ShmooFAQ

ShmooFAQ is a live trivia contest held during ShmooCon 2025 in Washington. Teams of up to five people answer multiple-choice questions on paper answer sheets across several rounds, each with its own subject and test ID. The hosts run the event with heavy crowd interaction and a short list of rules, including no shouting out answers and no devices during rounds.

The questions range widely in difficulty. Early rounds cover basic facts about the conference, classic computing and networking, such as common ports, binary arithmetic and protocol names. Later rounds move into arts and literature, drawing on hacker-themed novels and films, then the history of the field and its landmark incidents, then science covering electronics and word plurals. A final round uses certification-style questions. Technical glitches interrupted the show partway through, and a side fundraiser for the Electronic Frontier Foundation ran alongside the contest.

When the scores were tallied, the winning team was announced and the audience was credited with raising more than $1,500 for the EFF. For a practitioner, the main value is social: a low-stakes way to test general knowledge, meet the community and spot gaps in fundamentals. The content is trivia rather than explanation, so it offers little technical depth.