Why We Renamed Two of Our Tests

On 17 September 2026 we changed the names of two tests on this site. The character-strengths test, which we had been presenting under the VIA name, is now simply called Character Strengths. The affection-styles test, which we had been presenting under the love-languages name, is now called Love & Affection Styles. Nothing else moved: the URLs are the same, the scoring keys are the same, the items are the same, and nobody's result was re-scored. If you took either test before that date, your result still exists, still sits in the same place, and still means exactly what it meant when you finished it. What changed was the sign on the door, and this post is about why the old sign was wrong and what rule we now use to decide what a test on this platform can be called.

If you came here looking for the official VIA Survey, this isn't it

Let's answer the awkward question first, because you may have arrived here by searching for something specific and you deserve a straight answer rather than three paragraphs of preamble. Our Character Strengths test is not the official VIA Survey. The VIA Classification of Character Strengths is stewarded by the VIA Institute on Character, a non-profit, at viacharacter.org, and the official VIA Survey is administered by them — that is where you go if what you want is the instrument itself, with its own history, its own norms, and its own research programme behind it. We are not affiliated with the VIA Institute, we are not endorsed by them, and our test is not the official 240-item VIA-IS. It is an original instrument inspired by the VIA classification, with items we wrote ourselves.

Both things can be worth your time, for different reasons. If you are doing coursework, working with a coach who uses the official materials, or you want the instrument that the published literature is built on, go to the source. If you want a free, quick read on which strengths sit at the top of your profile — and you want it in a place where it sits alongside your other results and can be read next to them — ours is built for that. The same logic applies to the framework behind our Love & Affection Styles test: the five love languages framework is Gary Chapman's, it is his idea and his book, and our test is not his instrument. What we use is the underlying insight, which is that people differ systematically in how they prefer affection to be given and received, expressed through items we wrote.

The rule we adopted

Here is the line we drew, and it is the whole point of this article. A trademarked name may name the other product in a comparative or attributive construction. It may never name ours. So "a free alternative to the five love languages test" is legitimate — it refers to Chapman's instrument in order to say something true about the relationship between his and ours, which is exactly what the name is for. But "Free Love Languages Test" as the title of our own page is not legitimate, because there the name is doing something different: it is functioning as our product's name, and it tells you that you have arrived at the thing you were searching for when you haven't. The distinction is not a matter of degree or tone. It is the difference between pointing at something and claiming to be it.

We were on the wrong side of that line, and once it is stated plainly it is hard to argue with. Nobody set out to mislead anyone; the names drifted in because they are how people actually talk about these frameworks, and when you are building a test page the search term and the concept feel like the same object. They aren't. The concept is available to everyone — that is what a published framework is for, and building on one is normal, legitimate, and how most of the field works. The specific instrument that made the concept famous belongs to the people who made it. Using the framework was fine. Presenting our test as being that instrument was not, and the fix was to change the names rather than to find a cleverer way to keep them.

What the tests actually are

With the naming settled, it is easier to say clearly what you get. Character Strengths asks 73 items across six virtues — wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence — and ranks 24 strengths within them, so what you come away with is an ordering rather than a verdict: which strengths you lean on most, which sit in the middle, and which you use least. That last group is the interesting one for most people, because a low-ranked strength is not a deficiency; it is just somewhere you don't habitually spend your energy. Love & Affection Styles asks 30 items and returns the five affection styles in the order they appear to matter to you. Both are instruments for self-understanding — a structured way of looking at yourself and, ideally, a better vocabulary for a conversation. Neither is clinical, diagnostic, or medical, and neither should be used as though it were.

If you want more on either framework before you take anything, the guide to character strengths covers what the classification is and what the six virtues are actually organising. And because affection styles are so easily confused with something they are not, attachment styles vs love languages is worth reading alongside our attachment test — the two describe different layers of the same relationship and answer different questions about it.

What did not change, and why that matters

It is worth being precise about the scope of a rename, because "we changed the names of two tests" can sound alarming if you have a result sitting in your account. Nothing about the measurement moved. The items are unchanged, the scoring is unchanged, the six virtues and the 24 strengths are unchanged, the five affection styles are unchanged, and the URLs are unchanged, which is why an old link still works and an old result still reads the same. There was no re-scoring, because there was nothing to re-score — a name is metadata, not measurement, and treating a naming problem as a reason to touch the scoring would have been the wrong repair. The only thing that is different is that the page now tells you accurately whose instrument you are taking.

Being honest about how young these are

While we are being candid, here is the less flattering part. Character Strengths has been completed 13 times. Love & Affection Styles has been completed 101 times. Those are small numbers, and we would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise. A young instrument is not a bad instrument — the items were written deliberately, against the structure of the frameworks, and the scoring does what it says — but we do not yet have our own reliability figures for either test, and we are not going to borrow somebody else's and present them as ours. That is the same mistake as the naming, in a different costume: citing the published properties of an instrument we did not administer in order to make ours sound more settled than it is. When we have enough completions to compute reliability for these two, we will publish what we find, including if it is unimpressive.

That is also the honest reason to keep some perspective about any single result, ours included. A test result is one reading from one instrument on one day, and the useful move is almost always to read several together and look at where they agree — which is more or less the argument in what personality tests actually measure, and a better frame than treating any one score as a fact about you.

If you want to see how we decide what an instrument on this platform may claim — about its items, its scoring, and now its name — that is written up in our methodology.