Quizilla

Website
Name:	Quizilla
Owner/Maintainer:	founded by Matthew Nielsen (xunker), sold to Gorilla Nation then to Viacom/MTV/The N
Dates:	July 2002 – October 1, 2014
Type:	user-generated content, quizzes, fanfiction
Fandom:	general
URL:	quizilla.com (wayback)now the url site redirects to teennick.com
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Quizilla was an online community featuring user-generated content, including a lot of writing from teen authors. It was primarily intended to host user-made quizzes (e.g. "What Hogwarts house do you belong in?"), but also played host to a large cohort of fans writing quiz fic and reader inserts.

logo from website: "Penny the Pencil Monster"

Much of the fanfiction on Quizilla was written in genres and styles banned on Fanfiction.net. This included reader insert fics, but also any work written in Second Person POV, Real Person Fiction and Choose Your Own Adventure stories that were uniquely suited to the quiz format. Users recall a site where Quizilla's own formatting prevented the use of paragraphs to break large text blocks. On this quiz site, CYOA style questions at the end of a chapter rarely had any impact on the story. The next chapter was the same regardless of the reader's answer. The site was also host to a large collection of smut content, with users making use of the lemon scale, as there was no tagging system in place.

Quizilla is remembered fondly by those who used the site. For many it was their first experience of fandom and fanfiction. The site was known as a space where young teens could create fan content with very few restrictions. Later updates to the site made the posting and formatting of fanfiction and fan poems easier.

fics were at this point created en masse. you could now also code your fics, so they all had their own unique look! queue most Big fics (and all authors who wished to stand out) ending up looking like…… most geocities pages?
(and it was so fucking fun to do it. look, gif backgrounds, animated cursors, midi my chemical romance music? that was the shit back then. like, sure, it was hard as hell to read anything, but that wasn’t important. also you ended up feeling so cool as well, you figured out coding)

The site was started at the end of July 2002 and "first released into the wild" on August 4, 2002. Quizilla was bought out in 2006, leading to a purge of fan created content from the site. In September 2014, Quizilla announced it would be shutting down on October 1, 2014.

A similar site is Quotev.

What Was Quizilla?

From its website in 2004:

Quizilla is what I like to call a quiz foundry. What that means in real terms is that it's a place to make Internet quizzes and also a place to take them. It encapsulates and automates all the things needed to make the sort of quizzes that are all the rage with the kids these days.

When fans began to post their fanfic at Quizilla in the form of chapters, the site added a section for fiction. From its website in 2005:

Quizilla is a place to imagine, create and share great content. It started out, as the name suggests, as a place to make, take and share the results of quizzes. In its over 3 year life, it has grown beyond just quizzes. It now is a leading home on the Web for stories, poems and other user generated content. Whether you want to create, take and share quizzes, a personal journal, write poems, stories, create and share games and more. Quizilla has it all. It represents and embodies the heartbeat of today's teen spirit.

Why Was This Format Popular for Fanworks?

Much of the fan attraction to Quizilla can be understood with the context that fans often gather online in spaces that are by no means ideal for their needs (Livejournal, Tumblr) but have several primary features which make them appealing. It may be that Quizilla's fandom-inspired quizzes (e.g. "Which Yu-Gi-Oh! character are you?") served as the initial attraction for fans to gather, and as they did, a community formed and they began publishing fanworks. On top of this, Quizilla's quiz format was well-suited to the second-person, reader insert quizzes that fans favoured on the platform, although it's difficult to say whether this genre of fic was popular because of the format, or whether the format suited the genre of fic that fans wanted to publish. Second-person, reader insert quizzes may also have flourished on Quizilla because they were banned in other fan spaces, such as Fanfiction.Net and MediaMiner.

In 2014, a fan at Reddit asked:

To this day I still don't understand why people would write fanfiction on a site whose specific purpose is quizzes when there are fanfiction-specific sites around! Why would you want your fanfiction cluttered up with question numbers and checkboxes and submit buttons? When it wasn't even a choose your own adventure story?

xunker, Quizilla's creator, replied:

I don't understand either, especially since the quiz-editor that was used from 2002-2006 was really not good for anything more than than a few lines of text per question and only one line per answer.

However, that being said, they're one of the biggest reasons Quizilla stayed around for as long as it did. Quizzes were fun, and people would spend hours taking them but not many people wanted to spend the time to make a really good quiz. But stories... people would gladly spend weeks writing stories and building their little worlds. Part of me thinks that the users didn't really understand the quiz mechanism and so they thought it was a choose-your-own-adventure-type thing but it really wasn't. Or maybe they did, but just in a different way that I don't realize. A big reason, in the beginning, was the laissez-faire attitude toward customization. Early on, the users figured out how to put CSS and JS in to quizzes and the system fully accepted it, unlike many other user-generated-content sites at the time.

Early on it also had voting/rating with ranking pages, inter-user messaging and image hosting which were things that the sites built specifically around fanfic didn't have at the time.

Regarding the Citrus Content

A fan in 2014 asked a Reddit forum:

I wonder if teenage girls new to fan fiction know that term, or if it's specific to people who discovered fan fiction on sites like Quizilla and fanfiction.net that technically forbid pornographic scenes so teens came up with terms like lemons to get around the filters but let others know what was going down in their fanfic.

Quizilla's creator, xunker/Nielsen, replied:

I will go one step further: I started the site in August 2002 and it wasn't until probably late 2003 that I learned what that meant. A whole year of blissful ignorance.

No bones about it, Quizilla had a problem with that kind of content. I dutifully removed it when it was reported or automatically flagged, but if nobody reported it or they used words I didn't know about, well.. let's just say that I, 24 years old at the time, was regularly being outsmarted by 14-year-olds.

I think I learned what it meant when someone sent me a message asking me to "please get rid of all these lemon stories!" Thankfully, when I naively asked them what they didn't like about that particular citrus fruit they explained it all to me.

Thus, an arms race started: when I started automatically flagging quizzes if the title contained "lemon", they switched to "L3m0n". Then to "nomel", "lemonade", "limon", "lémón" and a dozen others I can't remember anymore.

The automatic filters got better and we later added volunteer moderators to seek it out and remove it, and that helped a bunch, but I can guarantee that people found ways around all of it. When you're young, you've got two never-ending resources: tenacity and time.

Regarding the Name "Quizilla"

What does the name Quizilla mean?

The name was thought up on the spur of the moment when I needed to quickly decide on a domain name for the Web site. A lot of the code was big, complex and hairy to the point it made me think of a large monster. So, at the last moment, I chose a variation on that theme, "Quizilla".

Are you in any way affiliated with Godzilla?

No, in no way. Quizilla is in no way affiliated with Godzilla or the owner of its trademark, Toho Co. Ltd.

The Beginning: An Announcement

The site was "released into the wild" the very end of July.

Its creator announced his site on August 4, 2002:

Announcing Quizilla. It's just one of those weird ideas that you get. After I slapped together my last weird idea about a uniform specification for Quizzes and Tests, I had the idea that "what if there was a program that built these definition files for you?" This evolved into "what if there was a system to build these definitions for you and makes making quizzes easy, plus hosts the quizzes, calculates the results and hosts the images, too?"

What a concept.

A hare-brained concept, maybe, but it's here and it's available. It's free and I think it's a pretty cool package. You register, you make a quiz and give the link to your friends. No javascript or programming experience required. If you like making or taking quizzes, take a peek.

A September 2, 2002 post:

*sigh*

Few things are more gratifying than watching HTTP_REFERER logs run past with tail(1). It's quit a cool thought to be sitting here and having people use something I made. And they keep using it, so they must actually *like* it. Wow.

I have an ego. But I'm sure it will pass.

From the FAQ page in 2005:

Where did you get the idea for Quizilla? The ides for Quizilla came to me when I was looking at ideas for expressing complex data structures in XML. I was mulling around the idea of a standardized format for quizzes and other things and I decided to make some CGI code to automate the idea for me. Then I decided to build more complex display layers around that core, and then I added user accounts, messages and everything else you see now.

Penny the Pencil Monster!

a fan commemorates "Penny the Pencil Monster" -- "If you remember the old days on quizilla then this is a familiar mascot that they should not have gotten rid of which is by far one of the best mascots ever."

Comments by Nielsen:

From the site's FAQ, around 2003 and again, in 2005: "That logo, the No. 2 with green arms and legs, is "Penny" the Quizilla pencil monster. When the site first launched I needed a logo to identify the site quickly, but I have no artistic skill when it comes to drawing. Instead, I loaded up a graphics program and clicked out a peculiar little image dot by dot in super zoom mode. It's not very good, but I've grown attached to it."

From Nielsen's online journal, January 2, 2008: "Big things are happening at the old Quizilla site, most of which are really due and I'm excited for, though with this new message posted there are more than a few complaints. My favourites? Look for all the people complaining about the loss of the Pencil Monster.. the logo I did in 20 minutes with the Gimp oh so long ago."

Comments by fans:

• "Whoever created Penny the pencil monster was a genius."

• "I pretty much blame the way I grew up on this little monster..."

Its Forum

In August 2006, Quizilla created a message board. It included sections for anime, books, poetry, and movies.

A series of controversial threads called for a rapid increase in monitoring and rule enforcement. [need dates, more info]

"Forum Jail" was a section on the forum: "This is where threads go when they are misbehaving badly... get it back on track and it stays alive. You may not start a new thread here.

As of late May 2012, the forums had been removed from the site indefinitely.

Zillapedia

Zillapedia was a section of Quizilla that used wiki software.

With Zillapedia, users were able to create glossary entries, some serious, some numerous.

Zillapedia closely resembled the Urban Dictionary in many ways, and it had similar functions to Wikipedia.

Follow the Money

Costs and Advertising

Regarding costs and advertising:

How is Quizilla supported? Is it supported by advertising? Right now, yes, Quizilla is supported completely by advertising revenue.

All Internet advertising is evil, and you're just doing this to make money off the work of others! Some people think that, and maybe they would even be right to think that from a cursory perspective. People think that because they got 10 MB of free web space with their dial-up accounts that every Web site in the world should be free because theirs is. However, the unpleasant truth is that a site of any large size costs money to run, money to maintain, and money to expand.

Take Quizilla for example. The costs of the site are very straightforward and follow what you could call "the three B's": bandwidth, brawn, and brains. Bandwidth is, obviously, how much it costs to get the data from the computer for the Web site to your home computer. Brawn is the computers that run the Web site. Brains is the people behind the Web site. If any one of those three things as lacking, the site as a whole will lag. If you can't pay for bandwidth then people can't see your web site. If you can't pay for computers then people can't use your web site. If you can't pay for the brains to run the web site then problems will never be fixed, features will never be added and it will become stale and no one will ever want to come back. And each of these things costs money and the more popular the site gets, the more money they cost.

Also see this 2007 post and comments: A look at some fandom based money numbers, ^{Archived version}, partly bouncy, June 25, 2007

If You Wanted to Buy the Site: 2004

From the site's owner in about 2004:

I want to buy Quizilla!

So, you wan[t] to buy the site, eh? Well, like everything in life, it's not that easy. You have to make choices.

The first option is to buy the site with me included. Why, I hear you cry, would you need to buy me with it? Well, the site is very complex, hodgepodge and convoluted. It would take even an expert IT staffer weeks to figure how everything works, let alone how to fix problems of add features. That's where I come in. You can buy ownership of the site but keep it on basically as is, simply under new management, with me still at the helm managing the site the way I always have but letting you handle the gritty stuff like advertising sales and accounting. If you chose to go that route, and were willing to give me an attractive reason to work for the man again, a good offer would start somewhere over the top of $150,000 USD.

But what if you wanted to outright steal my baby out from under me and wrest control and utter ownership away from me? Well, in such a case you don't have to have me come with it (though I'd recommend it), but you'd still need to assist me in reconciling the pain of giving up my precious baby. Reconciliation of my grief would probably start at $300,000.

Of course, those are merely starting suggestions. If you offered me the baseline hundred-fifty for getting me plus the site I'll probably only mull it over for a few seconds before I say no; though if you offered, say, a 50% premium above baseline it would almost certainly make me cave.

Bought Out and Changed: 2006

Similar Occurrences For other incidents in which platforms used by fan communities have cracked down on fanworks, discussion by fans, and fansites with "inappropriate" content, see: Cease and Desist by FOX against fan sites (mid-1990s) The Viacom Crackdowns (1995, 2005) PotterWar (2001-2002) Tripod Massacre (March 2001) FanFiction.Net's NC-17 Purges: 2002 and 2012 Quizilla's Purge (2006) Strikethrough/Boldthrough (May-August 2007) GeoCities Shutdown (2009) tagging policy decisions at Delicious (2011) The Snappening (2018) Tumblr NSFW Content Purge (2018) Yahoo! Groups Content Purge (2019) For a more general related topic, see List of Content Banned by Archives.

On October 16, 2006, Viacom's MTV Networks (the owners of MTV and Nickelodeon) announced it had bought Quizilla for an undisclosed sum of money.

After selling to Viacom, the site went from a free writing site to a PG rated site. Due to the sudden changes, a lot of the users' work was deleted, which caused a large number of people to abandon the site.

In 2014, the site owner, Nielsen, wrote about the content changes:

I guess, as Quizilla user #1, I should jump in and talk about this. I found out about this about a month ago via Twitter and I’ve been meaning to write something about it but could never find the right words. I hadn’t been involved with the day-to-day operation since middle/late 2009; when the economy tanked, Viacom laid off or reassigned all staff Quizilla developers. They didn’t lay me off since I was a contract employee with no guaranteed hours, but they basically said they weren’t going to give me any more work to do.

As the site went to hell I tried to keep up with the dwindling number of people I still knew inside Viacom/MTV Networks. At first they had one sysadmin and a couple of "community managers” still maintaining the site. Then they dropped the sysadmin and went to one community manager with some interns. The last time I reached my fingers in, Q2 2014, I was told all that was left was someone’s AA answering the support email part-time.

I didn’t expect them to axe it, actually. It was still bringing in enough page-views to turn a profit (I assume), especially since they basically had no staff. But there may have other been factors at play we don't know about, like potential liability. I haven’t heard from anyone as to why it was killed specifically.

I’m sad it’s gone, but it in a big way it had died years ago but just hadn’t stopped moving. I've tried to restart/reimagine the site at least 5 times since 2009, but my own faults have smothered all my attempts all in the cradle.

But I don't want want this to be just me complaining so, for all the nostalgia fans, here’s some pictures of the servers I built to power to site up until July 2005 Oh, the stories I could tell about sleeping on that server room floor while installing software on a new web server...

A fan in 2018 commented:

I’ve seen some posts mentioning LiveJournal as an example of what happens when a site starts getting really aggressive about policing content, but this particular situation is making me think of Quizilla.

Quizilla was the weird little site that introduced me to fanfiction. It was supposed to be for personality quizzes, but in practice it had a mix of fanfic (sometimes in a semi-CYOA form), original fiction (sometimes in that same semi-CYOA form), and quizzes. Some of it was smut. Writers would generally warn you that a “lemon” chapter was coming up, and there was an “are you sure you want to see this mature content?” screen you had to click through before you could read anything too iffy. It worked fine, at least as far as my tiny self could tell.

Then they got bought out by Nickelodeon, who went “oh no, this is a teen site now, and it must be Made Appropriate for Children!”

So off went a good deal of the lemons (without any warning, as far as I can remember). Some people still tried to sneak smut past the moderators, but what they got away with was far tamer than most of the things you’d see on Ao3.

This did not stop Nickelodeon from trying to keep “fixing” the site, with disastrous results.

The tag system was pretty much permanently screwed up at some point– I can remember scrolling through pages and pages of content marked “angel” or “demon” on the old Quizilla, but after a certain point of the changeover, I only ever got one short page of results for each tag, even when I knew there was more to be found within that tag. A lot of older stories, most of which weren’t lemony at all, simply ended up butchered after Nickelodeon decided that stories could no longer be in quiz format – basically, they imposed new word count limits on the quizzes, and they just deleted any parts of the story that overran the word count. They got rid of the forums because they didn’t want to bother moderating them, and I also seem to recall them banning custom themes for profiles, quizzes, and stories at some stage.

It was a slow process, but a lot of works were lost, both good and bad, both smutty and PG-rated. And eventually, once they’d screwed up the site and driven off a lot of people, they shut down the site.

tl;dr: Dammit, I already lost one guilty-pleasure site full of fandom content because of misplaced attempts to get rid of porn, and I don’t want to see this site start making the same mistakes.

#quizilla #fandom history #the great tumblr mess-up of 2018

2011 Thoughts on Revival

In 2011, Nielsen mused on reviving Quizilla with a different name:

People still use Quizilla, like, all the time. That staggered me. Someone has been updating it's page to have a play-by-play of all the outages, issues and problems. That staggered me some more.

I have been toying with the idea of re-rolling Quizilla for at least 4 years now; I even spent a few thousand on a lawyer to figure out my legal positions if Viacom/MTV ever tried to come after me (short answer: I'm in the clear)....

[snipped]

But I really want to try to see if I can reclaim some of the old Quizilla magic. Under a new name of course.

Fanworks

• R.I.P QUIZILLA, a YouTube vid created by fansupkatie, posted September 30, 2014
• Quibblo has an archive of various Quizilla fanworks that were archived by xXnekogirl63Xx as the site closed.

Fan Comments

General Fan Comments

[unknown date]:

Ok but is no one going to mention that dark period of time when we all flocked to quizilla??? RIP quizilla you trashiest of fic bearing sites you.

[2010]:

Oh, Quizilla....this brings back memories! Oddly, I'm grateful to the site for teaching me so much about how NOT to write. It really was a good learning tool! All of the points you made are spot on. I think even writers on this site could learn a few valuable things by reading this little writing guide!

And no matter how frustrated I get with the lack of quality writing on quizilla, I have to remember the most of the authors are young kids who don't know the first thing about grammar or punctuation, much less telling a good story! I figure it's better for them to TRY than to not write at all. They'll improve. Eventually. :3

[2010]:

With text messaging, people have found ways to shorten words so much that it's become a norm in society. And people get so used to using these chat shorthands, that the author continues to use them in his/her story. Unlike with Lunaescence, Quizilla doesn't check or really care about the quality of the stories published. It's absolute computer illiteracy.

One last thing, I've been on Quizilla for over six years now. I've seen it go completely downhill. I tell you, I've seen a lot of angry rants about everything, from the quality of the stories to the site itself. I just usually roll my eyes at them, but I must admit, I really like yours. It's not just some angry rant criticizing every little thing you hate about Quizilla. You've actually got ways and tips that the authors can help improve their stories. I don't know if a lot of other people on Quizilla will read this, too, but I honestly hope that they do.

[2010]:

Back when I first found Quizilla, when I was in middle school, I didn't really mind these things. However, I think the grammar and spelling one bothered me the most, as I progressed throughout the years, because they made it difficult to understand what was going on in the story.

And the giant block of text. It didn't bother me until I found a story with beautiful organization! O 3O

It's really a shame Quizilla's changed to how it currently is. Those great writers whose stories I loved probably left many years ago when the site was upgraded to its new look. =/

[2010]:

I've noticed a lot of these "writers" on Quizilla happen to be under the age of fifteen; therefore, their grammar will more than likely not be acceptable to most. They're still in that stage where it's cool to write "lyke d!ss" and not use grammar or spelling unless it's for an essay for school.

[2010]:

I used to be one of those crazy little kids writing on Quizilla! :'D *such a nerd* Man I was on quizilla back in '05, back before Viacom took it over when it was actually pretty damn GOOD.

Admittedly, everyone used to write the giant, and rather shameful wall of text.

I probably would still be on Quizilla today if they hadn't changed the layout to the glitchy, kid friendly version they have today. That and if they hadn't deleted over half my stories. :'D

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY! I'm not sure how many people remember the lock feature? Where you could put passwords on certain stories/quizzes so others couldn't get in unless they had the password? Anyway, I had a bunch of mine locked, mainly because I was editing the plot and didn't want anyone to read them. After the layout change. POOF. Stories were gone~ About 20+ chapters (that I only have saved on floppy disks at the time, and no floppy drive anymore since my old comp crashed.) When I emailed Quizilla about it, since I mean... it was a feature they had. I got a response back of "What are you talking about? What lock feature?" So... basically I had to describe how their website worked to them.

Never did get a reply back... Or my lost stories for that matter. o_o

[/End random story]

But yeah, I can remember back when the highest rated section actually had decent stories there, ones that weren't horribly botched. But after everything changed... :/ All the authors I knew on there left (for the most part).

I remember them posting a blog about what... um 2, maybe 3 years ago? About how they were going to bring back personal pages for everyone. That must have gotten flushed, lol. But yeah, Quizilla = Glorified Myspace/Facebook now.

[2014]:

was way older than the target audience, but I loved it before the fanfiction arrived. To this day I still don't understand why people would write fanfiction on a site whose specific purpose is quizzes when there are fanfiction-specific sites around! Why would you want your fanfiction cluttered up with question numbers and checkboxes and submit buttons? When it wasn't even a choose your own adventure story?

[2014]:

I never used quizilla for quizzes.... always for the fan fiction. Then I moved on to LiveJournal, and now part off me wonders why I liked them so much... dem lemons tho...

[2014]:

My god. This was the site that got me into fanfiction. Spent a ridiculous amount of time there.

[2014]:

Quizilla was one of my top 5 websites as a tween. That and Xanga, Gaia Online, Neopets, and QuizFarm. I took the shit out of those Harry Potter quizzes.

Oh, I got Slytherin? retake

[2014]:

Quizilla fanfiction. Lemons written by 13 year olds who had no idea...

[2015]:

My Fanfiction life started on Quizilla and then shifted slowly over to Livejournal and then on over to FF.net which is still homebase of my heart.

[2015]:

OKAY I WAS ON QUIZILLA FOR THREE YEARS ALRIGHT THREE YEARS AND THEN IT SHUT DOWN OCTOBER 2014 IT IS NOW OCTOBER 2015 I AM STILL NOT OVER IT I WROTE SO MANY WWYFF STORIES THERE

GOD FUCKING DAMNIT

[2015]:

I WISH I COULD GET IN TO MY QUIZILLA ACCOUNT FROM LIKE THE 5th GRADE

[2015]:

Quizilla helped me through some really tough shit growing up. The fact that it's gone really ticks me off, it was a way to vent, regular frustration, not feeling normal frustration, hell, most girls released sexual frustration into some really good stories that I can't believe are gone. We all had some amazing boy love/girl love stories, original character inserted fan fiction, and, I just-it totally sucks you know? Damn the people who destroyed it. I'm going to unleash the old Emo kid in me and wish thousands of years of death, mayhem, horror, and blood soaked nightmares on the individuals who would do such an atrocity. For anyone who says: "it's coming back! Shut up" yeah-like how MySpace came back and destroyed all our pictures, notes, conversations and saved IM's??

[2015]:

My childhood! All gone! I just found out last night that it was gone. It's probably been 3 years since I've been on. Even though the stories were pretty awful, they were really fun to read and some rare ones that were actually pretty good. Also, I loved taking these awesome quizzes that were made before quizilla went to shit. Damn TeenNick for ruining everything.

[2015]:

Oh my god! This site still existed. I remember I used to be all emo and "goth" back when i was 17 which was like, 10 years ago. but god damn it, Emo4eva, I can't believe how bad this stuff was and I used to be into it. This is hilarious reading this stuff.

[2015]:

Quizilla really was a pretty cool site and where I had a major transition of my life. It was just a few months ago when I tried to log on and found I couldn't that I found out that it was gone--FOREVER! :( Yes, there were a ton of crappy stories, but some were good/ decent and I'll forever miss logging into that site. Rest in peace, Quizilla. You will be missed. Also, SCREW YOU TEENNICK. I'M MAKING SURE NONE OF MY CHILDREN TO COME WATCH OR DO ANYTHING IN RELATION TO YOU. Thanks.

[2015]:

on the one hand, no one will ever find out I wrote a story where one of the major plot points was me getting married to Peter Silberman. still miss that site a lot though...

[2015]:

I started at Quizilla. I regret nothing.

Fan Comments About the Site Closure

[2014]:

Education on events is key, friends. I want everyone to know about Quizilla's history and why it has fallen. When this website closes, I don't want you all to remember Quizilla with remorse or even hate. No. I want you to walk away from this with good memories and feelings. Quizilla for me, my friends, sibling, and Y.O.U. has been a fantastic let out. Here we have hidden from s and bullies. Here we have created a loving and supportive community. Here we have made long and short-tern friends. And here is a place that so many of us have grown up in. When you hit the LOG OUT button for the very last time, I want to feel accomplished and happy. For a time YOU were important in a non-physical place and you learned so much there. Now, you are older and wiser and braver. You are ready to take on the world as it is. Feel proud of yourself and all that you've done.

When the world beats you down, you can think of all of your fondest memories. Go ahead. Reminisce those great "Glory Days" of the fine, fun Quizilla that Matthew Nielsen originally created for us. Like so many of the able things that have happened in our lives; Quizilla is just as if not more of a fond memory for our impressionable minds as we age into successful people. And when you've returned to your happiest state, you can move forward and be the most amazing you that you can be.

Thank You for taking the time to read this and for all of those amazing, memorable years. I won't forget what this site has done for me as I'm sure you all won't.

[2014]:

I used to write all kinds of fan fiction on that site... Not to toot my own horn, but I was pretty popular there; my stories were always on the "front page" they had. Spent all my summers and after school time writing more and more chapters and stories (some 'lemons' here and there, as well). I started to run out of characters to use (mine were always "you" in love with a character from an anime, not the ones with unlikely characters getting together) so I finished up all the stories and then stopped writing for a while. By the time I went back everything was different and I lost interest in the site.... Never knew it is now gone.... This makes me a little sad...

[2014]:

wow.. I loved those personalized quizzes where the author actually gave you your own story. Teen me spent a majority of my time filling out those personalized forms for Harry Potter. Now I don't know where to get my personalized answers :(

[2014]:

Don't worry, I JUST found out a few days ago it was shut down in October. I'm a little sad. All those stories I read, all the stories I wrote, poof. Gone. :( My past teen self is sad.

How easily we forget about those little things until they're all gone, no longer readily at the tips of our fingers.

[2014]:

I wish mine was still up, it may as well have been called "lesbian teen in the middle of nowhere whining because she can't get any and wishes she was a boy".

[2014]:

Holy shit, I took so many stupid quizzes on Quizilla. That's probable the first place I read fanfiction too. Wow. I made stupid quizzes too and wrote a stupid story or two, not fanfic though. Sad to hear it's gone. It's like Bebo shutting down all over again.

[2014]:

Oh yeah, I used to write Harry Potter fan fiction on Quizilla when I was 13. Man, it makes me sad to know those horrible pieces aren't still floating around on the internet somewhere. :(

Timeline

• the very end of July, 2002: The site was created by Matthew Nielsen and "released into the wild" as a quiz site.

• May 2005: Nielsen sold the website to Gorilla Nation Media (a subset of Viacom's MTV Networks).

• Late July 2005: There were lots of changes in layout.

• October 2005: Many new features under request were added such as poems, Zillapedia, and an astrology section.

• December 2005: A "tag" feature was added, a feature which allowed users to label content.

• January 2006: "Themes," sets of fonts, backgrounds, etc., could be applied to content.

• February 2006: Users could now add polls.

• April 2006: After numerous request by users, a message board was added to the site.

• June 26, 2006: Nielsen posted that he was buying a house with Quizilla profits.

• August 2006: New story and poem editors were made available. New sections were added for lyrics and "scored quizzes."

• October 2006: The site was bought by Viacom's MTV Networks.

• December 2007: The site announced that the site layout and content would be changed.

• January 2, 2008: Nielsen announced big changes to the site.

• Early May 2008: The site completely changed the site layout and content, as promised in December of the previous year. To many fans' dismay, the site's original logo - Penny the Pencil Monster - was removed.

• July 22, 2008: Matthew Nielsen wrote of his anger over turmoil at Gorilla Nation.

• August 2009: According to Alexa.com, Quizilla is the 1,680th most popular Web site and users spent an average of 10.8 minutes at the site each day.

• October 2, 2009: Matthew Nielsen tweeted: "I just finished Viacom/MTV Networks. The end boss is really hard."

• August 31, 2010: The site suffered a sudden and unexplained shut-down that resulted in many user's accounts being wiped clean and countless stories lost. All links began taking users to a 404 error page on MTV.com.

• September 9, 2011: Quizilla left the 'Most Popular Stories' section void.

• November 19, 2011: There were no stories, poems, quizzes posted to the "Most Popular," "Top Rated," "Ultimate," or "Newest" lists.

• November 21, 2011: The URL quizilla.teennick.com directed to a new quiz site linked with Teen Nick.

• November 30, 2011: Quizilla put quizzes, stories, poems back on the "Most Popular," "Top Rated," "Ultimate," and "Newest" lists.

• February 11, 2014: Few works were being posted. This was believed to be due either to a system hack, but much more likely was that many users had moved to less restrictive sites, or to sites they felt were better supported.

• September 2014: Quizilla announced it was shutting down on October 1st due to the drop in active users.

• October 1, 2014: Quizilla shut down.

Stats

2003: A year after its launch, Quizilla had over 330,000 users with above 9 million pageloads a day and more than 50 million images used on the site.

September 2005: It has 40 servers.

2005: "On an average weekday Quizilla serves nearly 3.0 million pages, most of these involving CGI code and database access. This figure does not include images, which can often surpass 10 million daily... If you go to the homepage of Quizilla.com, you will see some basic stats in the center blue bar at the top of the page. On most days over 1,000,000 quizzes are taken, 5,000 new quizzes are created and up to 2,000 people join the site as new members."

2007: Some forum stats from an unknown month in 2007: threads: 47,098, posts: 4,888,270, members: 184,705,active Members: 1,381, most users ever online was 673 on November 11, 2006

Links to Quizilla's LiveJournal Page

• Quizilla's Journal, ^{Archived version}, August 2005 and Quizilla's Journal, ^{Archived version}, November 2004, Quizilla's Journal, ^{Archived version}, November 2004

Graphics Resemblance to Slashdot.com

I think I've seen this before.

You may have, the structure and some of the questions are loosely based on the FAQ from Slashdot.org, with things changed just enough to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous galactic copyright laws.

Links to Quizilla Pages

• Quiz Mechanics
• RTFM aka The Documentation, ^{Archived version}, roughly mid-August 2005
• FAQS: October 2003, ^{Archived version}
• Image Content Guidelines
• Quizilla! Stories, ^{Archived version}, a Wayback look at a story page, September of an unknown year when there were "308430 Stories Created To Date"
• Quizilla Forums - Powered by vBulletin, ^{Archived version}, a Wayback look at a Forum page from about 2007

• Quizilla! Home Page, ^{Archived version}, Wayback link to one in July 2005

• Quizilla's Evil Usage Policy aka Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, ^{Archived version}, 2004?

• Privacy Policy, ^{Archived version}, 2004?

Photos of the Servers!

• 

  photo of the servers

• 

  photo of the servers

• 

  photo of the servers

Sample Screenshots

• 

  a home page, date unknown

• 

  first third of a stories page, date unknown

• 

  second third of a stories page, date unknown

• 

  third third of a stories page, date unknown

• 

  first third of a forum page, date unknown

• 

  second third of a forum page, date unknown

• 

  third third of a forum page, date unknown

Further Reading/Meta

• I just learned that Quizilla is no longer around. Anyone else spend their tween years taking stupid quizzes? : AskWomen, ^{Archived version} (2014)

• Why Quizilla closed? (2014)

• The Fall of Quizilla - Mibba, ^{Archived version} (2010)

• petition: We the people of Fancition lovers and writers demand Quizilla comes back., ^{Archived version} (2014)

• A look at some fandom based money numbers, ^{Archived version}, partly bouncy, June 25, 2007

• reviews of Quizilla, ^{Archived version}, 2008-2010, many by ten to twelve-year olds

References

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