Search found 72 matches

by kevink
Thu Apr 20, 2017 12:09 pm
Forum: Databases and Quizbowl Software
Topic: State of QB Databases, 2017
Replies: 3
Views: 4289

Re: State of QB Databases, 2017

Protobowl's latest question dump probably has the most tossup questions (105,923 in the latest dump) but it doesn't have any bonuses. It's comprised of questions scraped from a number of databases, including a custom parser, tweaked over the years through the protobowl question reporting interface. ...
by kevink
Wed Dec 18, 2013 11:39 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Wow, my favorite feature is totally the thing where if you miss too many questions Protobowl sends you an automated message that says (and I am not making this up) you suck like seriously you suck. you are a turd. Jesus H. Christ (the H stands for "high school section"), why on earth woul...
by kevink
Sun Nov 17, 2013 2:48 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I'm working on a new version of Protobowl which uses Github as a central question repository. This means that anyone can add their own packets with their own questions or fix broken questions. Get started here: http://github.com/neotenic/packets All the main questions are in /qb/ Folders are organi...
by kevink
Sat Nov 16, 2013 7:57 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I'm working on a new version of Protobowl which uses Github as a central question repository. This means that anyone can add their own packets with their own questions or fix broken questions. Get started here: http://github.com/neotenic/packets All the main questions are in /qb/ Folders are organiz...
by kevink
Wed Oct 16, 2013 12:04 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

There's a new ProtoBowl app. Yay. It doesn't work for iOS6. >.> Nay. I don't want to update my iPhone to iOS7, but... I didn't make the iOS or Android apps, but the creator says that there is currently a bug which causes it to crash on iOS6, but that it's designed to support both iOS 6 and 7 and th...
by kevink
Fri Oct 04, 2013 10:21 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Lefty734 wrote:I noticed that protobowl has been offline for the past day. Is there something wrong?
Nodejitsu just sucks
by kevink
Thu Sep 19, 2013 2:37 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Anyone notice protobowl forgot to renew their domain name? Yeah, ben stopped checking the email that he used to register the domain. We're trying to get it back. Just a heads up for anyone who might be interested in getting a domain at any point in the future DO NOT USE REGISTER.COM . In the mean t...
by kevink
Thu Aug 29, 2013 9:04 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Oops! Missed it by a day, but now Protobowl is officially 1 year old! To my knowledge, it's mostly stable right now. The server fallback mechanism works pretty well (which is a good thing given how unreliable Nodejitsu can sometimes be)- though it isn't totally automatic right now (i.e. if it's slow...
by kevink
Thu Jun 27, 2013 8:11 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Yo, every time I try to join /lobby from the homepage link, my browser window closes, and whenever I try to join it via typing in the address or the "Feeling Lonely?" box, the only things that come up are the timer, directions, and miscellaneous bars or whatever. Latency and sync offset a...
by kevink
Sun Jun 16, 2013 9:00 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

The answer checker has been significantly improved. I built a script which went through the protobowl log files to find out commonly accepted answers by the old algorithms to determine which words should be bolded so that the majority of questions don't require excessive knowledge of the subject's (...
by kevink
Thu Jun 06, 2013 12:05 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

This. The reasons HSQB and QBWiki are relatively devoid of racial slurs and whatnot are probably twofold: one, the quizbowl community is a relatively tight-knit one, composed mostly of halfway sane high school students and college (under)graduates, and two, we're all mandated to be clearly identifi...
by kevink
Wed Jun 05, 2013 8:36 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Look, if this latest change works, great. But the reason nothing has worked in the past is because people keep asking "can you make sure that people's first experience with quizbowl is not having the n-word shouted at them while people cheat at questions they have heard before" and your a...
by kevink
Wed Jun 05, 2013 6:12 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Having the lobby be a "welcome to protobowl, create a room" splash page seems like it would take basically no effort and would stop 99% of the stupidity. You could easily do this for a week or two as a trial run and see how it goes. tl;dr, temporarily (?) nuke the lobby and see how many o...
by kevink
Tue Jun 04, 2013 11:23 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

The Protobowl lobby is pretty atrocious. A few months ago we appointed a handful of moderators to patrol the lobby in hopes that it'd curtail the rampant racism and trolling, and apparently it worked for a short while, but there aren't nearly enough moderators to provide the constant monitoring whic...
by kevink
Tue May 28, 2013 10:19 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Is there a limit on how many questions you can bookmark/star/save? Not in the new version, but in the old (current) version the app would slow down until it becomes unusable. Anyway, new search has pagination http://i.imgur.com/5pvkJM6.png Also different bookmark levels http://i.imgur.com/qgItV16.p...
by kevink
Fri May 24, 2013 8:59 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

By 'this' I meant more like "notification of impending updates on site where said updates are going to occur". Uh, maybe. Anyway, happy date-of-conception-day (uh, is there a term for that?) to protobowl! [hr] Soon I'm going to rewrite the answer checker algorithm to take into account the...
by kevink
Wed May 22, 2013 5:15 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

point 1. More pics? point 2. Will any of this go on the site itself before it happens/has this already been done and I'm just stupid? Protobowl hasn't been updated since March (you can find that out from the build date on the bottom). So the update will happen when it does. The question header has ...
by kevink
Mon May 20, 2013 6:05 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

So I've been working on the next version of protobowl for a few days now, and it's making good steady progress http://i.imgur.com/ZWTDSo9.png But in a few short days we'll be at the earliest possible day which could be plausibly considered Protobowl's first birthday. May 24th 2012 was the first day ...
by kevink
Tue May 14, 2013 12:23 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I'm curious, is "Zhongguo" just some sort of hidden portion of the answer line, or is there like an algorithm that identifies common alternative answers? I'm fairly certain the algorithm isn't doing anything cool and special like that. It's probably just a very fortunate coincidence becau...
by kevink
Fri May 03, 2013 4:49 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Okay, it should be fixed now.
by kevink
Sun Apr 07, 2013 10:42 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I just randomly got banned along with many other users almost immediately after joining the room. I haven't been monitoring protobowl recently, but there haven't been any recent reports, so I assume it's been fixed. Right? Anyway, we're still working on protobowl, though we haven't done anything in...
by kevink
Mon Feb 25, 2013 4:42 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

On the flipside of what people were saying earlier, what if someone claims to be a certain person, but obviously isn't? Should they be kicked to protect someone's reputation? It's kind of hard to exactly know when someone's being an imposter. The first round of moderator acceptances is over, but we...
by kevink
Mon Feb 11, 2013 5:27 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

thyringe_supine wrote: EDIT: I see there is now 'distraction-free' mode. That's cool.
Also, little thing, you can click on the timer widget to collapse it.
by kevink
Sun Feb 03, 2013 12:18 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Also, I've noticed that resetting your score resets your streak as well. I guess that's intentional right? Well, it's not exactly unintentional, but should it be the other way? I think one possible move that could make admins more effective is to give moderators the ability place quarantines on the...
by kevink
Tue Jan 29, 2013 10:59 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Is there any way to make the app enforce these rules, or would it have to be monitored? At the most basic level, yes, but for other kinds of rules, no. You can't enforce etiquette programmatically. I like the idea of a reprimand button; I've also been working heavily with message (for which I have ...
by kevink
Tue Jan 29, 2013 12:43 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Is it possible to selectively incorporate that? Technically yes, but it's a bit complicated, and there are more than a few reasons I don't want to implement that. So, on to more practical things. As I mentioned earlier, I had no idea private rooms now hold the majority of traffic. What exactly woul...
by kevink
Mon Jan 28, 2013 4:03 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Some updates: Ban tribunals can not be created if one or more moderators are present and active You can't run immediately again for access to the room settings if your previous election campaign was unsuccessful (If you ran, and not enough people voted, you can't run again for 4 minutes, and if you ...
by kevink
Sun Jan 27, 2013 12:37 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I peeked into this a few times--with all due respect to the technological innovation that produced it, it's terrible. It's obviously just people cheating, making racist/offensive comments, and playing on sets they've read a million times. I can't see how this would be enjoyable or recommended for a...
by kevink
Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:34 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I would suggest you impose an upper limit, say, 1000 characters, on the length of possible chat messages / question responses, since there are people pasting in enough text at once to freeze the page until it's reloaded. Okay, the limit's been added to the release which should be deployed tomorrow ...
by kevink
Sun Jan 13, 2013 10:18 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

mithokie wrote:If I create a new room by typing in a name Example: "protobowl.com/example", can I then invite people to join me by sharing the link to that room?
Yes
by kevink
Sat Jan 05, 2013 9:40 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

thyringe_supine wrote:So, as I said, ban tribunals can be triggered by profanity?
Not automatically, but yeah, it's enough to give others the option of starting a tribunal. We figure it's a good compromise between people who complain about profanity and people who choose to use that kind of language.
by kevink
Thu Jan 03, 2013 3:44 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

perlnerd666 wrote:
thyringe_supine wrote:EDIT(2.1.2013): Server down?
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/protobowl.com

Also seeing this on my end.
Oops there was a weird bug that gave a server error to users without the cookie.
by kevink
Thu Dec 27, 2012 5:45 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I have never been able to use the offline feature. I click the 'Disconnect' link, but cannot advance the question after doing so. Is there something I'm doing wrong? Also, i would still request an option to remove neg penalties/power bonuses in order to better emulate certain formats that do not us...
by kevink
Thu Dec 27, 2012 1:52 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

So I think I've found out the nature and cause of the lag issue, and it should be more or less solved in the latest release.
by kevink
Wed Dec 19, 2012 5:16 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Assuming that you have a random number generator available which I will call rand(), and you are already collecting data on how many times a question has been read [ int(inc_random) ], you could choose the question with the smallest value of value=(rand()+int(inc_random))/rand(). This biases the se...
by kevink
Wed Dec 19, 2012 3:44 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

There's something wrong with the randomisation algorithm. Sometimes it gets stuck into repeating a tossup every second, or fourth question, or back-to-back, though this can be mitigated by skipping. I think it may be triggered by enabling a custom distribution, and changing the ratios too much, esp...
by kevink
Tue Dec 18, 2012 6:50 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Do you think you could add a PPG statistic to the little stats sidebar when you click on someone's name? It could be split up into "lifetime PPG" and "PPG in the last 20 tossups" or something. I think it would be easy to do and would definitely *ahem* be more helpful to gauge pr...
by kevink
Wed Dec 05, 2012 7:43 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

It would be awesome if you could set multiple difficulty levels without enabling them all, e.g. being able to see HS and College, but not MS. Also, something that would be really helpful would be separate difficulty settings for each category. Yes, this would be great. There was a huge amount of la...
by kevink
Fri Nov 30, 2012 6:59 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Ah well, I guess they were just refreshing and coming back in then. They claimed to be blocking their IP address, but I suppose it didn't make a difference either way. Anyway I just added per-room IP bans and a three-strike policy (i.e. getting banned three times from an IP results in a 20 minute b...
by kevink
Fri Nov 30, 2012 5:21 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

O Fortuna wrote:I'm not sure if there's anything you can do about it, but people are able to repeatedly circumvent the banning mechanism by masking their IP address. It can get somewhat problematic.
I don't think that's the actual problem, we aren't doing any IP specific bans yet.
by kevink
Thu Nov 22, 2012 4:16 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I think allowing questions to be submitted is a bad idea. It's not so much about submitting original material for protobowl, but to take those packets which are already on packet archives and to insert them into the protobowl database because parsing them (from their native pdf, rtf, doc or docx fo...
by kevink
Tue Nov 20, 2012 10:23 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Right now I have a guy whose job it is to go over all the mislabeled question reports and to approve or reject them. Presumably I could expand what he does to include reviewing user submitted questions, but that does open up the opportunity of more subtle attacks (changing obscure facts, etc). So I'...
by kevink
Tue Nov 20, 2012 3:00 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

So far, this has been great. Is there any chance of getting a hold of a bonus database for use? My team has set up a room, and it works very well. The ability to establish custom distribs is great, and the UI is very smooth. EDIT: Perhaps include several common distribs, ACF, NAQT, the like? The qu...
by kevink
Mon Nov 19, 2012 11:20 am
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Dewey wrote:So for the admin powers, should we message you to request them or will they somehow be granted automatically? (bullet point #5)
Message me and you can beta test the feature.
by kevink
Sun Nov 18, 2012 11:29 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

I guess I haven't written a changelog type post in quite a while, so I'll try to recap some of the more significant changes as of late "next" (keybindings are j, n) no longer works when there's any time left on the clock. This is different from the previous behavior which would skip to the...
by kevink
Sun Nov 18, 2012 11:03 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: Quiz Bowl Search Engine
Replies: 8
Views: 5541

Re: Quiz Bowl Search Engine

Cool! It took a while to figure out that the search bar was that green bar below all the text. It's fine to eschew the default styling, I think that's a rather nice way to keep search subtle, but I'd suggest that you put some placeholder text so that people can discover that they're actually suppose...
by kevink
Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

One thing I think this really needs is some sort of room ownership or admin power because I have difficulties with people being disruptive in my private school channel and as (1) they don't have to identify themselves through the username and (2) I can't shut them out unless the ban mechanism trigg...
by kevink
Sat Nov 17, 2012 12:02 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Also, the site's been hacked. Okay, yeah, I guess that was inevitable. Actually, Ben told me to do this like as the first thing to do, but I really don't like typing passwords, and that's why. Okay, I'll push an update soon. It was actually sort of an experiment to see how long it would take for pe...
by kevink
Thu Nov 15, 2012 6:43 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

Protobowl looks really cool -- definitely a lot prettier than the crude multiplayer QB game I smacked together over the summer. Just wondering, do you have any sort of API that I can query to grab questions? I have a few miscellaneous QB related projects (including a QB-playing Watson-style robot) ...
by kevink
Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:32 pm
Forum: High school area archives
Topic: ProtoBowl
Replies: 367
Views: 183794

Re: ProtoBowl

cornfused wrote:This is incredibly nit-picky, but it's t-r-o-u-t, not t-r-a-u-t.
Oh, thanks! Please mention it if you find any other typo (or if anything's worded awkwardly).