Text Answer questions are a great way to engage your audience even more during your interactive event. These questions can make your Trivia Game more challenging by forcing your crowd to think of their own answers. This question type also gives you more diverse results for your Polls.
However, as participants rush to get as many points as possible, they may make mistakes in their written responses. Or worse, they may think it would be funny to put inappropriate responses into their answers. This article will help guide you through what to do when someone submits an answer you don't want.
Not all crowds are the same! Just because we offer profanity and review settings doesn't mean you're required to use them. Most crowds aren't likely to try to input profanity into your experience. However, some crowds are more prone to this (ahem, younger adolescent crowds!) Your mileage may vary depending on your crowd.
You have a few options for working with Text Answer responses. In a Host Controlled Mode Experience, you can make sure all of the answers are in and appropriate for your crowd before you reveal them. This can all be done in the Experience Dashboard before enabling the Show Live Answer Results (A) view. But again, that will only work in Host Controlled Mode.
You can also enable Manually Review Text-Responses so that all answers must be checked before being displayed. This method will work for all playback modes. However, it does require each answer to be manually reviewed and approved. This option may be ideal for smaller crowds.
You can also enable Auto-Review Text-Responses to automatically catch any responses with profanity using our internal profanity algorithm. You can set this to either reject them outright or censor the profanity and display the answer.
For more information on the available Profanity & Review Settings, please check out the following article - Reviewing Text Answers for Profanity Before Displaying
Reviewing in Host Controlled Mode
Putting your Experience in Host Controlled Mode gives you complete control over your Experience. Anything you show or hide from your audience is totally up to you.
On the Experience Dashboard, all incoming text answers will land under the Crowd Answers section on the Active Question tab. Any identical responses will be grouped together under the same answer.
We can clean up some of these answers before we show them to everyone.
Marking Answers as Correct
Incoming answers may sometimes be correct but technically don't match any of the Correct Answer variations set for this question. This is usually due to spelling error and/or a variation on the answer (e.g. someone typing "White House" when the correct answer is "The White House".) You can mark these types of responses as correct by clicking the gray Correct (star) button on the left side.
Clicking the Correct (star) button for the first answer response.
This will change the answer to match the first Correct Answer out of your set of valid correct answers. This can come in handy for misspelled words or other unexpected variations on the correct answer. Be sure to enter many correct variations on the correct answer in order to "catch" as many correct-answer variations as possible (e.g. "White House", "The White House", "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue", "1600 Pennsylvania Ave", etc.)
The first response changed to match the correct answer.
When we marked "White House" and "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" as correct, they changed to "The White House" and joined under the same post.
What about Polls? Polls don't have right or wrong answers, so neither the Correct Answer(s) area nor the Correct (star) button is shown. The rest of these tips still apply, however!
Editing Responses
In a Trivia Game, participants will try to answer quickly to get the most points possible. Sometimes, this means they will misspell words, and/or autocorrect will change what they wrote.
The participant likely meant "The Washington Monument."
It's completely up to you if you want to change these or not, especially since it's the wrong answer. To make changes to a response, click the gray Edit (pencil) button on the right to open the Edit Panel.
Editing the incoming text response's content
You can change their response however you'd like, mark it as correct, or even remove it outright from the panel. Click the green Save (checkmark) button on the right to save any changes you make.
Removing Answers
Click the Edit (pencil) button, then click the red Remove Answer (trash can) button to remove an answer. This will completely remove the response from your experience, so a confirmation message will appear. Double-check that you've chosen the right response, then click Remove.
Remove Answers? confirmation module
How will that affect my players? For scoring purposes, removed answers are treated as if the participant did not answer the question. If you repeat your Experience and choose to keep your crowd's responses, that participant will not be able to answer the question again.
Once everything looks good, you can finally enable the Show Live Answer Results (A) or Show Correct Answer (C) view. After enabling Show Correct Answer (C), any stragglers who haven't submitted an answer yet will be locked out of answering.
Show Live Answer Results (A) and Show Correct Answer (C) are enabled on the Presentation View.
Show Live Answer Results (A) and Show Correct Answer (C) are enabled on the Participant View.
Manually Review Text-Responses
Enabling this setting in the green Settings tab and under the Interface section gives you all the same power as editing in Host Controlled Mode. You can edit responses as they come in and manually mark them as correct or not, but they will never be shown until you approve them.
For more information on how to Manually Review Text Responses, check out the article:
Auto-Review Text-Responses
The third option is to enable Auto-Review Text-Responses. Though not as thorough as going through each post manually, it can save you a lot of time if your only concern is profanity.
For more information on the Auto-Review Text-Responses setting, check out the article: