Nilly, Hec's the official collector. Thanks for the correction -- it's been made.

Sometimes I just want to say *foo*, and sometimes I mean foo.

Wrod. There's really a stress difference, as I hear it.

t edited because quickedit doesn't wrk inside itself

Thanks, ita. You, once again, prove how much you rock (um, krav should be proud to have you).

Oh. Okay.

At first blush, the coding and database design for the quizzes as John described them is no simpler than the coding for the episode guide.

I'm confused. The database design for the quiz is incredibly simple. One main table with questions. One table containing categories. One cross-reference table which identifies which categories go with which questions.

So you'd have:

Question [ID 0001] Name That Ep -- exhausted after fighting Adam, Buffy and the Scooby gang have a series of strange dreams in which they're pursued by a stone-age Slayer.

• Bedrock
• Sleepless
• Restless

And you'd have a table of categories, which would include:

...
Category [ID 0074] Questions About Season Five
Category [ID 0075] Xander's Sex Life
Category [ID 0076] Other Slayers
Category [ID 0077] Dream Sequence-A-Rama
Category [ID 0078] Buffy's Boyfriends
...

And you'd just need the matching table which would show that the question belonged to the appropriate categories:

QuestionCategory00010074 00010076 00010077

Whereas the Ep Guide was much more multidimensional, just because of problems like "Joss is sometimes a writer, sometimes a director, sometimes a producer and sometimes a composer" and required a lot more cross-referencing.

Have I missed something obvious?

I'm not in the least little bit saying we shouldn't do the episode guide. That was my idea too!

I definitely think we should do both.

One of the issues we'd have to take on board with the Ep Guide is some kind of check-out, check-back-in system, so that you could go to edit the entry for "Restless" to be told "Sorry, Hec has that one checked out at the moment" so as to prevent clashes and version problems.

The questions wouldn't require that kind of level of complexity just to get started.

But I don't want to argue the merits of either, like I said, just to re-state my (possibly mistaken) belief that the quiz is techically simpler than the guide.

Database design's already done for the episode guide, was my point, and one of the tables already implemented.

Database design's already done for the episode guide, was my point, and one of the tables already implemented.

OK cool, so stage one, already complete.

What's stage two?

Somewhere up ahead would be stage greater-than-one, less-than-go-live, but it's a huge one -- the entering of the data, and the snerkiness.

What do we need to be in place before we can start on that, or even start apportioning that?

Independent of everything else is collecting the data, which can be done by as many parties as volunteer, and requires no tech savvy whatsoever (I recall a couple folks volunteering back in the day).

And then there's application and screen design, which can be flowcharts, pseudocode, screenshots and static HTML.

Then development tasks get subdivided, and the fun stuff starts.

Independent of everything else is collecting the data, which can be done by as many parties as volunteer, and requires no tech savvy whatsoever

OK, when you say "collecting the data", are you seeing that as somehow different from "inputting the data"?

In my idea, there was for instance an "edit actor" page, where you would record that Charisma played Cordelia in episode 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 of Series One, but wasn't in episode 7. That would be done with checkboxes, I guess?

You would also somehow be able to record that SMG played "Buffy" in nearly every episode, but also played "BuffyBot" in a couple. That would require some kind of multiple drop-menu system listing all possible characters.

Are you thinking that we record and enter the information independantly of there being a nice form-interface for this kind of thing?

The data needs to be collected before it's entered. I don't remember how people were volunteering -- I seem to remember folks choosing actors, or something.

But if you're going to heads down enter it, it's best to have it conveniently to hand. Not collect/enter/collect/enter, if I make sense.