How does BuzzFeed know that you're Chandler? Like the rest of the Internet, we've been spending too much time taking quizzes lately. While the BuzzFeed quizzes can be hours of fun -- a 10-question quiz has more than 3 billion potential answer combinations -- sometimes it's more interesting to know why you got the result you did.
To find out, I looked into the code behind the quizzes and created a bookmarklet to help explore which answers lead to which results.
To lift the veil and see just why it was that BuzzFeed thought you belonged in Michigan, just drag this BuzzCheat link to your bookmark bar. Then go to a Buzzfeed quiz -- such as this one. Once there, click on the bookmark that you added, and the answers you need to get a certain result will reveal themselves.
(Disclaimer: This code makes certain assumptions based on a small sample of quizzes that might not be true for all of them. It also may stop working at any time.)
Here's how the quizzes work:
Each question's choices have a number assigned to them. (The choices aren’t listed in order, so choosing the first answer to each question won’t get you a particular result.) When you answer a question, it stores that answer's number. Once you've finished the quiz, it checks to see which numbers were answered most frequently and finds the corresponding result.
For example, on the ”What Font Are You” quiz, the Courier answer is result No. 3, so answering each question with the option assigned to No. 3 will give you Courier as your final result.
Summer Anne Burton, BuzzFeed's managing editorial director, noticed our bookmark and said on Twitter, "smart bookmarklet, but what it's showing you is just *a* path to get the result you want, not all of the matching answers."
It's true: There are billions of ways to be Chandler.