To give credit where it's due: I think these particular packets explore many cool topics that don't show up a lot in standard quizbowl tournaments. As far as I can tell, the author is a member of these forums (though they have not made a post) and is a player in good standing in the IRL quizbowl community. I enjoyed reading through them. I am very much in favor of people writing questions on their areas of interest and offering those questions for community use.
However, I think it's sort of odd that a packet that functionally wasn't in the quizbowl community's public record, and that wasn't possible for people to play prior to upload, is now a part of the collegiate archive.
In the recent past, there have also been worse and weirder uploads, including low-effort packets full of intra-team in-jokes (of the sort that might get played within a club's end-of-year social event) and a (now-deleted) packet that had unverifiable and bizarre clues that were likely produced by ChatGPT.
I do think there's some genuine uncertainty about what the "guiding philosophy" of the archive is. Should it be a comprehensive collection of everything anyone has ever written in the quizbowl format? If so, it wouldn't be a problem if random packets get uploaded out of the blue by people who feel like writing them. Should it maintain standards of quality or "historicity" that limit to events that had a wide audience and were clearly a part of good quizbowl's public history, so that teams looking to practice on good questions know they'll find them? If so, it may make sense to raise the standards for reviewing new uploads.
Now it is to some extent a good thing that a well-frequented site gives people who wrote some packets for a small audience (or who maybe didn't have any chance at an audience) a chance to push those packets out to a bigger audience. It'd be kind of callous to say "just host your packet somewhere else" when this one archive has had far more visibility than any other for over a decade. I also think that "a packet I put together for some friends" is a different kind of thing than a full set that got announced, written, edited, hosted, mirrored, and discussed by dozens to thousands of people, and it's beneficial to maintain that distinction in whatever archive we have. (The long-awaited impending overhaul is likely to change the specifics of what the archive looks like and how packets are stored/categorized, so more precise suggestions can wait till after that.)
So I suggest a minimal change -- add just two steps to the upload process:
- Ask for validation that a publicly accessible announcement was made
- Ask for results of the packet having at least one public reading
As use of These Boards declines, we could construe each of these broadly: the announcement could be a forums post, message in the public quizbowl Discord, social media post set to Public visibility, independent blog, etc., and the results could be a stats page, a link to a public Discord with the quizbowl reader bot outputting a score, some confirmation on social media, etc. but both should be accessible to archive admins.