilfe.de forum mentioned the idea of an app that i found very interesting. I then started implementing stuff and here i want to present you the first usable beta version of the app.
It is a community quiz. You can post quiz questions, other users answer them and place their bid on their answer. At the end you close the question with the correct answer and everyone is rewarded according to their bids.

Please help beta testing that app. Please note that in this very first beta, no work has been done for layout and design. See it as a functional prototype. Although i would be very thankful for design/layout ideas, maybe some even wants to help me?

I'm really looking forward to your feedback

Here is the link to a simple beta page that i hacked together: http://quizzer-android.appspot.com

And of course the corresponding QR code:

Greets, Goddchen

PS: Added some screenshots

Goddchen · May 17, 2011

added some screenshots...

omzworld · May 19, 2011

FC on clicking questions.

Galaxy S, Darky's 9.5 Froyo

mikael120 · May 19, 2011

Goddchen said:
I'm really looking forward to your feedback

good concept for an app, will probably be pretty fun when its finished, but right now the app is extremely unstable, sometimes it just exits right after I opened it, it always force closes when it tries to load the "by date" list in the "list of questions" section. The "by potsize" list usually works though that sometimes crashes too, in addition to all that the app seems to sometimes crash at completely random times.

In running the app on the LG Optimus 2x Phone, running CM7 Nightly build 21.

ps: on the registration part of the app, you only ask for the password once, its pretty common to ask for the password twice to avoid people mistyping the password, this does't really bother me that much but when you are typing on the android virtual keyboard it pretty easy to mistype something and not notice it, before you try to login to your app account.

ps2: If you don't mind me asking, I'm a bit curious about how you store account information, do you store the email & password in plain text? or do you hash & salt them? I'm just curious because I don't like to use services that doesn't protect their user data properly.

Goddchen · May 19, 2011

There was a FC-bug when displaying a question without any tag. Please reinstall with the new version (same url).

Psichi · May 19, 2011

I think once there are a wider range of questions it will be better (I know thatis on us, the users) .

I am also interested in knowing how my information is being stored.

Sent from my PC36100 using XDA App

todayist · May 19, 2011

It takes time for me to make up all the false answers to make funnier quizzes.

It allowed 0 QZR for a bid.

Admob area's size need to be fixed.

Anyway, I will love it when it's all finished.

mikael120 · May 19, 2011

Goddchen said:
I'm really looking forward to your feedback

gmail seems to categorize your emails as spam, just thought you would like to know.

oh and btw, not to be rude or anything but it would be nice if you could actually give us some kinda response to the feedback we have given you instead of just completely ignoring it.

Goddchen · May 19, 2011

Hey everybody,
it has been two busy days for me, unfortunately not two busy Android days... I really thank you for you feedback so far and i am excitingly reading through the notification mails as they arrive. I just didn't have the time to answer or even code on the project.
@mikael, is this really the level you want continue this conversation? I do also have a reallife besides Android, sorry. Did you ever try to get one of your cars throught german TÜV?

Then you know what is was doing the past two days...

I'll get back to you guys tomorrow and answer all the questions

Goddchen

mikael120 · May 19, 2011

Goddchen said:
@mikael, is this really the level you want continue this conversation? I do also have a reallife besides Android, sorry. Did you ever try to get one of your cars throught german TÜV? Then you know what is was doing the past two days...

Goddchen

sorry, as I said it was not meant as an insult, I do understand that you probably have other non android related stuff to do, It just that when you posted a post after I posted my feedback without responding at all, it seemed like you were intentionally ignoring my feedback, but if thats not he case then sorry I misunderstood you, I'm usually a pretty nice guy so please don't get the wrong idea, I have nothing against you or anything like that.

Goddchen · May 20, 2011

Ok guys, here we go

Sorry that i weren't able to respond in the past two days, you already know why

It was hard to find the time to fix that annoying FC bug when opening the questions list but i thought that was more important at that time then responding here since it renders the app useless.

Ok let's start

FC on clicking questions.

Should be fixed in the current version

good concept for an app, will probably be pretty fun when its finished, but right now the app is extremely unstable, sometimes it just exits right after I opened it, it always force closes when it tries to load the "by date" list in the "list of questions" section. The "by potsize" list usually works though that sometimes crashes too, in addition to all that the app seems to sometimes crash at completely random times.

There was an additional bug in the update code for the header of the main screen. Hopefully that is fixed now too and you won't experience those random FCs.

ps: on the registration part of the app, you only ask for the password once, its pretty common to ask for the password twice to avoid people mistyping the password, this does't really bother me that much but when you are typing on the android virtual keyboard it pretty easy to mistype something and not notice it, before you try to login to your app account.

Good idea, will definitely integrate it

If you don't mind me asking, I'm a bit curious about how you store account information, do you store the email & password in plain text? or do you hash & salt them? I'm just curious because I don't like to use services that doesn't protect their user data properly.

The password is hashed on your phone so that it never get's transmitted over the network in plain text and i can't see your plaintext password either. The email is stored as plaintext so that i can send you a mail if anything important is going on (like yesterdays mail about that critical bugfix). The backend of the app is hosted on GoogleAppEngine by the way. Feel free to suggest any other strategies on storing or transmitting values. The values that are stored for a user are: your activation token, an active flag, answer count, question count, key of your avatar in the gae blogstore, mail, nickname, pass (hash), and your QZRs.

It allowed 0 QZR for a bid.

damn, thanks for the note.

Admob area's size need to be fixed.

What do you mean?

gmail seems to categorize your emails as spam, just thought you would like to know.

damn, will have a look at this. They arrive just fine in my gmail inbox.

And a question from my side:
I have also implement a function for sending mass in-app notifications (appear on your notification screen in the app). Which way to be informed about critical updates do you prefer? mail or in-app notification. In one of the next versions i will add an optional background service that shows incoming notification on the phone's notification bar, too.

Looking forward to read your responses

Goddchen

mikael120 · May 20, 2011

Goddchen said:
Looking forward to read your responses Goddchen

as for the admob thing I'm guessing what todayist meant was that when the ad placeholder was displayed in the the top of your app it was wider than the app itself which allowed you to scroll within the admob object, but this only seems to happens with the placeholder ad, real ads seems to work as they should.

as for the notification thing I don't mind getting them by email, but there are a lot of people that probably do mind that, so if I were you I'd implement some preference thing that allowed a user to choose between email notifications and in app notifications.

I also have a couple of questions/feature requests:

first of all I think it would be nice it the person that has created a question would be able to actually see what people have answered on the question, that would be useful information to see whether or not the question was to hard or too easy.

in addition I'm wondering how you are going to stop people from screwing around with the questions, because as it is right now, you rely on the people creating questions to actually include and choose the right answer, somebody could easily screw people by simply choosing the wrong answer as the right answer, doing that could probably also be used cheat.

I also think that when a question is closed the users that answered on that question should be able to see what the right answer was, maybe you could even add a "report wrong answer" button that, if enough people pressed it would make a mod check whether the answer was actually correct, and if it wan't the people answering on the question should be refunded the game money that they bet on the question.
I know that would probably be a bit complicated but it would decrease the problem of people cheating by choosing the wrong answer as the right answer.

in addition to all that I have a question, its pretty obvious that acquiring QZRs is pretty important in this game (you even plan to allow people to buy QZRs using paypal and in-app purchase) but my question is, what is the point of the QZRs right now they can only be used to place bets, do you plan on adding some kind of store or reward stuff that can only be bught/unlocked by using QZR?

Goddchen · May 25, 2011

as for the admob thing I'm guessing what todayist meant was that when the ad placeholder was displayed in the the top of your app it was wider than the app itself which allowed you to scroll within the admob object, but this only seems to happens with the placeholder ad, real ads seems to work as they should.

strange i have set a max height now so that this shouldn't happen again

as for the notification thing I don't mind getting them by email, but there are a lot of people that probably do mind that, so if I were you I'd implement some preference thing that allowed a user to choose between email notifications and in app notifications.

In latest dev version a setting has been added to the profile to choose between notification/mail/both

I also have a couple of questions/feature requests:

first of all I think it would be nice it the person that has created a question would be able to actually see what people have answered on the question, that would be useful information to see whether or not the question was to hard or too easy.

available in beta2

a pie chart with the answers and their counts

in addition I'm wondering how you are going to stop people from screwing around with the questions, because as it is right now, you rely on the people creating questions to actually include and choose the right answer, somebody could easily screw people by simply choosing the wrong answer as the right answer, doing that could probably also be used cheat.

Good point. But to solve this? Forcing the set the correct answer on question creation? Any other ideas?

I also think that when a question is closed the users that answered on that question should be able to see what the right answer was, maybe you could even add a "report wrong answer" button that, if enough people pressed it would make a mod check whether the answer was actually correct, and if it wan't the people answering on the question should be refunded the game money that they bet on the question.
I know that would probably be a bit complicated but it would decrease the problem of people cheating by choosing the wrong answer as the right answer.

displaying the correct answer on closed questions is available in beta2. I'm working on the report button

in addition to all that I have a question, its pretty obvious that acquiring QZRs is pretty important in this game (you even plan to allow people to buy QZRs using paypal and in-app purchase) but my question is, what is the point of the QZRs right now they can only be used to place bets, do you plan on adding some kind of store or reward stuff that can only be bught/unlocked by using QZR?

Not sure how to do it exactly but in the future i'd like to give users additional benefits for their QZRs besides being on top of the leaderboard. Any ideas how to do it?

I really wanna thank you for your feedback. It has helped me a lot in the development for beta2. And i will make sure that most if not all of it will be available in beta3

Goddchen

mikael120 · May 25, 2011

Goddchen said:
I really wanna thank you for your feedback. It has helped me a lot in the development for beta2. And i will make sure that most if not all of it will be available in beta3

Goddchen

no problem

I do actually have some feedback about beta2 as well, primarily its seems like a good update, but there are still some things that bother me, first of all, after the beta2 update one of my questions seems to have become corrupted somehow.

The question I'm referring to is the "is the official name of android 3.1 icecream sandwich" question that I created under the user name mikael. The question has 2 answers, "True" and "False", but after the beta2 update my question now has 3 answers according to the pi-chart, the new option that suddenly appeared was "" in other word an empty string, currently 1 person has answered True, one has answered False, and 6 has answered "", which confused me since "" is not actually something you can select when you answer the question.

But I figured that out when I tried to close the answer, if I try to close the answer while the False otpion is selected the confirmation dialgue asks if I want to select "null" as the correct answer, the same happens if I try to select True as an answer, in other words both the true and the false answer point to the null string, which means that If anyone anwered the question after this bug occured their answer would be registered as null, instead of the option they actually selected, which expalins why 6 people apperantly answered "null". I have no idea what caused that bug, but I'm guessing its a database issue of some kind, so it something you will have to take a look at.

other than that I have another complaint, and I know that this is intentional but I think that allowing questions to stay live infinitely until they are closed is a bad idea, primarily because a lot of the questions seems to have been abandoned completely which means that everybody that answered on those questions basically just threw their game money away.

I think there should some time limit to when you have to close your question, something like 1 week or perhaps one month if you think that one week is too short. I have currently answered 7 questions on your app but only 2 of them has been closed, the other questions seem to have been abandoned by the question creator.

other than that though the app seems pretty good, I really appreciate the hard work you are putting into this app and I hope I don't put too much work on your shoulders with all of my complaints, questions and feature requests.

Goddchen · May 28, 2011

no problem

I do actually have some feedback about beta2 as well, primarily its seems like a good update, but there are still some things that bother me, first of all, after the beta2 update one of my questions seems to have become corrupted somehow.

The question I'm referring to is the "is the official name of android 3.1 icecream sandwich" question that I created under the user name mikael. The question has 2 answers, "True" and "False", but after the beta2 update my question now has 3 answers according to the pi-chart, the new option that suddenly appeared was "" in other word an empty string, currently 1 person has answered True, one has answered False, and 6 has answered "", which confused me since "" is not actually something you can select when you answer the question.

But I figured that out when I tried to close the answer, if I try to close the answer while the False otpion is selected the confirmation dialgue asks if I want to select "null" as the correct answer, the same happens if I try to select True as an answer, in other words both the true and the false answer point to the null string, which means that If anyone anwered the question after this bug occured their answer would be registered as null, instead of the option they actually selected, which expalins why 6 people apperantly answered "null". I have no idea what caused that bug, but I'm guessing its a database issue of some kind, so it something you will have to take a look at.

That bug got introduced in beta2 and fixed in beta2.1 update. I'm really sorry.

other than that I have another complaint, and I know that this is intentional but I think that allowing questions to stay live infinitely until they are closed is a bad idea, primarily because a lot of the questions seems to have been abandoned completely which means that everybody that answered on those questions basically just threw their game money away.

I think there should some time limit to when you have to close your question, something like 1 week or perhaps one month if you think that one week is too short. I have currently answered 7 questions on your app but only 2 of them has been closed, the other questions seem to have been abandoned by the question creator.

Yeah that really is a big problem that is bothering me for days now. beta3 (which will be released today) introduces the 3 other limit types (days, date, answers). Those will be fine and exactly what you are explaining. I am unsure if i should keep the unlimited option in the app. Do you think it would be a good idea to remove it completely?

other than that though the app seems pretty good, I really appreciate the hard work you are putting into this app and I hope I don't put too much work on your shoulders with all of my complaints, questions and feature requests.

You are not putting too much work on my shoulders. I am happy about every feedback that i can get. Keep up giving me work!

Goddchen

Goddchen · May 28, 2011

Yesterday i was thinking about how to make the release to the market. I want the beta testers to have a bonus for their work and help. So this is what i have come up with for a possible release to the android market:

Reset all beta tester accounts
Give all beta tester accounts 50 bonus QZRs
Remove all answers from all questions
Keep the questions so that there are some initial release questions
Make those questions owned by my account so that abandoned questions won't be a problem.

Do you have any suggestions to this?

Goddchen

Goddchen · May 29, 2011

Just uploaded beta3

http://quizzer-android.appspot.com/

mikael120 · May 30, 2011

Goddchen said:
Yesterday i was thinking about how to make the release to the market. I want the beta testers to have a bonus for their work and help. So this is what i have come up with for a possible release to the android market:

Reset all beta tester accounts

Give all beta tester accounts 50 bonus QZRs

Remove all answers from all questions

Keep the questions so that there are some initial release questions

Make those questions owned by my account so that abandoned questions won't be a problem.

Do you have any suggestions to this?

Goddchen

sounds pretty good to me, but if you are expecting a lot of new users and questions after making the app available on the market then wouldn't it be a good idea to get some extra moderators to moderate the questions? Maybe you should pick some of the beta testers to be mods. thats your choice though, other than that I can't think of anything else to do before you put the app on the market.

oh and btw I am still receiving "null" answers on some of my questions which probably means that there are still someone who use the old app, would it be possible to somehow block "null" answers on the server side, so that so that people who still use the old version would not be able to submit answers without updating the app.

Goddchen · May 30, 2011

mikael120 said:
sounds pretty good to me, but if you are expecting a lot of new users and questions after making the app available on the market then wouldn't it be a good idea to get some extra moderators to moderate the questions? Maybe you should pick some of the beta testers to be mods. thats your choice though, other than that I can't think of anything else to do before you put the app on the market.

oh and btw I am still receiving "null" answers on some of my questions which probably means that there are still someone who use the old app, would it be possible to somehow block "null" answers on the server side, so that so that people who still use the old version would not be able to submit answers without updating the app.

Good point, i just pushed the update to the server, "" is now not allowed anymore.

Good point with the moderators. I can use any help

Anyone interested?

Greets, Goddchen

mikael120 · May 30, 2011

Goddchen said:
Good point, i just pushed the update to the server, "" is now not allowed anymore.

Good point with the moderators. I can use any help Anyone interested?

Greets, Goddchen

I wouldn't mind helping you

I have plenty of free time and as you have probably noticed I'm a pretty tech-savy guy, so I think I would be a pretty good moderator.

[BETA] Quizzer

Inactive Recognized Developer

Attachments

Inactive Recognized Developer

Member

Senior Member

Inactive Recognized Developer

Senior Member

Member

Senior Member

Inactive Recognized Developer

Senior Member

Inactive Recognized Developer

Senior Member

Inactive Recognized Developer

Senior Member

Inactive Recognized Developer

Inactive Recognized Developer

Inactive Recognized Developer

Senior Member

Inactive Recognized Developer

Senior Member

Similar threads

Top Liked Posts