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De Andere Quiz: From Pub Quiz Spreadsheets to a Custom Scoring Platform

How we helped a Dutch charity quiz platform scale from manual Excel scoring to an automated system serving hundreds of bars — raising €800,000 for local businesses during COVID-19.

Client

De Andere Quiz

Platform

WordPress + QSM

Timeline

2023-2024

Fuzzy Answer Matching

Wildcard patterns for spelling variations

Multi-Presenter Support

25 presenters, hundreds of venues

Custom Portal

Standalone quiz management interface

Social Media Integration

Auto-generated ranking images

Background

The Client

De Andere Quiz (“The Other Quiz”) is a Dutch social enterprise running online benefit pub quizzes for bars and restaurants across the Netherlands. Founded by Willem and a small team, the organization emerged as a response to COVID-19 lockdowns — a way to keep communities connected to their favorite local venues while raising money for businesses forced to close.
By the time they reached out to JustHyre in early 2021, De Andere Quiz had already raised nearly €800,000 for local bars and restaurants through their online quiz nights. Thousands of players were participating each week, choosing to support their favorite venue while competing against friends and neighbors in a Dutch-language pub quiz experience.
Their quiz format was distinctly human: open-ended questions about pop culture, history, and geography, with multiple acceptable answers and a tolerance for near-correct spelling. It was exactly the kind of nuanced scoring logic that no off-the-shelf quiz plugin was built to handle.
01 — The Problem

Three Compounding Problems

For all their success, De Andere Quiz’s back-end was a precarious stack of Google Forms and Excel spreadsheets. This created three critical issues that limited their growth.

Spelling Errors Costing Points

Players who knew "Arnold Schwarzenegger" but spelled it "Swarzner" or "Shwarzenegger" lost points. Excel used wildcard patterns (*warz*) to award partial credit, but no quiz plugin could replicate this.

Client quote: “We rather give too many points than give less.

Partial-Credit Multi-Answer Questions

Questions requiring "name 4 out of 5 band names" for a point had no automated solution. Excel handled this with compound formulas, but quiz plugins required exact matches of all items.

No mechanism to say “if at least 4 of these 5 substrings are present, award 1 point.”

Hidden Scoring Logic Required

Players should only see what they answered — not the wildcard patterns used to check answers. If players saw the check was *warz*, the quiz's integrity would be undermined.

The Excel-and-Google-Forms setup couldn’t scale to hundreds of venues without manual processing.
02 — The Solution

Three-Phase Evolution Over 2.5 Years

The engagement unfolded in distinct phases, each building on the last as De Andere Quiz’s vision grew more ambitious.

Phase 1 · 2021

Smart Answer Matching

  • Wildcard/Substring Matching
Instead of requiring exact text matches, the system allowed quiz authors to define check patterns using wildcard syntax (e.g., *warz* to match any answer containing “warz”).
This replicated the Excel-based approach, now fully automated within QSM.
  • Partial-Credit Multi-Answer Scoring
Questions requiring multiple items now supported configurable thresholds: “award 1 point if the response contains at least 4 of these 5 substrings.”
Each item could have its own wildcard pattern.
  • Answer Display Separation
The system showed players only their submitted answers on the result page, never the scoring patterns. The wildcard check that produced the result stayed completely hidden.

✨ Impact: Excel scoring workbook eliminated. Players received scores immediately — including for quizzes from weeks earlier, with no manual intervention.

Phase 2 · 2021

Presenter and Venue Routing

With automated scoring in place, the next bottleneck emerged: quiz distribution. De Andere Quiz had 25 presenters running quiz nights, and each needed their group’s results by email. Creating separate quiz instances for every presenter was unworkable.
  • Presenter Selection
Players chose their presenter from a dropdown at the start. When submitted, QSM automatically sent results to that presenter’s email address.
  • Venue Selection
Players selected their bar/restaurant, and results were routed to the venue’s email. One quiz instance now served the entire network.
✨ Impact: Reduced from maintaining dozens of parallel quiz instances to ONE, while serving 25 presenters and hundreds of bars.

Phase 3 · 2022

Dedicated Quiz Management Portal

By April 2022, the WordPress admin interface had become the bottleneck. It was slow, required admin access (a security concern), and lacked operational features De Andere Quiz needed.

Quiz Listing & Management

View all quizzes with edit actions outside WordPress admin

Results Management

View submissions, delete individual results, or bulk-delete

Rankings Image Generator

Shareable leaderboard images for social media

Answer Review

Drill into any submission for question-by-question breakdown

Player Pre-Fill

Local storage saves player details for returning users

Portal Redirect

Managers always redirected to custom portal, not WP admin

✨ Impact: Purpose-built interface faster than WordPress admin. Rankings images became a social media ritual after every quiz night.
03 — The Impact

From Manual Processing to National Scale

€800K

Raised for Dutch bars & restaurants during COVID-19

25+

Presenters serving hundreds of venues from one quiz

2.5yr

Ongoing partnership across 3 major phases

The Journey

Before: Manually processing quiz results for thousands of players using Excel formulas. Growth capped by labor cost.

After Phase 1: Fully automated scoring. Players received results immediately. Quizzes could be replayed anytime without staffing overhead.

After Phase 2: Single quiz serving 25 presenters and hundreds of venues. Explosive scaling became technically feasible.

After Phase 3: Purpose-built portal faster and more capable than WordPress admin. Rankings images became a social ritual.

What This Story Illustrates

💡 The Trigger: A Social Media Complaint

The most interesting thing about this engagement is what triggered it: not a technical ambition, but players complaining about losing points for spelling “Schwarzenegger” wrong. The Excel wildcard check existed — it just lived outside the quiz plugin. This pattern shows up repeatedly in custom QSM work: clients know exactly what they need because they’ve already built it manually.

🔄 Compounding Nature of Good Development

Each phase naturally surfaced the next constraint. Automated scoring revealed the presenter bottleneck. Solving presenters revealed WordPress admin limitations. A platform that began as “can you make text matching smarter?” ended as a dedicated frontend application serving a national quiz network. None of that was in scope in February 2021.

❤️ Trust as the Foundation

De Andere Quiz wasn’t a commercial company chasing subscriptions. They were raising money for hospitality businesses shut down by a pandemic. Every time a player lost a point they deserved, it undermined the thing that made quizzes worth playing. The wildcard matching feature wasn’t a nice-to-have — it was the technical foundation of a fair and trustworthy experience for an organization doing genuinely good work.

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JustHyre is the custom development arm of ExpressTech, the team behind Quiz and Survey Master (QSM),
Starter Templates, and other popular WordPress tools trusted by thousands of sites worldwide.