Hosting a broadcast rank quiz

Rank Quiz is a quiz overlay you place on your stream. You type a few items in the correct order, viewers see them shuffled, and after chat predicts the order you reveal from the bottom up. Viewers guess. The screen only hides and reveals the answer.

One thing up front: this tool holds no ranking data of its own. We don't load sales figures, population counts, or chart data. You type both the question and the correct order yourself. That means accuracy and sourcing of the ranking is on you, the host, and the screen itself says the correct order is a value the host set.

In other words, this tool handles staging, not the data. You decide where the ranking comes from; this screen handles hiding it and pacing the reveal.

What one question looks like

One question is a title plus several items. The title asks what is being ranked, and the items are the names competing for that ranking. Items have a true order, but the screen shuffles them, so viewers only see a name list and question marks.

How a reveal proceeds

When you click Reveal next, the lowest rank opens first. Click again and the rank above it opens, and so on until only rank 1 is left. Only one slot opens per click, which leaves room for predictions in between.

When it ends

The question ends once every item has a rank showing. There's no timer and no fixed question count, so you can run one question per segment or chain several together. Who guessed how many right is something you, the host, tally from chat, not the screen.

From here, this is what the tool actually does. This varies between similar overlays, so reading it once saves surprises mid-stream.

Two to ten items

One question can hold two to ten items. Setup starts with four blank slots, and Add item / Remove last item adjust the count. Any blank slot is simply skipped, and a URL won't build with fewer than two filled items. Titles go up to 40 characters, item names up to 20.

Settings live only in the URL

Filling in the title and items produces an overlay URL that carries the question content directly. Nothing is saved on our server and no account is created. Paste that URL into an OBS browser source, set the recommended size 420 by 640, and the transparent background lets it sit right over your stream.

One caution goes with this: since the URL carries the correct order, pasting it into chat leaks the answer. What goes to viewers is the screen, not the URL.

How the shuffle works

The on-screen layout is shuffled using a value derived from the item names. So the same question always lands in the same layout on a refresh, and reloading the source mid-stream won't shuffle it again. It has nothing to do with the date, so a URL made yesterday opens the same today. Change even one character of an item name, though, and it's treated as a different question with a fully different layout.

Reveal and rewind

Reveals happen from the browser source's interact window by clicking Reveal next. An opened slot turns amber and shows its rank number; unopened slots stay a question mark. Once at least one slot is open, a Restart button appears alongside to close everything and start over. Once every slot is open, the button reads All revealed and stops responding.

No scoring, no saved progress

We spell out what this tool doesn't do, too. There's no input field for viewer answers and nothing counts correct guesses. It builds no accuracy rate or leaderboard, so tallying who got how many right is on you, watching chat. There's no timer and no sound.

How far you've revealed isn't saved either. Refresh the overlay or reload the OBS source and reveal state resets to zero. The question itself lives in the URL, so it isn't lost, but treat any progress up to that point as gone.

Visit metrics only report which screen was opened and whether a round finished. Quiz content like the title or items never reaches the server.

These are hosting tips picked up on stream, not something the app does for you, but settling on them upfront cuts a lot of time off writing questions.

Pick rankings you can cite

Official sales figures, music charts, or published statistics work well because you can name where they came from on air. A citable source keeps viewers okay with a wrong guess and keeps disputes from dragging on. A vague popularity ranking, by contrast, invites why is that number one after the reveal and drags the segment out. Since the screen can't display a source, it helps for you to say it out loud once instead.

Five to eight items

Five to eight items most viewers recognize by name works best. Three ends too fast, and ten loses steam partway through. If even one unfamiliar name sneaks in, that slot stops being a prediction and becomes a guess, so think twice before adding an unfamiliar item.

Take a prediction before you reveal

Revealing from the bottom keeps the rank-1 candidate in play until the end, building tension. That tension needs a gap between reveals to work. Before you click Reveal next, ask what chat thinks is coming, read how the guesses split, then click. Clicking through back to back just fills the list in without any of that.

Put the twist in the middle

A question comes alive when an item everyone assumes is last turns out to be #3, or one that looks like #1 is actually #2. This kind of twist works better mid-reveal than as the first or last click. Front-load it and the rest feels flat; save it only for the end and the early part drags. Planting just one item where expectation and reality diverge is enough.

Prebuild your URLs

Since a question lives entirely in its URL, you can build several ahead of time and keep them in a notes file before the stream. Mid-segment, swapping just the OBS source's URL moves you to the next question. That's safer than opening the setup screen live, since that screen shows the answers in order and a slip sends it straight to air.

Use the rewind as a bit

The Restart button isn't only for undoing a mistake. Close out a fully revealed question and bring the same URL back on a later stream as a recap round. Asking whether anyone remembers last week's ranking gives regulars an edge and changes the room's energy.

Tie it to a challenge

Grant a wish to anyone who gets every item right, or set a penalty scaled to how many they miss, and one question becomes a full segment. You can also chain it with our sibling tool Territory Grab, wagering a tile on the outcome. Since the screen doesn't score anything, agree on the judging rule out loud before you start.

The URL won't build

With fewer than two filled items, the URL slot just shows placeholder text. This usually happens when you've expanded to four slots but only filled two, and blank slots are ignored, so it's fine to leave them. A slot with only spaces counts as blank too.

The overlay only shows a placeholder message

A message saying no quiz is set up means the question data got cut off the URL. This happens if the part after the question mark got dropped while copying, or a line break snuck in while pasting. Copy the URL again from the Copy URL button on setup and paste it in whole to fix it.

Reveal state reset itself

As noted above, how far you've revealed isn't saved. Reloading the OBS source or toggling the scene off and on mid-stream resets everything to question marks. The question itself lives in the URL so it isn't lost, so click Reveal next the same number of times to get back where you were. Not touching the source mid-segment is the safest bet.

The answer leaks early

There are only two places an answer can leak from this tool: the setup screen, where the correct order is spelled out, and the overlay URL, which carries that order. Finish setup before you go live and never paste the URL into chat. If you're screen-sharing your whole browser, it's worth double-checking the address bar isn't visible too.

Text looks cut off

Item names can run up to 20 characters, but the board has a fixed width, so a long name looks cramped. Shorten it to something viewers recognize instantly rather than spelling it out in full, and say any longer explanation out loud instead, since it reads better on screen that way.