ProtoBowl

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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

perlnerd666 wrote:
pk14ster wrote:How does the ban system work? One of my team members was banned from our private room twenty minutes ago but is currently unable to rejoin. Is it possible to create a moderator system who has the power to change distributions and settings and hand out bans?
Yes, also this is prone to trolling ("hey let's ban the guy who's scoring the most points").
Ok, I've made some changes to the ban system so you can now vote to not ban someone (though not to unban), and the bans only last 10 minutes, also it should be harder now to trigger the mechanism.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by conquerer7 »

I have sort of the reverse problem: I can play with somebody in the same room, and we can see each other online, but we'll effectively be in different rooms: we'll have different questions and not be able to see each other buzz. Somehow they can see my chat messages, and I can't see theirs.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by jonathanmarx »

Is there a way to create and name a new room? i.e. if I wanted to create one for my team, could I name it RM instead of just something random?

This is great - thanks so much!

EDIT: Never mind, got it - I'm an idiot.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

Protobowl will soon support bonuses, well, at least in the application code. The database doesn't have any bonuses in it (It's based on a copy of QuizbowlDB's eponymous DB, though the miscategorized questions are actually being fixed as they're being reported). However, Protobowl's mostly stable at this point, so development will probably slow down at this point. Of the 30694 questions in the database, 1201 questions have never been read (all of those are College questions, it seems that not many college people use Protobowl). The most unpopular category is Social Science.

Nodejitsu (our hosting provider) is leaving beta, so operating Protobowl is starting to incur actual costs (it works out to about $50/yr which isn't actually that much considering that it gets almost a thousand visits per average day). Ben lost a bet so he's paying for things for now, but in the longer term, donations will probably be necessary for its continued operation.

That said, at the moment I don't think Protobowl is really having any scalability issues, so feel free to continue sharing Protobowl, because paradoxically enough we're more willing to spend money maintaining the server and the application when the user base is bigger. Google Analytics says that the average visit duration is 25 minutes, which is really pretty incredible user-engagement wise. The audience is almost exclusively the United States and states which use Protobowl the most are (in order): California, Texas, Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Maryland, Georgia, Missouri, and New York. In much of the midwest, nobody's ever used protobowl.

If anyone has a bunch of JSON-formatted questions (tossups or bonus) that I can add to the database, I'd be willing to add that to the database. Right now there's a little experiment with 150 or so certamen questions at http://protobowl.com/certamen/lobby (bonuses are in the database, but they haven't been deployed quite yet). The main thing holding me from adding other types of things is that it's a hassle to parse packets and to download and crawl stuff.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Emil Nolde »

methinks a callout to Illinois players to show those young upstarts how it's done is in order.
Also, how exactly will bonus possession work? Will PPB be a measured stat? Will there be bouncebacks? Actually, right now aside from score and interrupts, there aren't really any metrics to Protobowl. It'd be nice if we were able to gauge progress while we practice.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Eddie »

thyringe_supine wrote:methinks a callout to Illinois players to show those young upstarts how it's done is in order.
Also, how exactly will bonus possession work? Will PPB be a measured stat? Will there be bouncebacks? Actually, right now aside from score and interrupts, there aren't really any metrics to Protobowl. It'd be nice if we were able to gauge progress while we practice.
If you click the name of each player in a room, you can get a detailed summary of his or her performance.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by vinteuil »

We're getting some major server issues (5 people in a room, decent amount of activity, people get dropped, intense lag, etc.)
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

perlnerd666 wrote:We're getting some major server issues (5 people in a room, decent amount of activity, people get dropped, intense lag, etc.)
There was a server update deployed around 9:50, so a few server issues are to be expected, but they should have settled down to normal levels. What room is this happening on in particular? Also, what are you defining as lag?
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by vinteuil »

"Lag"—I attempt a certain action, sometimes several times, and I do not see any evidence of the action for several seconds.

Things have indeed settled down; the room was "echhs"
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

perlnerd666 wrote:"Lag"—I attempt a certain action, sometimes several times, and I do not see any evidence of the action for several seconds.

Things have indeed settled down; the room was "echhs"
What actions in particular?
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Emil Nolde »

pk14ster wrote:
thyringe_supine wrote:methinks a callout to Illinois players to show those young upstarts how it's done is in order.
Also, how exactly will bonus possession work? Will PPB be a measured stat? Will there be bouncebacks? Actually, right now aside from score and interrupts, there aren't really any metrics to Protobowl. It'd be nice if we were able to gauge progress while we practice.
If you click the name of each player in a room, you can get a detailed summary of his or her performance.
I was unaware, thank you.

Also, a relatively simple thing would be to put a comments box for the 'report question' function, in case it doesn't entirely fit in one category. For instance, in my travels I've seen a few questions that had multiple functioning power marks, there should be a way to be more specific about problems like that.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by vinteuil »

kevink wrote:
perlnerd666 wrote:"Lag"—I attempt a certain action, sometimes several times, and I do not see any evidence of the action for several seconds.

Things have indeed settled down; the room was "echhs"
What actions in particular?
Buzzing (often registers about a line later, and the entry box does not appear for a few seconds) especially.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

thyringe_supine wrote:
pk14ster wrote:
thyringe_supine wrote:methinks a callout to Illinois players to show those young upstarts how it's done is in order.
Also, how exactly will bonus possession work? Will PPB be a measured stat? Will there be bouncebacks? Actually, right now aside from score and interrupts, there aren't really any metrics to Protobowl. It'd be nice if we were able to gauge progress while we practice.
If you click the name of each player in a room, you can get a detailed summary of his or her performance.
I was unaware, thank you.

Also, a relatively simple thing would be to put a comments box for the 'report question' function, in case it doesn't entirely fit in one category. For instance, in my travels I've seen a few questions that had multiple functioning power marks, there should be a way to be more specific about problems like that.
Well, anything other than "category" probably needs to be manually edited by someone (at the moment, they're just all thrown onto a queue that doesn't get processed). But incorrect categories get fixed, I go through and approve them and the questions get fixed about once a day. If something like that happens just mark it as wrong details or bad question.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by vinteuil »

perlnerd666 wrote:
kevink wrote:
perlnerd666 wrote:"Lag"—I attempt a certain action, sometimes several times, and I do not see any evidence of the action for several seconds.

Things have indeed settled down; the room was "echhs"
What actions in particular?
Buzzing (often registers about a line later, and the entry box does not appear for a few seconds) especially.
Definitely happening again. Also, it's not working with Safari's private browsing for some reason.

[EDIT: I hate purple links, ok?]
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Eddie »

I see you got image support - nice! The only problem with this is that it's a little vulnerable to trolling, as a couple of people have already begun posting inappropriate images (porn, gore, etc.).
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Kilroy Was Here »

Could you just get rid of the skip function? It leaves it open to trolling and general frustration.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by vinteuil »

Weighted Companion Cube wrote:Could you just get rid of the skip function? It leaves it open to trolling and general frustration.
Except when playing single-player or with a small group of people, when it can be useful (skip all science except biology or skip all biology, etc.). Maybe disable it in the two big public rooms?
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

So now the disable skip option also prevents completing the question with F, there's a new vote to lock settings feature and a system for users to bring up banning tribunals.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Maxwell Sniffingwell »

This is incredibly nit-picky, but it's t-r-o-u-t, not t-r-a-u-t.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

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).
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by whaatt »

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) that would really benefit if I could dynamically fetch tossups from a database. I've been using QBDB's API, but outages are not infrequent over there, so a backup source would be nice. Even the database file might be helpful; I could set up an API on my own servers.

Again, really nice work on your site.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Beevor Feevor »

Some answers that should really be taken aren't, as evidenced by them negging me on "30 Years War" instead of "Thirty Years War". I was only typing the short version because of hesitation about my typing skills anyway.....
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

whaatt wrote: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) that would really benefit if I could dynamically fetch tossups from a database. I've been using QBDB's API, but outages are not infrequent over there, so a backup source would be nice. Even the database file might be helpful; I could set up an API on my own servers.

Again, really nice work on your site.
I'm not terribly interested in setting up an API because the server resources are already at this moment quite limited. It's essentially based on the same database as QuizbowlDB. However, there are category mis-labels which are getting fixed. Right now they're at a pretty usable state (the past day or so has resulted in very few category reports), I'm guessing most of the high school level questions have been corrected, but college questions seem to be seen significantly less and have fewer reports. There are still some broken questions which need to be fixed, so perhaps later, I might publish an update. https://github.com/antimatter15/protobowl/downloads
Einhard wrote:Some answers that should really be taken aren't, as evidenced by them negging me on "30 Years War" instead of "Thirty Years War". I was only typing the short version because of hesitation about my typing skills anyway.....
Yeah, an update to the answer checker is long overdue, but it's coming.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Kilroy Was Here »

Anyway you can remove the pause button in the Lobby? Nobody actually uses it, people just troll with it.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Maxwell Sniffingwell »

Also, the site's been hacked.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by whaatt »

cornfused wrote:Also, the site's been hacked.
Yeah, the admin page is relatively obvious in the source code for people who are just poking (I'll be the first to admit that I was peeping around). From what I've seen of the admin page, it's pretty powerful; I just banned myself for fun once or twice, but not everyone will refrain from its public abuse. What might be useful is a password to access these features, and you can store it as a plain-text MD5/Whirlpool/etc.. hash in your source code so it can't be reverse engineered either.

That's what I've done for the admin features on Qub, and it seems to have worked pretty well, other than when I've absent-mindedly typed it into the chat box instead of the command box on my site. D'oh!
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

cornfused wrote: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 people to find out.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Dewey »

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 triggers, I have some rather extreme difficulty keeping control sometimes. Just like a kick or temp ban mechanism or a channel admin password would be awesome.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Eddie »

Dewey wrote: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 triggers, I have some rather extreme difficulty keeping control sometimes. Just like a kick or temp ban mechanism or a channel admin password would be awesome.
Please.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

Dewey wrote: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 triggers, I have some rather extreme difficulty keeping control sometimes. Just like a kick or temp ban mechanism or a channel admin password would be awesome.
I'll look into this. In the mean time, anyone with more than 50 points in a room with at least 3 users can trigger a ban tribunal by clicking the red ban button that appears on the right of certain actions.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by vestben »

Dewey wrote: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 triggers, I have some rather extreme difficulty keeping control sometimes. Just like a kick or temp ban mechanism or a channel admin password would be awesome.
I've been trying to convince Kevin that this would be a good idea for the past two or three months. Maybe now that the people have spoken I will be able to convince him, bwahaha.

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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by whaatt »

kevink wrote: I'm not terribly interested in setting up an API because the server resources are already at this moment quite limited. It's essentially based on the same database as QuizbowlDB. However, there are category mis-labels which are getting fixed. Right now they're at a pretty usable state (the past day or so has resulted in very few category reports), I'm guessing most of the high school level questions have been corrected, but college questions seem to be seen significantly less and have fewer reports. There are still some broken questions which need to be fixed, so perhaps later, I might publish an update. https://github.com/antimatter15/protobowl/downloads
Thanks for the JSON file. I downloaded it and uploaded it to my domain, with a little AJAX application to search at http://skalon.com/untitled. I'll make a post that talks more about this, for anyone interested.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

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 next question if there was less than 5 seconds (i.e. the question was finished being read).
  • Administration tools are now password protected, so it shouldn't be an issue anymore of people logging on to cause mayhem
  • "secret ninja", protobowl's lexicon for "admin" now gets prefixed with a magic wand icon just to be more identifiable
  • Duplicate usernames are automatically suffixed with a # (if two people are named "bob", there will be a "bob #1" and "bob #2")
  • There's the beginning of something which might resemble private rooms. There's no interface for it yet, but it's possible to enable an "admin" flag on users, and this gives them a little star icon before their name and gives them power to create ban tribunals or to temporarily ban people without due process.
  • The local database handling code has been moved over to a separate file, local.coffee
  • Identical Events/Messages/Actions get collapsed together, this can help alleviate certain trolling issues. For instance, if someone were to perpetually reload the page, this would no longer fill the screen with "abc left the room", "abc joined the room", but rather it'll just be one "(52x) abc reloaded the page".
  • The backend has been upgraded from Express 2.5 to Express 3.0
  • Keeps track of additional user attributes, mostly different times (last action, last session, creation)
  • Global Settings lock preference, probablistically initialized for new users
  • Moving window scoring, calculates scores based entirely on performance during the last 20 questions to simulate points-per-game skill metric
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Dewey »

So for the admin powers, should we message you to request them or will they somehow be granted automatically? (bullet point #5)
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

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.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by heterodyne »

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?
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

This Urn Is So Grecian wrote: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 questions are based on the set used in QuizbowlDB which hasn't been updated in about a year. I've written a basic sort of parser and classifier, but I'm not terribly satisfied with the functionality of either. I also don't have an indexer or anything like that.

However, one alternative is having people manually taking these packets and inputting them into a form for inclusion into the database. This depends of course on the willingness of people to spend a minute or so copying and pasting questions for inclusion in the database.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by heterodyne »

kevink wrote:
This Urn Is So Grecian wrote: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 questions are based on the set used in QuizbowlDB which hasn't been updated in about a year. I've written a basic sort of parser and classifier, but I'm not terribly satisfied with the functionality of either. I also don't have an indexer or anything like that.

However, one alternative is having people manually taking these packets and inputting them into a form for inclusion into the database. This depends of course on the willingness of people to spend a minute or so copying and pasting questions for inclusion in the database.
These are quizbowlers, I doubt you'd have trouble with that.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Kilroy Was Here »

kevink wrote:
This Urn Is So Grecian wrote: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 questions are based on the set used in QuizbowlDB which hasn't been updated in about a year. I've written a basic sort of parser and classifier, but I'm not terribly satisfied with the functionality of either. I also don't have an indexer or anything like that.

However, one alternative is having people manually taking these packets and inputting them into a form for inclusion into the database. This depends of course on the willingness of people to spend a minute or so copying and pasting questions for inclusion in the database.
Please don't do this. If people are willing to continually press the pause button, people will be more than willing to flood it with things that aren't actual questions.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by heterodyne »

Weighted Companion Cube wrote:
kevink wrote:
This Urn Is So Grecian wrote: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 questions are based on the set used in QuizbowlDB which hasn't been updated in about a year. I've written a basic sort of parser and classifier, but I'm not terribly satisfied with the functionality of either. I also don't have an indexer or anything like that.

However, one alternative is having people manually taking these packets and inputting them into a form for inclusion into the database. This depends of course on the willingness of people to spend a minute or so copying and pasting questions for inclusion in the database.
Please don't do this. If people are willing to continually press the pause button, people will be more than willing to flood it with things that aren't actual questions.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but does pause spam actually happen? I'd also like to point out that if the database could be made to automatically reject things that are not in packet format (and I'm not a computer person, so I don't know how hard that would be), then most of the trolls just wouldn't spend the time.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Masked Canadian History Bandit »

This Urn Is So Grecian wrote:
Weighted Companion Cube wrote:
kevink wrote:
This Urn Is So Grecian wrote: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 questions are based on the set used in QuizbowlDB which hasn't been updated in about a year. I've written a basic sort of parser and classifier, but I'm not terribly satisfied with the functionality of either. I also don't have an indexer or anything like that.

However, one alternative is having people manually taking these packets and inputting them into a form for inclusion into the database. This depends of course on the willingness of people to spend a minute or so copying and pasting questions for inclusion in the database.
Please don't do this. If people are willing to continually press the pause button, people will be more than willing to flood it with things that aren't actual questions.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but does pause spam actually happen? I'd also like to point out that if the database could be made to automatically reject things that are not in packet format (and I'm not a computer person, so I don't know how hard that would be), then most of the trolls just wouldn't spend the time.
You're just lucky; it happens. There would have to be some sort of manual control or else trolls could submit questions like:

1. This person is the reason why you're so stupid and why you suck. In addition for being the reason why you're ugly, this person is also the reason why you're really fat. This person is themselves fat and ugly. For 10 points, name this terrible person who is the reason you're alive.
ANSWER: YOUR MOM
Last edited by Masked Canadian History Bandit on Tue Nov 20, 2012 9:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

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'm probably not doing that in the immediate future.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Eddie »

A side idea kind of relevant to this would be creating a room in which users can submit their own questions (with their intended difficulty, subject, etc.) and others can playtest them and provide feedback.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by heterodyne »

pk14ster wrote:A side idea kind of relevant to this would be creating a room in which users can submit their own questions (with their intended difficulty, subject, etc.) and others can playtest them and provide feedback.
I endorse this idea.

There is also the possibility of user accounts, although I've heard that can be hard to implement, but account bans would discourage bad question entering.

EDIT: If it's not clear, I mean the register-y kind, not what's currently there. I read an article or something, said that a short registration process can cut down on trolls significantly.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by vestben »

This Urn Is So Grecian wrote:
pk14ster wrote:A side idea kind of relevant to this would be creating a room in which users can submit their own questions (with their intended difficulty, subject, etc.) and others can playtest them and provide feedback.
I endorse this idea.

There is also the possibility of user accounts, although I've heard that can be hard to implement, but account bans would discourage bad question entering.

EDIT: If it's not clear, I mean the register-y kind, not what's currently there. I read an article or something, said that a short registration process can cut down on trolls significantly.

I'm actually currently in the process of implementing user accounts which would allow for a large number of additional benefits to those who want to spend a lot of time on protobowl or want additional features that are not possible without user data persistence, such as aggregated statistics. Entering questions in manually could be an option to the other problem, however, I don't believe manual data-entry is ever a valid option to something that can be relatively easily automated. Although I'm currently fairly busy with school and the user account things I will look into parsing existing data packets some time soon, no promises on the results of that investigation though.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Christian Okoye »

I think allowing questions to be submitted is a bad idea. I may be wrong, but the only packets that aren't loaded up on the popular softwares (QuB, Protobowl, and QB Central) are the sets from the 2011-2012 school year, where most, if not all of them, are already loaded on other packet archives, or in the case of the HSAPQ sets, right here. There are two main inherent cons of allowing user submissions; trolling and question integrity. If players from across the country, some of whom may be either ignorant of the principles of question integrity and not posting material from uncleared sets, are given an opportunity to submit material then there is a potential for questions to be compromised by either an ignorant student or a malevolent troll. If there is a huge problem with trolls just skipping questions and crap like that, then there is bound to be someone who'll ruin the resource for everyone.

Also, not to sound pretentious, but I don't think the average protobowl user has the ability to judge the quality and accuracy of a peer's question that a more skilled and experienced writer/editor, such as an ACF member, could. A more optimal idea would be to promote ACF's Writer Feedback Program amongst your friends.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Eddie »

Christian Okoye wrote:A more optimal idea would be to promote ACF's Writer Feedback Program amongst your friends.
Is that program still active?
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by kevink »

Christian Okoye wrote: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 formats) isn't particularly easy.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by O Fortuna »

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.
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Re: ProtoBowl

Post by Smuttynose Island »

pk14ster wrote:
Christian Okoye wrote:A more optimal idea would be to promote ACF's Writer Feedback Program amongst your friends.
Is that program still active?
Yes! Go use it.
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