The Quizbowl Resource Center

With the impending retirement of quizbowlpackets.com, its packet archive functions will be taken over by the TDB on the frontpage of this site.

There are already 304 question sets posted. I have 749 additional sets, including material collected from all other public archives and a good deal of tournaments not previously available, which will be integrated into the TDB archive over the coming weeks.

You can see what's there at:

http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/questionse ... archived=y

and you can also upload your own question sets directly through the tournament announcement interface.

After everything in my archive is put up, I will ask that if you have any set that is available for posting (which means pretty much anything that isn't being played anymore, and isn't owned by someone who is still actively selling or enforcing a copyright claim on the packets such as NAQT or College Bowl) and it isn't there, you can send it to me or some other people who will be designated, and we'll get it up there. This archive is meant to be all-encompassing and includes college, high school, middle school, and all other levels; academic, trash, and whatever else; both good sets and bad from both real and fake quizbowl, etc.

At some point, there will be a rating system added by which you can see both my ratings of a set (on two scales, difficulty and quality) and vote for a publicly-sourced rating on each set.

Will quizbowlpackets.com redirect here? It's WAY easier to recommend the site when it has an address that is easily remembered by new players.

Horned Screamer wrote:Will quizbowlpackets.com redirect here? It's WAY easier to recommend the site when it has an address that is easily remembered by new players.

Yes. There will be a few days where you will see something different at quizbowlpackets.com depending on your ISP and location, as some ownership changes propagate, but eventually it will be permanently available with redirects (either for each tournament or generally).

Will there be sortable functionality with the TDB archive? It seems like right now you have to know exactly which packet set you're looking for at the outset in order to use the TDB archive properly.

theMoMA wrote:Will there be sortable functionality with the TDB archive? It seems like right now you have to know exactly which packet set you're looking for at the outset in order to use the TDB archive properly.

Once the quizbowlpackets.com domain gets set up correctly, the main page will be a single page list in reverse chronological order very similar to what the original site looked like (preview here or here). The question set search functionality that is available now is essentially unchanged from when the database was initially launched, so not much effort has been put into it yet. The database will allow us to implement alternative ways to filter and present the available sets, but we wanted to get the site transitioned over first. Suggestions for improvement and new features are always appreciated.

Also, you can use the search function and put nothing in the set name section.

The quizbowlpackets.com and collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com domains should be set up correctly now. It might take a day or two for the DNS changes to propagate to all servers.

In most cases, old links to specific files or tournaments (from a search engine, etc.) should redirect automatically to the corresponding new URL.

Awesome. As usual, Jeff, this is amazing work.

Would it be possible to implement a download all option? Ideally split amongst college, hs, and ms.

Alpha Phi Gamma wrote:Would it be possible to implement a download all option? Ideally split amongst college, hs, and ms.

By "download all," do you want to be able to download all the packets from a particular set at once, or download all of the question sets at a particular difficulty level?

Question sets of a particular difficulty.

The current size of the archive across all difficulty levels is just shy of 10 GB at the moment, and continues to grow each year. Currently the college archive makes up just under 50% of the sets in the repository, the high school archive another 25%, and the middle school, open, and trash archives account for the remaining quarter.

Making large chunks of the archive available as a single download is both time- and cost-prohibitive. While the size of the archive isn't dramatically large by any means, we are still responsible for paying outgoing bandwidth costs for the server. The site is continuing to set monthly records for bandwidth usage and site visitors; that's hardly a terrible thing in its own right, but it means that server costs are already increasing and I'd like to avoid adding to that where possible. Making multi-gigabyte portions of the archive available for single-click download would quickly send those costs much higher.

Furthermore, many of the sets included in the archive are quite old and hardly suitable for regular practice material. If there's interest, I could potentially make a subset of packets available - such as a single ZIP containing the high school sets that are currently marked in bold and recommended as quality practice material. Beyond that, though, no.

It would be great if you could make quarterly or semi-annual or annual dumps of the database available as torrents. I hear seedboxes are pretty cheap these days.

(Or, I mean, I guess anybody, even Chris Ray, could do that by downloading the packets from the site and putting together a torrent, but this is obviously easier for someone with back-end access to the packet database.)

That's something I'd tossed around as an idea as well. I can provide the files if there's someone who is willing to do the work to set up the torrent.