New tournament database for all quizbowl events
Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2008 7:41 pm
The new tournament directory & results software is finally here, thanks to Evan Silberman. The address is http://www.hsquizbowl.org/tdb .
Right now, the following features are supported:
1) Entry of upcoming high school & collegiate tournaments
2) Searching for tournaments by proximity of any distance from any city in North America
3) Searching for tournaments by the levels of "middle school," "high school," "college," or "open"
4) Searching for tournaments within a particular state
Loads of other features, including search-by-format, search-for-nationals-qualifiers, and a searchable index of high finishers at tournaments, are currently being implemented. Once the entire feature set is working, we will begin adding tournaments from past years into this system in an attempt to create a searchable directory of all known tournament results.
Right now, I encourage you to add tournaments that your school has planned for this academic year.
The basic instructions on using the database are as follows:
To add a tournament:
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/tdb/tournaments/new
Fill in all requested details. Put the complete street address, city, state, and zip code in the "address" field and select your state from the dropdown menu. Yes, you should include the state in the address box, AND ALSO select it from the dropdown menu. Make sure you spell the city name properly and use the correct postal abbreviation for the state, to make the geographic searching work. Forum post and results post links do not need to be filled in if, as expected, you do not have that information when creating the entry. HTML in the description will be ignored, so just use plain text for now. On clicking "submit", a password will be displayed that will allow you to update the tournament page later. The password will not be displayed again, so write it down.
Note: You do not have to be the director of a tournament, or affiliated with it at all, in order to add it. Especially if the TD is unlikely to use this website, feel free to add all tournaments that you know of--as long as you get the details right, of course.
To find tournaments:
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/tdb/tournaments/upcoming shows all upcoming tournaments in the database, and will allow you to filter results by state and by field level. To search for tournaments within a certain distance of an address, use the search form on the front page. These results can also be filtered by tournament level.
Additional tips:
Please do not create entries for general tournament sets such as "ACF Fall" or "NAQT IS-81." Instead, there should be entries for each actual site of those events, with a note as to the question set used.
Please do create entries for TV tournaments, leagues, district tournaments that are part of a state series, and all other events, even if they are not part of the Saturday invitational mainstream. Again, please follow a one-to-one principle: one entry for each actual tournament. Thus, there should be entries for "Wyoming District Four Tournament," "Wyoming District Five Tournament," and so on, but no entry for "Wyoming Districts" in general. Leagues count as one tournament; don't create separate entries for each individual meet. Similarly, a TV tournament is one tournament and does not need separate entries for every episode. For all such events (and any other tournament spanning more than one day), use the date schedule for the last match of the event in the "date" field and note the full range of dates in the "description" box.
For the purpose of this database, any high school competition between school-affiliated teams that uses buzzers and is not confined to one subject is considered a quizbowl tournament that may be listed. (This means no Science Bowl or KMO for now.) At the collegiate and open level, the traditional definitions will apply (ACF, NAQT, Honda, TRASH, and so on and so forth, get listed; the Entomology Bowl does not). Feel free to ask at viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6216 if you're unsure. Generally, we're only trying to exclude things that no one would reasonably be looking for in a database of quizbowl tournaments (Academic Decathlon, Ethics Bowl, etc). Past that, we're going to be as inclusionist as possible and will not try to make any value judgments about listing tournaments.
For tournaments with multiple titles awarded (such as state championships with AAA/AA/A divisions, or invitationals with varsity/JV divisions), create only one entry. When the high finishers index portion of the site is ready, you will be able to enter each set of top finishers, with the appropriate label, separately in association with a single tournament. At this time, we are only supporting single links to results pages (which can be either threads on this forum, or pages on your own website) so please link to the most obvious page if your results span more than one link.
For the moment, please enter trash tournaments under the "open" level. In the near future, we will be implementing a separate flag for trash tournaments that will allow you to search just for those events.
This thread will be locked as a permanent announcement of the database. As additional features are implemented, they will also be announced here. If you have questions about using the database, please use this designated thread for them: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6216
I want to thank everyone for their patience over the lengthy time it took to get this new system implemented, and I invite you to take full advantage of it starting immediately.
Right now, the following features are supported:
1) Entry of upcoming high school & collegiate tournaments
2) Searching for tournaments by proximity of any distance from any city in North America
3) Searching for tournaments by the levels of "middle school," "high school," "college," or "open"
4) Searching for tournaments within a particular state
Loads of other features, including search-by-format, search-for-nationals-qualifiers, and a searchable index of high finishers at tournaments, are currently being implemented. Once the entire feature set is working, we will begin adding tournaments from past years into this system in an attempt to create a searchable directory of all known tournament results.
Right now, I encourage you to add tournaments that your school has planned for this academic year.
The basic instructions on using the database are as follows:
To add a tournament:
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/tdb/tournaments/new
Fill in all requested details. Put the complete street address, city, state, and zip code in the "address" field and select your state from the dropdown menu. Yes, you should include the state in the address box, AND ALSO select it from the dropdown menu. Make sure you spell the city name properly and use the correct postal abbreviation for the state, to make the geographic searching work. Forum post and results post links do not need to be filled in if, as expected, you do not have that information when creating the entry. HTML in the description will be ignored, so just use plain text for now. On clicking "submit", a password will be displayed that will allow you to update the tournament page later. The password will not be displayed again, so write it down.
Note: You do not have to be the director of a tournament, or affiliated with it at all, in order to add it. Especially if the TD is unlikely to use this website, feel free to add all tournaments that you know of--as long as you get the details right, of course.
To find tournaments:
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/tdb/tournaments/upcoming shows all upcoming tournaments in the database, and will allow you to filter results by state and by field level. To search for tournaments within a certain distance of an address, use the search form on the front page. These results can also be filtered by tournament level.
Additional tips:
Please do not create entries for general tournament sets such as "ACF Fall" or "NAQT IS-81." Instead, there should be entries for each actual site of those events, with a note as to the question set used.
Please do create entries for TV tournaments, leagues, district tournaments that are part of a state series, and all other events, even if they are not part of the Saturday invitational mainstream. Again, please follow a one-to-one principle: one entry for each actual tournament. Thus, there should be entries for "Wyoming District Four Tournament," "Wyoming District Five Tournament," and so on, but no entry for "Wyoming Districts" in general. Leagues count as one tournament; don't create separate entries for each individual meet. Similarly, a TV tournament is one tournament and does not need separate entries for every episode. For all such events (and any other tournament spanning more than one day), use the date schedule for the last match of the event in the "date" field and note the full range of dates in the "description" box.
For the purpose of this database, any high school competition between school-affiliated teams that uses buzzers and is not confined to one subject is considered a quizbowl tournament that may be listed. (This means no Science Bowl or KMO for now.) At the collegiate and open level, the traditional definitions will apply (ACF, NAQT, Honda, TRASH, and so on and so forth, get listed; the Entomology Bowl does not). Feel free to ask at viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6216 if you're unsure. Generally, we're only trying to exclude things that no one would reasonably be looking for in a database of quizbowl tournaments (Academic Decathlon, Ethics Bowl, etc). Past that, we're going to be as inclusionist as possible and will not try to make any value judgments about listing tournaments.
For tournaments with multiple titles awarded (such as state championships with AAA/AA/A divisions, or invitationals with varsity/JV divisions), create only one entry. When the high finishers index portion of the site is ready, you will be able to enter each set of top finishers, with the appropriate label, separately in association with a single tournament. At this time, we are only supporting single links to results pages (which can be either threads on this forum, or pages on your own website) so please link to the most obvious page if your results span more than one link.
For the moment, please enter trash tournaments under the "open" level. In the near future, we will be implementing a separate flag for trash tournaments that will allow you to search just for those events.
This thread will be locked as a permanent announcement of the database. As additional features are implemented, they will also be announced here. If you have questions about using the database, please use this designated thread for them: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6216
I want to thank everyone for their patience over the lengthy time it took to get this new system implemented, and I invite you to take full advantage of it starting immediately.