The Quizbowl Resource Center

When you post in your private discussion forum, please use thread titles that contain the name and year of the tournament, such as:

"Wyoming Quizbowl Invitational 2014- Tossup difficulty discussion"
"Wyoming Quizbowl Invitational 2014- Thoughts on the history questions"

and not:

"Discussion"
"Science"
"Logistics"

and so on. The reason for this is as follows: When each tournament is clear for general discussion, private forums are dissolved back into the general discussion archives. This is necessary to avoid having dozens of subforums and user groups dominating the interface. Having titles like the first examples above makes it easier to figure out what tournament the thread was originally about once the subforum is gone.

Conversely, forums set up for the editors of a tournament are never opened for public viewing; they are moved to the "editor-specific forums" section of the archives, but are still restricted to those people who could see them in their original location. As such, you can title threads in those forums however you wish.

When requesting to join private discussion groups, even if you don't plan on posting, please make sure that you have enabled a signature containing your name and affiliation (in accordance with board rules). People approving membership requests need to be able to see who you are in order to make sure there's no issue with giving you forum access.

Thanks!

Another brief request from your friendly forums admins: when requesting the creation of a private forum, please include the forums account name of at least one person (generally some subset of the editing team) to be assigned as a leader of the usergroup, who will be responsible for approving join requests. This saves us some time tracking down the relevant usernames (which are surprisingly hard to search!) and can make your lives a lot easier by spreading the responsibility for approving requests out over more than one person.

Thanks again!

Board staff would like to apologize for the issues with private forum creation over the last competition year. We've gone through and updated the email address to add several admins, and talked about this on the staff subforum, and we'll do our best to ensure that your private forums get created promptly once requested.

As always, when you're requesting a private forum, please send an email to [email protected] that includes:

1. The words "private forum" somewhere in the subject; if you don't include this, the email will not forward properly.

2. The hsqb usernames of the people you would like to be the group leaders, who will be in charge of vetting and approving requests for access.

It would also be helpful to know the first date of your event.

We will try to create your private forums within two days of the request; if we don't, please respond to your initial request with a reminder. You're welcome to request the creation of the forum before your event occurs if you would like discussion to start promptly (but please wait until a couple of weeks before your event at the earliest to send advanced requests so we aren't swamped with requests all at once).

UPDATE: As suggested by Emmett Laurie and others here, please send a send a second email to [email protected] (still with the words "private forum" somewhere in the subject) when your set is clear and you would like its private discussion forum to be made public. This should significantly increase the efficiency of this process.