Trivia List Creation Guide

The Trivia cog allows you to create your own “trivia lists”, which are then processed in the cog - allowing you to create as many questions as you’d like, with easy to use syntax.

Getting Started

Let’s start off by creating a file named mytrivia.yaml. Our trivia list will be named after the file, so in this case, it will be called mytrivia.

Author Field

We should first include an AUTHOR field, to let the user know who wrote the questions.

When the user starts the trivia, the author(s) will be sent in the starting message (see below).

The following should be placed at the top of your file, replacing “Red” with your name:

AUTHOR: Red

If there are multiple authors, we can separate them with commas.

AUTHOR: Red, Rojo, Rouge

Description Field

We can also add an optional DESCRIPTION to our trivia list, which will show from the output of [p]trivia info <category>. The description should indicate to the user what the trivia list is about and what kind of questions they can expect to face.

For example, if you were writing a logo quiz trivia list, you could create a description like this:

AUTHOR: Kreusada
DESCRIPTION: >-
  A quiz to test your logo knowledge to the limit. This trivia
  will send image URLs and ask you to identify the company's name
  from the logo that is sent.

Questions and Answers

Writing questions and answers is simple. Once you’ve finished your AUTHOR field and DESCRIPTION field, you can move on to your questions just below.

Questions should consist of at least one answer, with other possible answers included if necessary. You must put a colon at the end of the question, for example:

How many days are there in a regular year?:

Answers will follow below, each separated by a line break and with a hyphen at the start of the line.

How many days are there in a regular year?:
- 365
- three hundred and sixty five

It’s always nice to include alternative answers if a question needs it. We can add as many valid answers as we’d like below this question. Answers are NOT case sensitive, so you don’t need to worry about adding the same answer multiple times in different casings.

There are multiple special characters in YAML, such as colons, hashtags, hyphens and more. If these characters are included within our questions or answers, you’ll need to enclose the content with quotation marks.

"Who is the #1 followed user on Twitter?":

If we didn’t have these quotation marks, the question would not render.

Who is the #1 followed user on Twitter?:

Tip

We can also include line breaks within our questions by using \n, like this for example:

"My first line\nMy second line":

As you’ve added more questions, your file should look something like this:

AUTHOR: Red
DESCRIPTION: A general quiz to test your knowledge.
How many days are there in a regular year?:
- 365
- three hundred and sixty five
"Who is the #1 followed user on Twitter?":
- Barack Obama
- Obama
What is the only sea without any coasts?:
- Sargasso
- Sargasso Sea
Who won the Premier League in 2015?:
- Chelsea
- chelsea f.c.
How much money is a US Olympic gold medalist awarded?:
- $37,500
- 37,500
- 37.5k
- 37500
- $37500

You can keep adding questions until you are satisfied, and then you can upload and play your very own trivia! See [p]triviaset custom for more information.

Still stuck? Take a look at the core trivia lists for reference.

Optional: Custom Overrides

Once you’ve got the hang of the question-answer format, you might want to add some custom overrides with the CONFIG key - in a similar way to the AUTHOR key. These will override the settings set with [p]triviaset. For example, with a trivia list which has questions that are quick to answer you could decrease the time limit and require a higher score to win.

Here are all the overrides available:

CONFIG:
    bot_plays: true or false  # bot gains points if no one answers correctly
    delay: positive number  # answer time limit (seconds), must be greater than or equal to 4
    timeout: positive number  # timeout for no responses (seconds), must be greater than delay
    max_score: positive integer  # points required to win
    reveal_answer: true or false  # reveal answer on timeout
    payout_multiplier: non-negative number  # payout multiplier
    use_spoilers: true or false  # use spoilers in answers

So, your final file might look something like this:

AUTHOR: Red
CONFIG:
    bot_plays: false
    use_spoilers: true
    delay: 20
    payout_multiplier: 0.5
    max_score: 20
How many days are there in a regular year?:
- 365
- three hundred and sixty five
"Who is the #1 followed user on Twitter?":
- Barack Obama
- Obama
What is the only sea without any coasts?:
- Sargasso
- Sargasso Sea
Who won the Premier League in 2015?:
- Chelsea
- chelsea f.c.
How much money is a US Olympic gold medallist awarded?:
- $37,500
- 37,500
- 37.5k
- 37500
- $37500