Features
Part of Lookalike user submissions: what we keep and what we drop
Why user submissions quiz rounds get refused
User submissions quiz proposals rarely survive: no provenance, private faces, and items about young people that are refused and deleted on sight.
A share of reader mail does not ask a question. It proposes a game: here are some photographs, can you guess who this is, would this make a good lookalike round. User submissions quiz proposals — submitted quiz items — are the highest-risk material a lookalike and face-match desk receives, and the reasons have nothing to do with how good the items are.
The quizzes this desk publishes are face rounds built from photographs: two images, same person or not. That is the context a submission enters, and it is why provenance matters more here than it would in a quiz about trivia.
What to take away
- A submitted item usually arrives with no provenance, so nobody knows who took the picture, when, or whether the subject knew.
- The best items, by quiz standards, are the ones most likely to involve somebody who is not public, because unfamiliar faces make a harder round.
- Items involving young people arrive regularly and are refused without discussion, since a school or family photograph is not quiz material.
- Running someone else's photograph as a question publishes it, and publishing it is the part that cannot be undone.
Provenance is missing by default
A submitted image has usually been through several hands. What is left contains no reliable information about origin, date, or consent. A desk cannot verify any of it. Publishing the image implies publishing was fine, and that claim rests on no evidence. Verification is harder because synthesized imagery of real people now circulates in ordinary feeds.
The quiz format selects for the wrong subject
A good quiz round needs items that are not instantly recognizable. That criterion, applied honestly, pushes straight toward people who are not widely photographed, which means people who are not public figures.
Submitters feel this without naming it: their proudest items usually involve someone a general audience would not know, and those are exactly the items that must not run.
The desk applies that line, set out in the user submissions policy on why private individuals are the boundary. The quiz format is a machine for crossing it.
What a submitted item asserts about the subject
What a submitted item asserts
| What the item does | What it asserts | Who agreed |
|---|---|---|
| Uses a person's photograph | This image is available to publish | Nobody asked |
| Names them as an answer | Their name belongs beside this image | Same as row 1 |
| Offers other names as distractors | Those people are confusable with them | Same as row 1 |
| Scores the player | There is a right answer about a face | The format, not the people |
The table lists what each action asserts and who agreed to that assertion, with the final row set by the format. In US law, the interest a person holds in the commercial use of their name and likeness is protected by the right of publicity, a doctrine set by state law. That interest is exactly what the second and third rows disregard, and the third row is the one that quietly produces a permanent pairing.
What a submitted item asserts
What the item does
- Uses a photograph
- Image is publishable
- Names them as answer
- Name belongs beside image
- Offers distractors
- Those people are confusable
- Scores the player
- Right answer about a face
What it asserts
- Uses a photograph
- Nobody asked
- Names them as answer
- Nobody asked
- Offers distractors
- Nobody asked
- Scores the player
- The format, not the people
Who agreed
- Uses a photograph
- Names them as answer
- Offers distractors
- Scores the player
Items about young people
These arrive more often than anyone expects: a class photograph, a family album picture, a childhood image of somebody now grown. The category is refused entirely and the material is deleted immediately, without a discussion of whether the particular case is fine.
There is no version of this that gets improved by careful handling. The correct procedure is to not have the file.
What can be built instead
A quiz that names nobody. Same-or-different items using unfamiliar faces, condition tests using one face under two lighting setups, or a self-test run on the player's own photographs. Every one of these measures something closer to face perception than a celebrity round does, and none of them produces an artifact that outlives the game.
An acceptable round can show two different faces and ask same or different, or show one face under window light and under a desk lamp.
Those formats get more detail in the lookalike quizzes guide.
The named version measures so little for the same reason images cannot support it, which the guide to lookalike comparisons covers. The permanence problem is set out in the celebrity lookalikes account of what a published pairing does to a name.
How a submitted item is handled
- It is read, refused by category, and deleted. No reply is sent unless the sender asks; any reply names nobody and quotes nothing.
- No file is kept, indexed or noted, including items that were nearly acceptable.
- If it involves a young person, the material goes immediately. Any reply is one line.
- If the sender asks why, they get the reasoning above in one reply rather than a policy reference.
Common questions
What if the photograph is already widely published?
Wide circulation says nothing about whether the subject agreed, and republishing it as a question adds a claim on top.
Could a submitted item run with the subject's permission?
A desk cannot verify permission from a stranger, and the distractor names in the item still belong to people who gave none.
Is a quiz about fictional characters acceptable?
That is a quiz about costumes and production design, which is a different thing entirely and carries none of these problems.
