Quiz Rooms: Challenge Three Friends, No Waiting Around

Revising alone is quiet work, and quiet work is easy to abandon. Quiz Rooms are the opposite: you generate a quiz on whatever you are studying, send one link to your group, and up to four of you take the same questions and compare scores.

Nobody has to be online at the same time. You play your round when you open it, your friends play theirs when they get to it, and the scores fill in as people finish.

What changed, and why

This used to work differently, and it is worth being honest about it. The room was originally a live race: everyone had to be present, and only the host could press Start.

It did not work. Over the feature's whole life, 33 rooms were created and not one was ever finished.

The reason turned out to be obvious in hindsight. Sending an invite means leaving the app for WhatsApp — so by the time your friend opened the link, you were no longer on the screen to press Start, and they sat in a waiting room with no button they could press. Ever.

So the waiting room is gone. Anyone with a seat can start their own round, alone, immediately.

The part that matters most

Your friends do not need a Flaevo account.

They open the link, type a name, and they are in. No sign-up, no email, no install. This is deliberate — a study group is not a place to make people fill in a form at 10pm the night before a paper.

How it works

1. Make the quiz. Generate one the way you normally would: type a topic, paste your notes, or upload a lecture PDF. Before you generate it, switch on Play with a Friend. The room is created for you and you land in it as the host.

2. Send the link. The Share Invite Card & Link button opens your phone's normal share sheet, so it goes straight to a WhatsApp group. Or copy the link and send it yourself.

3. Play, whenever. Press Start my round and go. You do not need anyone else to be there, and you do not need permission from the host — every player has that button, including you if you joined last. Arriving late is fine: there is no "this quiz already started" dead end any more, so a link opened three hours after everyone else still lets you play.

4. Watch the scores land. Your results appear the moment your round is done. Anyone who has not played yet shows as "--" and fills in when they finish. If two of you happen to be playing at the same time, you will see each other's progress moving live — but nothing depends on that happening.

5. Read the results properly. The end screen is a ranked leaderboard, not just your own score. The answer review then shows every player who picked each option — so you can see that three of you chose the same wrong answer, which is usually the moment somebody says "wait, why is that wrong?"

6. Your mistakes come back. Anything you got wrong is added to your spaced-repetition review deck automatically. The competition is the fun part; this is the part that moves your grade.

As the host you also get 3 days of Pro once somebody joins your room — and you get it just by opening your own link again, so you no longer have to be watching at the instant they arrive. It is once per room, not once per person: four friends is three days, not nine.

Is it safe to drop the link in a group chat?

Fair question. A link anybody can open sounds like a link anybody can abuse. Here is what actually protects the room.

The link is the only way in. Rooms cannot be listed, searched or browsed. There is no page anywhere that shows which rooms exist or who played whom. If you do not have the exact link, the room may as well not exist. (This was not always true — until early August an anonymous request could list rooms that had been played. We found it in a security audit and closed it properly rather than just making it harder.)

Rooms expire after 24 hours. Not "hidden after 24 hours" — the server refuses to let anyone in. An old link that resurfaces in a group chat next week opens nothing.

Four players, and no more. A fifth person is told the room is full. Nobody gets quietly bumped out of a game they are already playing to make space.

Your seat is yours. When you join, your device is given a private key that stays on your device. Reload the page, lose signal in a lecture hall, or come back after a phone call, and you return to your own seat with your own score — instead of burning one of the four seats on a duplicate of yourself.

Nobody can play as you. Moving your progress or submitting your score requires that key, so another player in the room cannot write to your seat, and neither can somebody outside it.

Scores are final once submitted. A score can be set once and not overwritten. Nobody can resubmit until they like the number.

Only the real host can host. Asking for the host seat is not enough — it is checked against who actually created the room, and only that person can claim the room's Pro reward. (Starting a round is not a host power. Every player has that, which is the whole point.)

None of this requires you to do anything. It is just how the room works.

When it is actually worth using

• The night before a paper, when everyone in the group has read the same chapter and nobody is sure any of it went in
• After a lecture, on the slides you just sat through, while it is still fresh enough to argue about
• In a class group chat, as a way of finding out what the whole group is weak on — if all four of you miss the same question, that is the topic to take to your lecturer
• When you cannot make yourself start. A quiz with somebody else's score waiting at the end of it is much harder to put down than a quiz you are taking alone.
• When your group can never agree on a time. This is the one the old version could not do at all. Nobody has to be free at the same moment.

Try it

Open Quiz, switch on Play with a Friend, generate one on whatever is next on your timetable, and send the link to your group. Then play your round straight away — there is nothing to wait for.

If it does not behave the way this post describes, tell us through the feedback option in Settings — that is honestly how most of what we fix gets found.