As our Topics & Quiz section gains popularity, the following change will be made to Quizzes.

Starting tomorrow, we shall not reveal the names of people who answered correctly/incorrectly. You will still know how many answered the quiz and the percentage of wrong/right responses. But ONLY the person who answered will know whether they answered correctly or incorrectly.

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change is to encourage people to be bold and answer the question, and LEARN, instead of worrying about their scores or getting embarrassed for wrong answers.
Thanks.

This is a notice of a feature soon to be introduced. Currently, we have unique member IDs per member which are hard to remember. We shall soon be introducing "User Handles", as used in Twitter and other social media sites.
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1. "User Handles" are a unique combination of letters/numbers - (at least 3 characters long) - which will uniquely identify the member.
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2. Once a "user handle" is claimed by a member, it cannot be re-used by any other member. Also, the member will not be able to change their user handle once assigned. Requests to change user handle CANNOT be entertained due to technical limitations.
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3. User handles will have the "verified" tag for our well-known members.
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4. You may choose any user handle you like - does not have to be your name. However, offensive/abusive user handles will not be permitted.
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5. Once assigned, the user handle will be used everywhere in blogs to uniquely identify the member.
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6. Member IDs will ALSO be maintained. So you may search by user handle OR member ID.
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Thanks.

Over the last few days, there have been concerns expressed by many members that politics are being discussed. Well, with 90% of the trains NOT running over the last 3 months, there is not much rail-fanning happening!!! People have to discuss something. Mature political discussions are allowed in the Topics section, and maybe a little bit also in the Main section.

Please remember that during this pandemic, politicians of all shades and parties, all over the world have fared extremely well, with their luxurious lifestyles and best class VIP treatment facilities. So...
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don't worry about them or lose your sleep defending them!!! Members are advised not to get too attached or shed tears over their chosen political leaders (whoever they may be). Again, remember that politicians are all doing very well. All politicians are well-fed, well-treated and are leading very privileged lives - don't worry about them too much. It's not good for your own health.

Members are however, required to maintain civility and respect with each other, in all discussions. Personal attacks against members are STRICTLY not allowed in the Forum.

Our members are the most important asset of this site, NOT their favourite political leaders or their chosen political parties. Any personal attacks on members themselves will not be tolerated. However, arguments, disagreements and debates are fine. It's high time we all learn to maturely and respectfully discuss subjects with others, even if we disagree with them.

Thanks.

@all:
For the last 2 days, I have been putting up some quizzes in the Topics section, with the following design:
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1. Each quiz starts with a statement.
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2....
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Then a question, followed by 4-6 choices.
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3. AFTER a member makes a choice, all the other choices are revealed, along with the creator's choice and a detailed correct answer and some web links.
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4. The number of Topics will be increased in the coming weeks. Also, other languages like Hindi, etc. will be allowed.
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5. Quiz statistics will also be collected with a member's Correct Score indicating their knowledge of that Topic.
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This type of quiz was meant to be created right in the early days of IRI, but somehow kept getting postponed. I have personally believed that quizzing is a good way to activate our minds to learn more about the world.
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Going forward, after another week of testing, the quiz section will be opened up to all members to post their own quizzes with the above design.
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One important thing about quizzes is that Quality and Accuracy are very important. For this reason, the role of Monitors for Quizzes will be more significant. We would need to have Quiz Monitors PER Topic, based on their knowledge of that topic.
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The above changes will be made in the coming weeks and months. Meanwhile, I myself will be posting quizzes in the next week or so to test the feature and gather feedback.
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Thanks for everyone's participation with the quizzes.