An online music quiz
Raad de band of het lied (RDBOHL) was an online music quiz that ran for six years between 2009 and 2014, where each year offered a new unique competition in which users could compete with each other to reach the acclaimed first position in the Hall of Fame.
The quiz consisted of riddles, which would depict either a band- or a song (implied by the platforms name, in Dutch). Riddles were either images (showing an abstraction of the answer) or audio recordings (representing an "interpretation" of a song). Think of it as a pub quiz from the comfort of your own home. Just bring your own drink.
The platform was entirely non-profit, free and contained no ads.
User driven
The platform was fully accessible to non-registered users, but members had the benefit that apart from being eligible to appear in the Hall of Fame, they could also access member-only content, such as the forum where members could create topics, share videos / stories, etc. Additionally, members were eligible to submit their own riddles and participate in bonus challenges where both could award them more points to rise within the ranks of the Hall of Fame.
These bonus challenges were time restricted (where less elapsed time meant more awarded points) and came in the following flavours :
- Complete the missing words in the lyric
- Guess which song is played (badly) on ukelele
- Test your knowledge of music related trivia
Beyond the homepage
For maximum performance, the entire RDBOHL program was custom built both on backend and frontend, where the frontend was fully optimised to be accessible on desktop, tablets and phones.
The majority of the RDBOHL program was however not directly visible:
- Pattern recognition for automated validation of user answers, taking typos into account
- Integrated mail notification service to inform registered users of competition related activities
- Integrated instant sign-up / login using the dominant social media platforms of the time (and Google+...)
- Automated award systems for submissions of riddles and bonus challenges
- Copy writing : periodic mails as well as periodic forum posts by the administrator
- Automated publishing of new riddles from a queued backlog (as the administrator needs vacation too)
- SEO : all content was indexed and instantly accessible (regardless of having a single page frontend)
- To overcome the limitations of cheap hosting, repetitive database queries and results were cached and invalidated when appropriate.
All submitted answers, forum posts and awarded bonus points could be moderated from the custom CMS that was logging all user interactions to validate possible attempts at fraud.
And boy, do people love to find ways to cheat...
Languages and technologies used:
PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, ActionScript 3.
Example content
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