The Quizbowl Resource Center

You probably want to skip all this narrative crap, so just click on that image or on this link to get to the demo room. Also, just before you leave, I want to shamelessly beg for feedback. Seriously, I really want your feedback. Feedback is awesome and magical and there's a good chance that I'll actually implement your suggestions. Also, if I break things, don't assume I'm aware of that.

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So for the past few weeks, I've been working with my friend Ben Vest on a little app (actually, he did much of the back-end work and I did the front-end work). His copy isn't quite up and running yet, but I have my little miniature server running.

I don't have a big list of features, mostly because I don't quite remember everything. It's real time, NodeJS, Bootstrap, MongoDB, Coffeescript, Express, Modernizr, jQuery and SocketIO powered (big technical stack, but I figure it might as well be modern now because it's going to be old eventually). But it's in the name that it's meant to be more of a prototype (for instance, most things don't actually have persistence so whenever the server crashes or I push an update, all the rooms, scores and usernames get lost because it uses an in-memory data store, which also inherently makes it less scalable).

One of the cooler features of it is that not only does multiplayer work, but it also works offline (multiplayer doesn't work offline for obvious reasons). It uses HTML5's appcache to save a list of a random sample of 1000 questions locally so you can just bookmark the page and visit it without a connection. The layout's fully responsive which means it should work as well on mobile devices and tablets. The reader uses a syllable-counting algorithm so each word read takes an amount of time proportional to the number of syllables (which is a little bit of over-engineering, but whatever). There's purty animations everywhere. There are a few keyboard shortcuts, space is buzz, S, N and J all map to skip/next (I like J because it's on the home row and next/down for google reader), P and R are pause/resume, "/" (forward slash) and c map to chat. It also gives extra points for buzzes before asterisks, penalizes interrupts and standard stuff.

Questions are always randomized (usernames and room names are randomized by default too). No teams and no persistent (across rooms) scores, statistics or usernames. It's got a weird algorithm for checking answers (like really weird, it's counting levenshtein-damerau matches and I started working on one which did word stemming and excluding words already in the question as well, but quickly gave up) so it might be at times too pedantic and other times too lenient. And again, the server might crash at any moment sending everyone offline and losing track of everything. No search, no queries or command system. But for all its faults, it has a chat bot powered by data extracted from omegle (of all places) that you can access when you're offline by sending the chat message "I'm lonely".

I probably won't do many (if any) more updates to this project for a while, but Ben might launch his version to replace mine eventually (and I'll tell him to watch this thread or something). I haven't covered too much here, so if you notice anything useful that I've forgotten, feel free to post here or anywhere else tips and what not. It's using NodeJitsu, whatever free quota there is, so be kind to the server.

http://protobowl.com/hsquizbowl

Oh it turns out I actually did have a really big writeup laying around on github, feel free to read it if you have nothing else to do https://github.com/antimatter15/protobowl

This is the best thing I've ever seen. Trying to look for any problems, not seeing any.

Edit: okay, after playing for a half hour, the only shortcomings I can think of are
-sometimes the answer lines required are a bit weird (it'll want both first name and last name when the first name is the most famous: "Romeo" or "Nero")
-it's easy, when several people are in the room, for people to buzzer race, and have several people start typing an answer at once. that triggers a lot of n's.
-sometimes the spell checking is really mean (War_s_ of the Roses), which is weird, since it's extremely generous otherwise ("spuernova" --> "supernovae")

Otherwise, this is incredible! Latency seems really low, too.

I learned from protobowl today that the Arthur Miller play and the awful movie are called "Crucible" and "Hangover", respectively. Generally, there was a problem with parsing the answers; you needed to know Sacco and Vanzetti's first names, all 7 or so names of Salvador Dali, among many other things. Also, when "do not prompt on" is in the answer line, it accepts what you shouldn't be prompted for. your scrambling algorithm might also have problems-- I received 7 lit toss ups in a row on the default setting.

Generally, though, a good foundation that I really enjoyed playing on. Thanks for doing this.

Okay, so I've pushed a new update. The next one will almost certainly do something in the ways of addressing the answer checker, but this one leaves it intact.

Now it distinguishes between the actions "skip" and "next". Skip works at any point in reading the question and is accessible via the "s" key. Next, which lets you go to the next question is done through the "n" or "j" keys (j is nice because it's on the qwerty home row). Next is a no-op when the question is still being read, so you won't have to worry about simultaneously hitting next and skipping a question.

The buzzer race conditions shouldn't be an issue anymore because the text area will now first appear grayed out when it's initially triggered (blocking all key actions sent to it) until it's "acknowledged" by the server (latency is low enough that it should only look like a brief flash). And then it'll disable all but the first.

The backend now supports prompts (well, the answer checker/parser doesn't yet, so that's an issue).

Also, now I'm logging every buzz that is followed by the chat string "broken". So if you encounter something weird with the answer checking, just send a chat message with the word "broken" (without quotes), and I'll use that to compile a test/cross validation set on the algorithms.

It's been crashing a LOT. Other than that it's excellent.

Yeah, that should be fixed now. It was part of the new answer checker which broke on one-word answers or something. Also, I had a bit of trouble deploying with the server, but it should be fixed now.

Whatever selects the next question in this really really doesn't like history.
EDIT: Also, establishing a vote to kick system would be great, because getting spammed by nefarious gnat is no fun

Another problem I encountered was attached. Clicking on the previous question gave me the entire readout of the question being read, which, i must say, was quite helpful.

Hannibal wrote:Another problem I encountered was attached. Clicking on the previous question gave me the entire readout of the question being read, which, i must say, was quite helpful.

So what was the problem? Oh, I see now.

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September 1, 2012 2PM Update:

• New "Reset My Score" Button resets the current user's score.
• Question and Answer reporting systems actually work. You can click on "Report" on any question to report that question for review (e.g. if the category or answer is wrong) or you can click the little labels on the answers ("Wrong" or "Correct") to report them specifically.
• Backend changes for global notifications
• Slight changes to the background and header gradient

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September 1, 2012 7PM Update:

• Fixed bug with question history
• Users and rooms with no activity in 12 hours are automatically removed
• Added donation button (donate money for this tool to be long-term sustainable, it only needs a couple dollars every month)

The interface is incredibly slick. I love it.

However, my main complaint is that the chat feature seems to be broken. Whenever I try chatting, the questions stop loading on the page. I have to refresh the page for the questions to start loading again. I've only used ProtoBowl once so far, so I don't know if this is a persistent issue.

Corry wrote:The interface is incredibly slick. I love it.

However, my main complaint is that the chat feature seems to be broken. Whenever I try chatting, the questions stop loading on the page. I have to refresh the page for the questions to start loading again. I've only used ProtoBowl once so far, so I don't know if this is a persistent issue.

Oh, sorry, I'll fix that. I'm deploying the fix now. Fixed

It keeps getting better, but there are stil some parsing issues, like requiring the full name of e coli (I've never had it come up in a tournament while I was paying attention, so I don't know if that's standard or not) and not accepting certain titles with "the" at the front.

Hannibal wrote:It keeps getting better, but there are stil some parsing issues, like requiring the full name of e coli (I've never had it come up in a tournament while I was paying attention, so I don't know if that's standard or not) and not accepting certain titles with "the" at the front.

Please report those problems, you can do so by pressing the little colored badges that say "correct" or "wrong".

Sep 9, 2012 Update:

This update adds quite a few things but the most important one is a new journaling system which allows scores and user settings to be preserved in the event of a server crash, restart or update.

• Off-server journaling system allows scores and user settings to be preserved as long as one of the servers are online
• The "f" key is now aliased to "finish", which completes the question and reveals the answer without advancing to the next question.
• For those who are bothered by the live typing, there's a checkbox to disable it.
• Also, there's a checkbox to force a maximum of one buzz per user per question.
• Offline mode was fixed.
• The initial server connection handshake has been reduced from 4 steps to 2, which means it should load slightly faster.
• Users are now only cleared after 48 hours of inactivity, raised from 24.
• Prompts now appear exclusively for answers which would otherwise be deemed incorrect and now occur 1% of the time, rather than 0.1% of all responses. The algorithm has also been slightly revised to issue prompts under certain conditions.

Here are two more problems that I've noticed with the app:

- It doesn't accept numbers written like "2nd" or "3rd". For instance, if the answer is "Fourth Crusade", you can't answer "4th Crusade".

- When a question has a (+) sign to designate the end of a power, ProtoBowl doesn't recognize it.

Also, this was really weird, though I can't figure out the exact problem:

One more thing: when you set Protobowl to only display a certain category of questions (e.g. "history"), it doesn't read questions automatically. I have to keep pressing the "Next" button to see the next question. I'm not sure if this is intentional.

Corry wrote:One more thing: when you set Protobowl to only display a certain category of questions (e.g. "history"), it doesn't read questions automatically. I have to keep pressing the "Next" button to see the next question. I'm not sure if this is intentional.

It's intentional. Generally the idea is that not having questions automatically read allows people to chat in-between questions and to decide their own pacing. Also, the next button is aliased with "j" and "n" (where j is nice and handy on the home row and it has some nice built in guards against skipping a question when multiple people press next). It's not really a technical limitation (early versions used to automatically read questions) but if it really bothers you, I could add that as an option.

Protobowl seems to be offline at the moment. Is maintenance/updating going on?

EDIT: It seems to work when I use Safari, but not on Firefox.

MorganV wrote:Protobowl seems to be offline at the moment. Is maintenance/updating going on?

EDIT: It seems to work when I use Safari, but not on Firefox.

No, there isn't any maintenance work that's going on right now. I can't reproduce that issue (and anyway updates generally shouldn't make things offline for more than a few seconds). Since when has it stopped working on Firefox (the last update was like three days ago)?

I was playing with the offline features earlier today and I noticed that the points you accumulate in offline mode reset once you go back online. Is this intentional?

pk14ster wrote:I was playing with the offline features earlier today and I noticed that the points you accumulate in offline mode reset once you go back online. Is this intentional?

Yeah. Someone online playing it might get confused by someone else's random instant 100 point jump.

ProtoBowl's really vulnerable to trolling right now - is there any way a maximum number of buzzes per minute or skips or something could be implemented?

cornfused wrote:ProtoBowl's really vulnerable to trolling right now - is there any way a maximum number of buzzes per minute or skips or something could be implemented?

I changed the rate limiting threshold. Hopefully that works.

kevink wrote:

cornfused wrote:ProtoBowl's really vulnerable to trolling right now - is there any way a maximum number of buzzes per minute or skips or something could be implemented?

I changed the rate limiting threshold. Hopefully that works.

Now it's stopping legit buzzes, too.

Would it be possible to change the question category menu to allow selection of multiple, but not all, options?

By the way, I really appreciate all of the work you've put into this project.

Is it possible to select specific tournaments to hear? And if not, would it be possible to implement this?

Something has to be done about answers counted as correct. I've seen Iran Contra taken for the Warren Commission, Auld Lang Syne taken for God Save the Queen...the list goes on.

pk14ster wrote:Would it be possible to change the question category menu to allow selection of multiple, but not all, options?

By the way, I really appreciate all of the work you've put into this project.

Okay, I've added support for defining custom category distributions (select "Custom" as the category).

Also new is support for joining teams, which allows the leaderboard to sum up scores.

kevink wrote:

pk14ster wrote:Would it be possible to change the question category menu to allow selection of multiple, but not all, options?

By the way, I really appreciate all of the work you've put into this project.

Okay, I've added support for defining custom category distributions (select "Custom" as the category).

Also new is support for joining teams, which allows the leaderboard to sum up scores.

Wow, I really like the changes. The distribution automatically adapting itself is really cool, and the team function is pretty handy.

The changes are great.

You know, now that there's a team function...it would be really cool to have an option for having bonuses read too...

...so then the fish said, "Ok! Your wife can be God!" And she was a very benevolent and loving God and everybody agreed she was the best God ever.

There are still a few things that need to be worked out, but a few of my teammates have started using it. One relatively simple request I have would be to move the report link moved off to the side, when I wanted a closer look at a certain question , I've misclicked it like 10 times.

There have been a couple of times where I've gotten things I shouldn't have; some times this makes at least some sense (answer and guess have similar letters- this is a big deal for 'sphere' questions) and sometimes it doesn't make any. Also good would be if the time to answer was based on the length of the answer line, especially for things like common link questions.

thyringe_supine wrote:There are still a few things that need to be worked out, but a few of my teammates have started using it. One relatively simple request I have would be to move the report link moved off to the side, when I wanted a closer look at a certain question , I've misclicked it like 10 times.

There have been a couple of times where I've gotten things I shouldn't have; some times this makes at least some sense (answer and guess have similar letters- this is a big deal for 'sphere' questions) and sometimes it doesn't make any. Also good would be if the time to answer was based on the length of the answer line, especially for things like common link questions.

The answer checker is something that I'd like to tackle soon enough, but it's pretty complicated to get right.

Right now, I'm working on a pretty big overhaul of the software design. You probably won't notice it when it gets released because most of it isn't front-end stuff, but it might be a bit faster and easier to maintain in the long run.

I just wanted to express my sincere gratitude for the existence of ProtoBowl. We all like to nitpick about answer algorithms and small features, but honestly, this website has really bolstered interest in quizbowl in my school. Because it's so readily accessible, members of my team are excited to play against each other even when they're not in practice. Some kids even skip their lunch periods to go to the LMC and play 1 on 1 matches the entire time. ProtoBowl can do great things for quizbowl. It certainly did for my team, and for that, I am very thankful.

Teachers are complaining that my players are using their netbooks to play protobowl in class when they should be working on other things, paying attention, etc....

I keep opening up Chrome on my school's computers and finding Protobowl in the 'most visited sites' homepage thing. The room we made for our school is still going strong after a month, with god knows how many other 1v1 rooms created. It's incredible!

The protobowl rewrite is coming along nicely and will probably be released some time next week. Right now it's almost at feature parity with the existing version, plus a few small changes.


Links are now automatically clickable, that includes urls like "http://protobowl.com" or relative room names like "/magical-room-name", and image links are automatically displayed as images.


Typing @ opens up chat with the first letter as @ and will allow you to send private messages to specific users (this isn't quite done yet).


The progress bar is now two-part, with the normal shade of blue meaning the question and the second part, a lighter shade, representing the time left to answer after the question is read.


Little inline text symbols (think the bells for buzzes) are now included for when pauses are triggered, and also logs are shown for who pauses the game when. You can now hover over almost any username to show the time at which a certain message was posted. New rooms don't automatically have a hidden question loaded, so for new rooms, changes to category and difficulty will take effect immediately instead of having to skip a question to get to it.



There's a new question reporting interface which shows a list of options and the ability to actually change the categories of questions rather than submitting them to a review process which doesn't get processed.



Sliding read speed to the far right now makes the entire question appear instantaneously. Overall, there's also performance improvements.

But those are the incremental feature changes, which are admittedly a small part of the new rewrite. The interface is left more or less intact, there aren't any major changes to the background, color scheme, panels or icons. In fact it probably won't look like a major update in any real way. But the core of the application has been almost totally rewritten with a new architecture that shares code between the client and the server in such a way that the API is much nicer and such that offline pretty much comes at no cost. There's a new question selection algorithm which will further reduce the probability of question repeats and create more uniformity of distributions. It's faster and requires fewer database queries. Also, the code has mostly been upgraded as to support the possibility of future expansion into different types of questions (e.g. science bowl, certamen, jeopardy, etc).

One of the features I'd like to build before it gets released is some kind of democratic system to vote people off a certain room.

edit:

Protobowl has had a chat bot built in since the beginning, but it was originally a tiny feature that only worked within offline. Now, it's slightly improved.



I did actually get around to implementing that banning interface:



Here's what private messages look like

Rather slick interface! I'm digging the implementation of Bootstrap (or at least that's what it seems like). It's been a pretty fantastic aid for our team, so thanks for that.

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?

I think the system reupdated; my MacBook is no longer to use Protobowl, but my desktop running XP can. On my Mac, I tried Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, and all of them didn't work, while Firefox and IE both worked on my XP, so could this be looked into? Thank you.

Nevermind, it's a problem with avast! However, I should note that this problem did not occur before, and it will likely affect other avast! users, so something to be aware of I guess.

mzhang13 wrote:Nevermind, it's a problem with avast! However, I should note that this problem did not occur before, and it will likely affect other avast! users, so something to be aware of I guess.

Even then I'm curious as to how that happens. What did it look like when it didn't work?

There were a couple of questions where the 'correct' button didn't show after I got it. Seems to be fixed now, though.

EDIT: hmm it isn't showing the 'incorrect' ones either.

EDIT2: OH WAIT enter puts you in chat?

kevink wrote:

mzhang13 wrote:Nevermind, it's a problem with avast! However, I should note that this problem did not occur before, and it will likely affect other avast! users, so something to be aware of I guess.

Even then I'm curious as to how that happens. What did it look like when it didn't work?

I use avast! and haven't had any of this trouble.

cornfused wrote:

kevink wrote:

mzhang13 wrote:Nevermind, it's a problem with avast! However, I should note that this problem did not occur before, and it will likely affect other avast! users, so something to be aware of I guess.

Even then I'm curious as to how that happens. What did it look like when it didn't work?

I use avast! and haven't had any of this trouble.

Are you on a Mac?

And what would happen is that the page would load normally, and the server still responded to keyboard commands, but one could not see any of the other players in the room. If another player buzzed, it would show up as <name unavailable> and then question would pause. Questions still came as per the commands, but if one buzzed, the server would not get the answer, and the realtime chat and answer typing would not show either. It seemed as though it was selectively connected.

mzhang13 wrote:

cornfused wrote:

kevink wrote:

mzhang13 wrote:Nevermind, it's a problem with avast! However, I should note that this problem did not occur before, and it will likely affect other avast! users, so something to be aware of I guess.

Even then I'm curious as to how that happens. What did it look like when it didn't work?

I use avast! and haven't had any of this trouble.

Are you on a Mac?

Nope, PC (Windows 7) and Chrome.

mzhang13 wrote:

cornfused wrote:

kevink wrote:

mzhang13 wrote:Nevermind, it's a problem with avast! However, I should note that this problem did not occur before, and it will likely affect other avast! users, so something to be aware of I guess.

Even then I'm curious as to how that happens. What did it look like when it didn't work?

I use avast! and haven't had any of this trouble.

Are you on a Mac?

And what would happen is that the page would load normally, and the server still responded to keyboard commands, but one could not see any of the other players in the room. If another player buzzed, it would show up as <name unavailable> and then question would pause. Questions still came as per the commands, but if one buzzed, the server would not get the answer, and the realtime chat and answer typing would not show either. It seemed as though it was selectively connected.

I seriously doubt that this would be an avast! or any antivirus issue, because a firewall type problem would just end up making it unable to connect at all. I'm guessing it might be a client-server version mismatch because saturday night/sunday was when I launched a new version which significantly changed both the client and server. However, I would expect that to sort of fix itself in a few page refreshes.

kevink wrote:

mzhang13 wrote:

cornfused wrote:

kevink wrote:

mzhang13 wrote:Nevermind, it's a problem with avast! However, I should note that this problem did not occur before, and it will likely affect other avast! users, so something to be aware of I guess.

Even then I'm curious as to how that happens. What did it look like when it didn't work?

I use avast! and haven't had any of this trouble.

Are you on a Mac?

And what would happen is that the page would load normally, and the server still responded to keyboard commands, but one could not see any of the other players in the room. If another player buzzed, it would show up as <name unavailable> and then question would pause. Questions still came as per the commands, but if one buzzed, the server would not get the answer, and the realtime chat and answer typing would not show either. It seemed as though it was selectively connected.

I seriously doubt that this would be an avast! or any antivirus issue, because a firewall type problem would just end up making it unable to connect at all. I'm guessing it might be a client-server version mismatch because saturday night/sunday was when I launched a new version which significantly changed both the client and server. However, I would expect that to sort of fix itself in a few page refreshes.

I did refresh multiple times, on all three browsers I used. Note that I also run avast! on my PC, and Protobowl worked the first time on all three browsers. This leads me to believe that it is a avast! Mac problem, or a Mac firewall problem..

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").