Tournament Writing Software

[whaatt]

In the past, my school, like many others, has written and hosted quiz bowl tournaments at both the Middle and High School levels. This was often a tedious process: Everyone would be assigned to write X questions on subjects A, B, and C, which, assuming this nebulous responsibility was not neglected, would then be emailed to a coordinating figure working tirelessly to provide feedback, make edits, filter by distribution, and ultimately compile question sets.

From now on, those days are gone. End sales pitch.

Last summer, I developed an internet-based question writing database very loosely modeled after Wikipedia. Since then, my program has been used in three tournaments -- Triangle Science Bowl I, Right Triangle Open XI, and RCHS MSQB 2013 -- to collaborate on questions and crowdsource many of the tasks previously delegated to "chief editors." I now wish to submit my feeble coding to public criticism and use.

Features include password-protected tournament creation, different levels of editing permission, the ability to select users as subject-area managers, a question feedback system, a colorful statistics page, the ability to manually or automatically generate packet sets, support for Science Bowl's notorious format, and obviously, the composition of tossups and bonuses with all pertinent formatting available for use.

Known issues include a occasionally possible but unproven lack of randomness in automatic packet creation in addition to any bugs you find and report. I have also not done significant amounts of user load testing, but I am relatively confident that this will remain a non-issue, AFAIK. TODO items include the creation of a forgot-your-password interface as soon as I can test my server's email capabilities. Until then, contact me for password resets.

Obviously, it is understandable that you might not want me to have access to your questions at my server's back-end, though I will assuredly avoid doing so. However, please contact me if you would like to install this code on your own server with PHP/MySQL support, and I can help you out with that. Other technologies used include HTML5/jQuery/CSS/AJAX. Screenshots are located here, here, and here.

As I mentioned previously, tournaments are password-protected. If you're just looking for a taste of what this is like, I have a Test Tournament made especially for that purpose. The tournament name is "Test Tournament" without the quotes, and the tournament access code for editor-level permissions, which is always a randomly generated six digit number, is 582690. Trolls, please keep your spamming in moderation!

Would you like the website, the code, or an example packet made of PACE questions? I apologize in advance for poor documentation.