I build Boardit, a free browser game site, and one of its six games is a live quiz called Trivia Tavern. As of 4 October 2026, its public pages describe a bank of nearly 4,000 checked questions across 38 topics, and the site's trivia hub prints 663 of them as samples on 17 topic pages. The bank was rebuilt on 26 and 27 September 2026.
This post is not a copy of our files. It is the structure I would hand anyone starting a question bank of their own, and where something Trivia Tavern does in public explains a field, I say so.
Keep one question per line
Store each question as one JSON object on its own line. The format is called JSON Lines, and its whole specification fits on one page at jsonlines.org. A broken record then breaks one line, not the whole file. A diff shows exactly which question changed. And counting the bank is a line count, not a guess.
Here is one record, written for this post. It is not from our bank:
{"id":"rivers-0001","difficulty":"easy","question":"Which river runs through Cairo?","answer":"Nile","wrong":["Danube","Thames","Volga"],"explain":"Cairo sits where the Nile Valley meets the Nile Delta.","sources":["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo"],"subject":"Nile"}
That is eight fields. The rest of this post gives the reason for each.
The id outlives every edit
An id is the only part of a question that survives being fixed. Correct a typo or relabel the difficulty and the id stays, so any answer history still points at the right question. Never give an old id to a new question.
Difficulty is a field because it changes the score
In Trivia Tavern an easy question is worth 100 points, a medium one 200 and a hard one 300, and that weighting is the same in every room. So a wrong label is a scoring bug, not a matter of taste: a "hard" question that everyone knows pays three times what it should.
Rounds also build. On the default Mixed setting, each round starts with questions nearly everyone knows and ends on a couple of hard ones. A dealer can only do that if difficulty is a field it can read.
I counted the labels on one public sample page on 4 October 2026, the landmarks topic: 39 questions, of which 16 are easy, 15 medium and 8 hard. That is about 41%, 38% and 21%.
Settle one thing before anyone labels anything. With four options, a blind guess is right one time in four. If difficulty means the share of a casual table who get it right, lucky guesses included, no label can honestly sit below 25%.
Wrong answers get their own list
Store the right answer and the three wrong ones apart, and do not store a letter. Every Trivia Tavern question has four options, with no lifelines and no passing, and options in any quiz like this should be shuffled each time a question is shown. A stored "C" is wrong the moment you shuffle.
A separate wrong list also lets you review the wrong options on their own, which is where weak questions hide. For what makes a good wrong option, start with Haladyna, Downing and Rodriguez's review of 31 item-writing guidelines (Applied Measurement in Education, 2002). Two of its plainest rules: keep the options alike in kind and length, and avoid "all of the above".
An explanation, and where the fact came from
When Trivia Tavern reveals an answer, the result stays up for six seconds and shows how many people chose each option. A table that has just got something wrong wants to know why, and one explain sentence gives a reveal something to say. Make it a new fact, not the answer said again.
sources is a list because one link is not enough for anything a player could argue with. Our changelog calls the rebuilt questions "checked", and a check needs something to check against, kept next to the question rather than in someone's head.
Topic and subject are not the same field
A topic is what a host picks: football, flags, the ancient world. In Trivia Tavern a match left on Mixed gives every category an equal share, and most topics hold about a hundred questions, with more for football and for food and drink. Keep the topic in the file name, so moving a file moves its questions.
A subject is narrower: the one thing a question is about, such as a river or a person. With it, a dealer can avoid asking two questions about the same thing in one match, where the first tends to give the second away. Spell subjects one fixed way, such as an encyclopedia article title.
What no format can check
A schema checks shape. It can refuse a record with two wrong options or no source. It cannot tell you that a fact is true, that a subject is famous enough for your table, or that "easy" really is easy. A second reader can catch the first two. Only real answers, collected over time, settle the third.
The same fields work for trivia questions written for a pub or a classroom, and for a trivia quiz you run as trivia online with friends.
Trivia Tavern does not take questions written by players, so all of this is for people building a quiz of their own. If you want to see a finished bank from the player's side, the quiz is one of the games on Boardit.
Ahmed Moaz builds Boardit, a free browser game site, from Egypt.
