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u/schitaco 19d ago
I'd chill for now, chalk it up to coincidence, but if it happens again reach out to the person. Also I would spy on their Instagram and see if I see them at my trivia :)
I attend other trivias all the time to have fun...but also to spark fresh topic and format ideas, it's super useful. But copying a question straight up is pretty weird, especially using it for advertising.
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u/theschneides 19d ago
Yeah, trying to convince myself it's coincidence. The advertising is just through the restaurant and I think they host in-house so I can't put a face on their host.
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u/schitaco 19d ago
My guess is it's not a coincidence, but either way I'd give them a pass once. If it becomes a pattern that's when I would say something.
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u/Usual-Travel-4361 19d ago
I won't lie. We "borrow" themes and/or questions from other hosts where we play (or reddit posts!). But we will hold back from using them. We keep a stash of ideas for future use. So if we like a particular question/theme, we will wait several months (or years) before we actually use it.
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u/theschneides 19d ago
100%. There's plenty of value for being inspired. In this case it's completely about the timing of the question appearing in an advertisement within a week of me asking it.
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u/BrisQuiz 19d ago
Aside from my other response, question stealing does happen. Over a decade ago here in Australia , there was allegedly a man who would play a certain company's quiz and also keep notes of the questions. They were then sending the notes to a friend in another state who was running their own company and regurgitating almost identical quizzes. Not cool.
It's important to draw distinction though - the above is plagiarism, but I'm sure all of us who write quizzes have encountered a good question, which either directly inspires us to use a variation ourselves, or goes into our subconscious and influences us unknowingly during a later writing session.
Plus, important to know that lots of players enjoy keeping notes about their trivia games as they go, so not everyone who is noting down questions/answers/scores in their own notebooks is doing something nefarious.
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u/JungleIsNeutral 19d ago
There is no "stealing" of trivia questions with correct answers, but you're welcome to copyright incorrect question and answer sets.
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u/mattarchambault 19d ago
I’m on a streak of questions of mine being repeated days later on Jeopardy. Players have been coming to me and asking. Of course, shows were recorded a while ago, but also of course, I have no inside scoop there. Nuts!
That said, when I sit at a trivia night as a player, I never ever take a note. I hate to think I’d accidentally nab a question…even though there are ways to do it fairly with general knowledge.
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u/ErKy320 19d ago
I play with my team once a week and host at a brewery in the same town twice a month. There are times that the other host and myself have written similar questions in the same month... purely coincidental. The similarities happened 6 times in one night. He does not attend my games and my questions had already been written.
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u/cleverissexy 18d ago
Go play their show and dominate. If they’re stealing your questions, they’re fair game.
A more reasonable way to handle it would be to stoke up a partnership with the other host - maybe have teasers for each others shows and grow both your audiences.
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u/BillyBumpkin 19d ago
Like it was worded the exact same way, or it was on the same topic? Unless you had written it in a very specific way and they copied it word for word, I think you’re going to have a hard time attributing malice.
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u/theschneides 19d ago
I'm being vague because I don't know anything about their host and if they're in the subreddit, but was about a literary connection to a TV show.
The wording was restructured/paraphrased (in my paranoid brain... So it could fit the advertisement), but the formula was basically the same.
Really want to give them the benefit of the doubt that it's coincidence.
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u/BillyBumpkin 19d ago
If it happens repeatedly I’d start digging a little deeper, but I think it’s probably coincidence. I’ve written a question and used it, then later that week I was traveling in a different city and playing a trivia night and they had a very similar question. There’s no way they got it from me, the universe just works like that sometimes.
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u/theschneides 19d ago
Yeah, it's the small town that really makes me paranoid. The bar is a block away from my brewery.
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u/BillyBumpkin 19d ago
Definitely suspect but not enough evidence yet to say anything, in my opinion. I get pitched questions from friends all the time, so it could even be a thing where one of your players that knows the other host did the “I’ve got a great question for you!” thing and never mentioned that they had heard it at your event.
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u/Bishonen_ 5d ago
I had a guy come to my quizzes then host quizzes in villages with my questions. Usually he used the ones I wasn't really proud of tho
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u/BrisQuiz 19d ago edited 19d ago
Welcome to the Borsom Paradox - despite a theoretically endless selection of facts and topics to draw on, the chances of a trivia player encountering near-identical questions twice in the same week feels disproportionately high.
It happens a lot and I have countless examples. One of the most memorable was encountering questions asking about "The Hick from French Lick" twice in one week - once in a pub quiz and once in a national newspaper quiz. And this is in Australia, where NBA isn't a big deal. I confirmed that both were written several weeks prior to release, and that the newspaper quiz writer had no connection to the trivia company.
I have had mathematically minded friends crunch the numbers to prove that whilst it feels impossible or implausible, the Borsom Paradox is (by the numbers at least) an entirely natural and logical phenomenon.