Quizbowl Resource Database enhancements and requests

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ScoBo
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Quizbowl Resource Database enhancements and requests

Post by ScoBo »

After almost two years of slow progress, I think I FINALLY have this entry merging functionality done! There unfortunately won't be many public facing changes in this next release, but at least we'll be able to finally go through and more easily clean up duplicates and other clutter from the database.

After all of the time I spent working on the same new functionality, I want to spend some time focusing on making several small but useful enhancements to work through the backlog of suggestions to the features that are already available rather than start work on another big feature.

Here's a list of unimplemented suggestions I've received (mainly from the TDB help thread) and some ideas I've had myself, roughly in order of increasing complexity:
  • Add a link to Harry's database search page since the database itself currently doesn't have that functionality
  • Automatically convert URLs to links
  • Add "last modified" metadata to entries (requested to help with Harry's database search)
  • Basic search parsing (e.g. "2014 Regionals" becomes a search for "Regionals" in 2014)
  • Tournament search: add option to filter out tournaments without statistics
  • Improvements to tournament list on "account" page ("add tournament" link, pagination, etc.)
  • When uploading an SQBS report, allow the user to select all files at once (similar to how the packet upload form works) rather than having to select each file individually
  • A prominent box or similar element at the top of certain pages that provides a quick link to upload stats when the user owns the entry for a tournament that is being held that day (or within a certain relative time frame). This also serves as a reminder that the entry already exists to help avoid creating duplicate entries.
  • Improvements to edit stat report page (display date of tournament, provide warning if attempting to overwrite stats for a tournament that happened a long time in the past)
  • Email notification and other improvements when creating entry on someone else's behalf/transferring entry to another user.
  • "Copy" entry functionality: when adding a new entry, provide a way to pre-populate the form with data from another existing entry
  • Add ability to retrieve tournament search results as an RSS feed
  • Pricing form improvements (preset prices, add staffer discount as a default option, copy pricing from another entry, etc.)
  • Automatically extract packets in uploaded .zip files (so that search engines can index them), and maybe provide a link to download all files uploaded to a question set as a single .zip file (if the entry has no .zip files attached).
Other suggestions/ideas that will probably wait until several of the above are done:
  • Anything that requires new data types (people, organizations, etc.)
  • Team and staffer databases (although this shouldn't be too complex)
  • Improvements to quizbowlpackets.com - Adding quality/difficulty ratings, searching for sets (either native to quizbowlpackets or a link to the existing hsquizbowl search), maybe a search box to search packet content using Google
  • Schedule database
  • Advanced ownership permissions (will probably require underlying "person" and "organization" support first)
If you have any additional suggestions for small improvements or enhancements I could make to the existing tournament and question set functionality, feel free to post in this thread. Again, I'm primarily targeting incremental improvements that could be implemented in a short amount of time, so that I can complete as many small enhancements as possible before I start work on the next major feature.
Jeffrey Hill • Missouri Quizbowl Alliance president • UMR/Missouri S&T 2009 • Liberty (MO) 2005
Post your tournaments, SQBS reports, and question sets to the Quizbowl Resource Center Database!
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Mike Bentley
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Re: Quizbowl Resource Database enhancements and requests

Post by Mike Bentley »

It would be great if there was a way to specify the final placement of teams from an uploaded SQBS file. Often it's not completely clear when there are multiple divisions, records carrying over, etc.
Mike Bentley
Treasurer, Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence
Adviser, Quizbowl Team at University of Washington
University of Maryland, Class of 2008
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Fado Alexandrino
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Re: Quizbowl Resource Database enhancements and requests

Post by Fado Alexandrino »

ScoBo wrote: [*]A prominent box or similar element at the top of certain pages that provides a quick link to upload stats when the user owns the entry for a tournament that is being held that day (or within a certain relative time frame). This also serves as a reminder that the entry already exists to help avoid creating duplicate entries.
The creator of an entry could add names to a list of other accounts that could potentially input stats. This simplifies the situation where the TD has to give ownership to the statskeeper who then gives it back to the TD to input the finals and/or corrections, or situation where there are multiple statskeepers who don't have to create a throwaway account (like what we did for NSC this year) and all statskeepers can upload statistics from their own accounts.

Could the database potentially spot common statistic input errors that SQBS isn't currently programmed to catch? The two main examples I am thinking of would be warnings for TUH != gp*20 and total bonus points ending in 5.
Joe Su, OCT
Lisgar 2012, McGill 2015, McGill 2019, Queen's 2020
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Cody
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Re: Quizbowl Resource Database enhancements and requests

Post by Cody »

Having just encountered this problem (and also having dealt with it in the past), it would be good to have the stylesheet incorporate printing page breaks for printing to PDF / paper.

For the individuals page, this can be solved with the following style specification (stolen from some stackexchange thread or another).

Code: Select all

<style type="text/css">
   table { page-break-inside:auto }
   tr    { page-break-inside:avoid; page-break-after:auto }
</style>
It seems like for standings you would need some hybrid of that and page-breaking before headers (more desired).

I do not know about the other pages.
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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