The Fifteenth Letter - The Story of My First Featured Quiz

The morning started like any other. I woke up, made myself a bowl of cereal and watched some Malcolm in the Middle. Then I logged onto JetPunk to check what was new, only to see this:

OK, well it was actually 11 notifications. I didn't take a screenshot before I clicked the bell because initially I didn’t think it was anything special. The Oscars had just happened a few days earlier which annually reset a whole bunch of quizzes I just assumed I was being notified that my points went down, even though I never take any of the Oscars quizzes on account of that fact. But as you can probably guess, it wasn't a bunch of quiz reset notifications. Nine of those notifications were comments. One was a notification that one of my quizzes was spotlit. But the eleventh notification was a message from Quizmaster saying that one of my quizzes had been featured! Which quiz was it? Drumroll please...

Oh, OK. That probably wouldn't have been my first choice for a featured quiz, but I guess I can't complain. It still feels a little unreal, and I'm kind of on a high right now. So what better way to celebrate this milestone than to give a brief history of this soon-to-be-historic quiz? I can't think of one! So let's stop wasting time and get right into it!

The story of this quiz begins in the same place most of my quizzes' stories began: the creation of my account. I discussed this part of my JetPunk story in this ancient, ancient blog so I won't bore you with the details, but basically I had taken the Countries of the World quiz on JetPunk, created an account to save my progress, then made my very first quiz, Legend of Zelda games with "Link" in the title. I went on to create another quiz, Grass Type Pokémon, since I really liked Pokémon at the time. A few days later I came to a realization: these quizzes weren't very popular. Popular, of course, meaning thousands of takes.

In retrospect it's pretty silly to think that they would be immediate smash hits for many reasons, not least among them being that the quizzes was pretty niche and there was already a much more popular version of the Pokémon quiz created by someone else. There wasn't really an audience for either quiz. I didn't know that at the time though, so I was still kinda disappointed. I wanted to be popular on JetPunk, and it stung that it didn't happen immediately. To increase my takes tenfold, I had to do research into what sorts of quizzes people wanted to take. I looked at the most popular quizzes on the site and learned two things:

1) featured quizzes had way more takes than every other quiz, and

2) nearly every featured quiz was geography related.

It should come as no surprise that the very next quiz I made was a geography one. Though, that does comes with a caveat - I didn't know anything about geography! All I really knew were the names of countries, but beyond that I knew diddly-squat. Surely I could come up with a fun, interesting quiz based solely around the names of countries, and not the actual qualities of the countries themselves, right?

Ah, Countries but all Vowels are Changed to "O" #1. Originally known as Countries but all Vowels are Changed to "O" (this will be relevant later, believe it or not), the premise of the quiz was simple: you are shown 16 different countries whose vowels have all been changed to the letter O. It was not the most mind blowing quiz by any means, but as a 2018 Stewart pointed out, 'Produces some funny results... "Oostroloo" is brilliant.' It was a pretty easy quiz, deliberately so, but it ended up being my most popular quiz I had ever made with a whole 27 takes!

...Okay, I'll admit it, 27 is not a super big number. But it was alot bigger than the combined 10 takes my previous two quizzes garnered and I was very happy about that. So, naturally, I immediately started work on a sequel. My goal was to increase the difficulty, as the easiness was a complaint of the first quiz. Countries but all Vowels are Changed to “O” #2 was released on January of 2018, with the description only reading as "Tougher than the original." And while that's technically true, I wouldn't really call it hard as the lowest guessed answer was only at 86%. It was still lower than the 97% guess rate of the original quiz’s lowest guessed answer, so... success?

Two months later I released a third instalment to the series, which was the hardest of them all. Only a measly 78% percent of people were able to get the lowest scoring answer, and only 68% of people got a perfect 15/15. That’s just a little over half! Wow! However, tragedy soon struck the Countries but all Vowels are Changed to "O" series - I got sick of making them. It was already a long process trying to find interesting and difficult country names and by the third quiz I had basically used them all up. Were there interesting country names left? Probably. But the vast majority of them were more along the lines of "Chod" where only one or two letters changed. I didn't want to abandon the series, but I had no more motivation left to continue it as it was.

That said, I did have one idea to continue the series. Instead of replacing the vowels of countries, what if I replaced the vowels of capitals? So, two months after releasing the third country quiz I released Capitals but all Vowels are Changed to "O". Having a fresh set of names to work with certainly made it alot easier to select a bunch of interesting ones, though unlike the country trilogy I only ever made one capital quiz. I wasn't really interested in capitals the same way I was countries (which I wasn't super interested in anyways), so I never bothered even trying to make a true sequel.

In October of 2018, I uploaded what I consider to be the last instalment of the original run of this series: Pokémon but all Vowels are changed to “O”. By this point I was pretty exclusively making video game quizzes, so I thought it might be fun to take my only geography series and make a Pokémon version of it. But now I was truly plumb out of ideas for this series. It would take a miracle for it to continue.

I don't remember when and I don't remember how, but at some point it came to my attention that there was a way to make random quizzes. And if I'm remembering correctly, there wasn't any option to create a random quiz like we have now where it's built into the quiz editor. Instead, the only way to do it was to copy an already created random quiz, then add your own answers. I first tried it out with the Fast Math - Addition quiz, but inspiration soon struck me to use this random feature to create a new instalment in one of my oldest quiz series. Which means that we've finally arrived at the creation of the quiz of the hour, Countries but all Vowels are Changed to "O" - Random Edition (and it only took 10 paragraphs)! And man, what a great idea it was to make the quiz random. It pretty much solved all my problems I previously had with continuing this series. Are the names interesting? Who cares, it's random! Are the names difficult? Who cares, it's random! It was the perfect way to revitalize this series because I could just throw all 196 countries into one quiz and call it a day. Though that did sort of inadvertently cause the end of this series. The main hook of these quizzes was getting to see what weird names were created when changing all the vowels to O, but since this quiz had all of the countries there really wasn't a point to making a true fourth instalment as there was nothing new left to do with this concept. And in all honesty, I was happy with that! In case I haven't made it clear yet, I wasn't super interested in continuing this series anymore. Having a true 'finale' felt right to me, as opposed to letting the series sizzle into nothingness. I could move on, knowing that I had done everything there is do involving changing the vowels of country names into the letter O.

I made a similar random quiz for capitals shortly afterwards, but that was the last time I have ever substituted all the vowels in a word to the letter O ever. I haven't even thought about it. I moved on from the series to make the things I actually wanted to make rather than the things I thought would make me popular, and I'm so happy I did. I got to meet people that have similar interests and made connections that I will always treasure. I learned new skills, like some basic HTML & CSS as well as how to make SVGs. I started the Super Smash Bros. Fighters series, an ongoing series where I make a quiz about each fighter in the Super Smash Bros. series, which has exposed me to so many more different games then would've ever done naturally. I started the Quiz Creation Challenge which got me into the blogging community on JetPunk, which has gotten me to write more (even if I've yet to upload any of it to JetPunk). Even in real life I've become more comfortable with myself and who I am. I am so, so thankful for my experience here on JetPunk, and if I had committed to just making geography quizzes all those years ago in the hopes that I would one day be featured then pretty much none of it would have ever happened.

I don't hate geography by any means, and if you want to make geography quizzes then don't let me discourage you. I just prefer playing them rather than making them. And while I do wish that more non-geography quizzes were featured, I understand why that's not the case and I've come to terms with the fact that none of my quizzes will probably ever be featured.

Until today.

Yeah, so, in case you forgot, Countries but all Vowels are Changed to "O" - Random Edition was featured today, March 22nd 2024, and I'm not sure how I really feel about it. I guess I'm more so just confused about why this quiz and why now. This quiz is five years old, had about 300 takes and no more than 5 nominations. I don't even know how Quizmaster found this quiz, let alone what compelled him to feature it.

Though I guess that's not really important. All that is important is that he did find it and that he did feature it. He changed a few things, like swapping out the thumbnail of a random building to the letter O, and dropping the 'Random Edition' part of the title. He changed the URL to match, but this inadvertently caused it to have the same URL as the first quiz in the series because it USED to just be called Countries but all Vowels are Changed to “O” (told you that would be important later). That led the first few people that were notified of a new featured quiz into taking the wrong one. This technically means that Countries but all Vowels are Changed to "O" #1 was actually a featured quiz, albeit for a only a short while. It’s probably the world record for the shortest amount of time that a quiz was ever featured. Some things that he didn't change, which I really appreciate, were all the words in the description I had replaced with the letter O (even though it makes it slightly harder to read), as well as the inclusion of countries that only have O as a vowel like Morocco, Kosovo and Togo. Those answers are pretty much gimmes, but given how easy the quiz is anyways I don't see any problem with keeping them in.

I'm not sure how to describe my thoughts on this being my first featured quiz. Obviously I'm thrilled that something I made was worth featuring, though part of me deep down wishes it was for something I'm more passionate about and worked a little harder on. It's a bit of an odd feeling to have my first (and currently only) featured quiz be of something I have no strong feelings for, like or dislike. I have made a great many quizzes on JetPunk, some of which I think are great, some that kinda suck, but Countries but all Vowels are Changed to "O" - Random Edition is something I have no opinions on. And what really stinks is that this will probably be my most-taken quiz for pretty much ever now, as there’s really no chance my non-featured quizzes have any chance of competing for that title. 

I think that's the main thing I'm hung up on. It's not so much that I'm unhappy that I have a featured quiz, it's just bittersweet knowing that this is sort of an end of an era for me. ...Ok, that's a bit melodramatic, but what I mean is that I've been using this website for nearly seven years and I have never been featured once. I sort of identified myself with not being featured and took a bit of pride in that fact. I was happy making the stuff I was making and the small successes they found, even though there was this sort of feeling in me that I would probably never be featured. I figured that on the off-chance I ever was featured it would be because one of my quizzes had a huge surge in takes or nominations that it would become impossible to ignore. I genuinely never considered the fact that any of my old geography quizzes would ever be considered feature worthy and the fact that one of them was feels very odd to me.

I think I just need some time to fully accept it. I wrote most of this blog on March 22nd (the day this quiz was featured), but just a few days later I'm feeling alot better about it being featured. I felt this same way everytime my most taken quiz was dethroned by another one, though eventually it became normal. This is just the most extreme incident of that happening. I'm sure that by next month at the latest I'll have changed my tune, and will go back to not caring about this quiz at all.

OK, so addressing the elephant in the room: this quiz was featured months ago. Initially I delayed publishing this blog because I wasn’t happy with how negative I came across and I wanted to polish it up a bit. Eventually I decided that I wanted to wait until this quiz was featured on the front page before releasing this blog. I felt that, since this blog is meant to be a complete history of Countries but All Vowels are Changed to O, it only made sense to include the first time it was on the front page of the site as that’s when the most people will see it. I made this decision sometime in late March/early April, but unfortunately by that time the message containing the date the quiz would be on the front page was long gone. I knew it was going to be sometime in June, but I couldn’t remember the exact day. I’m currently just waiting for a huge spike in takes and comments to tip me off.

Well, was I WRONG! I spent ALL of June waiting for this quiz to pop up on the front page, only to never see it. Every day I would open up JetPunk to see if it's time, but nope! It never was. June came and went and this quiz was never on the front page. Apparently this quiz was set to be on the front page on JULY 15th, not anytime in June like I thought. Let this be a lesson, kids. Always write down dates you think are going to be important, because you never know when JetPunk will automatically delete them.

The only somewhat interesting things that happened between then and now is that on May 15th, Countries but All Vowels are Changed to O surpassed Category Elimination - Super Smash Bros. Characters to become my #1 most taken quiz, and shortly afterwards on the 24th it became my first quiz to break 5,000 takes.

As of about 4:30 today the quiz has received 10,000 takes and I've jumped up around 50 spots on the quizmaker rankings. Obviously I would never endorse trying to make quizzes for the sake of getting takes, but I'd be a fool if I were to ignore the effects of being on the front page. Especially since, you know, it's my first time being featured.

That's all from me for now. This blog was alot longer than I had anticipated, turns out I had alot to say on this subject. Sorry if it came across as a little whiny or ungrateful, that wasn't really my intention at all. I just felt a little weird about this specific quiz being my first featured quiz and I needed to vent a little. I had fun writing this blog, though. 

Featureless, unappreciated in his time Insaniot signing off for the last time.

©Me

P.S. - Y is sometimes a vowel. I thought this was common knowledge but some of the comments I've received over the past couple of months would suggest otherwise. Generally, Y is a vowel when in the middle or end of a syllable and is a consonant at the beginning of a syllable (when it makes a 'yuh' sound). This is crucial knowledge for understanding the English language at a kindergarten level.