8 Things You Probably Didn't Know about JetPunk

JetPunk is a quiz website that we are all familiar with. But like everything else, what you normally see is probably just a tip of the iceberg, or even less than that! Here's 8 things you probably didn't know about this website, from the big picture all the way down to minor details. Without further ado, let's get straight into #1!

JetPunk hasn't always been a quiz website like it is now. Back when it was started (on March 20, 2008), it offered travel-related features like searching for flights or hotels. This is still reflected in the site's name: "JetPunk" includes the word "jet", which can refer to an airplane (cf. "jet lag"). By September 2008, six months after the site's creation, it began to feature quizzes for unknown reasons, probably to provide entertainment for its visitors. As time went on, quizzes became the main feature of JetPunk, and it has been this way ever since.

Believe it or not, JetPunk used to be run by only a single person until about 2019. That person is, of course, the JetPunk quizmaster (real name Dan Hostetler). Another person named Stewart later started working on the site and has improved it quite a bit. Nevertheless, from what I know, JetPunk was already a great website as it was before Stewart joined. (I didn't join JetPunk until the end of 2020, but I have seen snapshots of the site going back to the early 2010s.)

Think about it: all the work was done by just one person. Making quizzes, making the website's logic, allowing users to make quizzes, moderating UGC, and the list goes on. Impressive, right?

JetPunk has quizzes on almost every topic imaginable. This can be both a good and a bad thing, but we're here to talk about the bad. There are some quizzes on JetPunk that people might find "scary", or otherwise provoke negative emotional responses. These range from objectively depressing or unsettling quizzes that everyone would rather not see (such as environment-related quizzes), to more subjective ones that only disturb some people (like those related to world news, space, or natural sciences). The key takeaway is that you need to be careful navigating the website if you'd say something along the lines of "Ugh, I'd rather not see it" for certain types of quizzes.

And before you start yelling at me, "you forgot blogs and charts!", yes, this applies to blogs and charts too. Also Interesting Facts and Interesting Quotes.

In case you haven't been paying attention, every Sunday, a quiz from the "General Knowledge" series is put onto the front page, in the order they were first created (#1 first, then #2, then #3, etc). When the last quiz of the series is reached, it will go back to #1 again the following week. As of writing this blog, there are 233 total "general knowledge" quizzes in that series. This means they are on a 233-week feature cycle, which is around four and a half years.

In recent years, JetPunk has attempted a few different projects that lasted (or were intended to last) one full year. These include the Daily Word Search, which ran from February 2022 to January 2023, and a series called "every day's a holiday" for all of 2022 which proved to people that every day is some sort of holiday (quite interesting if you think about it). For those of you who joined in 2023 or later, those were excellent additions to this website. I'm hoping for a re-run at some point in the future but it probably won't happen.

As for failed attempts, the most prominent one is perhaps the "Word of the Day" feature, which was intended to show a different vocabulary word on quizzes every day for all of 2024. Unfortunately, for some reason, it didn't work out for QM and was scrapped after just a few days if I recall correctly. This is bad news, but I respect his decision.

In addition to year-long projects, some other shorter-duration projects are also worth highlighting. These include, but are not limited to: the "196 countries, 196 quizzes" series that ran in the second half of 2020, the "50 states" quiz series in early 2021, and also the "Multiple Choice City Quizzes" project earlier this year.

JetPunk has a "dark mode" which most people are probably taking for granted. But did you know that, as the maker puts it, it was added "for selfish reasons"? According to the change log entry for September 19, 2021, dark mode was added to the site after either QM or Stewart (I'm not sure which person) experienced Posterior Vitreous Detachment (PVD) in their eyes. I have no idea what that is, but it made them really uncomfortable looking at a white screen. It was exactly for this reason - to make themselves feel better - that they added dark mode. If not for this, we would probably need to wait at least a few years more before dark mode would even get a chance of being added to the site!

Have you ever noticed when the front page updates every day? If you haven't, I'll tell you: new quizzes appear at midnight Eastern Time every day. This is because, internally, JetPunk's servers are set to the Eastern Time Zone, which is either GMT-5 or GMT-4 depending on whether DST is active.

Speaking of, the very fact that server time is affected by DST could lead to problems or unusual site behavior for some people, especially those residing outside the US. For example, according to China Standard Time (which is GMT+8 year-round), the front page updates at different times - sometimes 12 noon, sometimes 1 PM. This means that you need to know whether daylight saving in the US is in effect in order to predict when the front page will reset.

This gets even more complex for people with a different DST schedule, such as those living in Europe. Taking the UK as an example here, the front page usually resets at 5 AM local time every day, but it's 4 AM when DST is active in the US but not Europe. This happens twice a year, once between the second and the last Sunday in March, once during the one week Europe has "fallen back" but the US hasn't.

The "Streak" feature also seems to be affected by this. On some days it says the streak can be extended again after 11 PM today, sometimes it says 1 AM tomorrow, although most of the time it will just say midnight. But this issue appears to fix itself the next day every time it manifests.

Not that this is a big deal, but it could lead some users to wonder "why" or feel "weird" about the behavior of the website.

That was quite a mouthful. What am I talking about? Well, it has to do with the "tagline", which is the line of text that appears below a quiz's title on the front page, and occasionally it's different from the instructions of the quiz itself. Apparently, the Quizmaster himself, and only himself, gets to decide whether to write something different for the tagline, and also what to write in it. Usually, if he does decide to write a different tagline, the tagline will be more concise or witty than the instructions, functioning better as a "hook" to draw people to quizzes.

That brings us to the end of the blog. I originally wanted to include 10 things but just couldn't think of any more than these 8. Anyway, if you know anything else about JetPunk that's little-known and/or interesting, feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading, and happy JetPunking!