People often email or post about how Typeracer should add more texts. We have about 700 at present, but we realize that this number needs to keep increasing, especially as some users complete a lot of races and start to see the same texts over and over again. If you’ve been on Typeracer for a while, you probably are familiar with the “Wait, didn’t I just type that quote?” feeling.
If you included your username with your text submission, this how it will be displayed.
Text submission link on our home page.
If you’re a Typeracer veteran, you may be aware that you can submit your favorite texts to Typeracer. But if you’re like some most people, you might not have seen “Contribute” link at the bottom of the main page.
Anyway, starting last year, we requested help from some of our most trusted users, and put together a small team consisting of vonunov, schoaib_shahnawaz, fyda, Vikas Yadav, and Alexander Omorodion (Agizzlefizzle123) to help me comb through over 5,000 texts that had been submitted via the “Contribute” link. First, we eliminated the ones which were unusable, either due to being too short, being incomplete, being inappropriate, or other reasons. For a reason still unknown to me, some people go to the “Contribute” form and enter excellent, high-quality quotes such as “lol u sux”, and then hit submit. Most of these didn’t make the cut. Sorry.
Our text selection process involved a number of large, colorful spreadsheets.
After eliminating the big losers, we used a voting process, where each member of our super cool “new text team” indicated that they either liked a particular text (giving it “1 point”), or didn’t like a text (giving it no points). The texts were ranked based on this point system, ranging from 5 or 6 points (meaning nearly everyone thought the quote would be good on Typeracer) to 1 or 0 points.
I then entered the first batch of the highest-ranked texts into our database, making sure to match all the submissions to the username and Pit Stop page of the submitter. This way, the people who submitted quotes get credit for them. If your text got added, and you included your Typeracer username on the submission form, your username will show up whenever people finish a race on that text. After everything was submitted into the system, our tech genie Typeracer founder Alex Epshteyn (typeracer) did some stuff that we don’t really understand, in order to transfer and activate the new group of texts in the main site, play.typeracer.com.
Now that we have this curation process in place, we will be able to keep adding more texts at more frequent intervals moving forward. Today we’re launching about one hundred new texts, and there are still plenty of high-rated texts in our curated spreadsheet we could add. We’ll get them out there over the coming coming months. Thanks to everyone who helped! We hope all Typeracers enjoy the new texts.
Do you have texts you’d like to submit to Typeracer? Submit them here. We could also use more help filtering and choosing best texts from new submissions, so if you want to volunteer, feel free to email support AT typeracer DOT com and let us know!
Thanks!
David Pritts (valikor)
