Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by dablasian »

Are there plans to update Neg5 or do something with the servers this weekend? I ask because we are planning to use Neg5 for our tournament, the Secret City Classic, this weekend (October 21).
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by dablasian »

Also, about 3-5 times a day in the past week at my school, the website for Neg5 cannot be reached for some reason. Is this an issue with the server or is it more likely an issue with the wifi at my school?
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by dablasian »

Sorry for the many questions but Neg5 is not letting me delete a team from the entry because that team has a game already saved. However, when I attempt to click the game to delete it, an error pops up ("Could not load game"). Is there any explanation for this? We even added additional games to see if they could be deleted and they could be.

Edit: To be more specific, the game score is 20 - (-10) for the glitchy game. I created another Neg5 entry and tried to delete a match whose score was 20 - (-10) and the match couldn't be loaded there either...
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

dablasian wrote:Sorry for the many questions but Neg5 is not letting me delete a team from the entry because that team has a game already saved. However, when I attempt to click the game to delete it, an error pops up ("Could not load game"). Is there any explanation for this? We even added additional games to see if they could be deleted and they could be.

Edit: To be more specific, the game score is 20 - (-10) for the glitchy game. I created another Neg5 entry and tried to delete a match whose score was 20 - (-10) and the match couldn't be loaded there either...
Hmm, that's odd. I'm not entirely sure why you'd be getting that error, but I doubt it has to do with the scores. Could you give me the tournament's id in the url?
Mostafa Bhuiyan
Norcross High School '13
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Joshua Rutsky »

Mostafa-

With the increasing number of people who are using Neg5, and the obvious value of a cloud-based system for tournament management, I would love to see this project continue to develop, especially in a couple of key areas that are important to me personally (worksheet scoring and NAQT acceptability, for example). However, I know you are extremely busy being a full-time student and doing all the work that entails. Do you have plans to work on this system in the immediate future, or are you tabling development for the foreseeable future? If you are, are you ok with other people cloning your work and trying to work on improvements in a different development branch, with credit for the software's original design remaining yours? I ask because I have a few people around me who have some experience with .json, and think they might be able to help move the project forward in the areas I need, but I certainly don't want to step on your toes. As I've said before, I know that I would personally be happy to contribute to a crowdsourced funding effort if that would make continued work worth your while! Your software is extremely useful, and I hate to see it stagnate when it has come so far.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

Hey, Mr. Rutsky, I absolutely do plan on continuing work on Neg5; a lot of my recent work has been all "behind the scenes", if you will - none if it's been pushed to the website, but I have a lot of work that I've done on my computer and on Github.
Joshua Rutsky wrote: However, I know you are extremely busy being a full-time student and doing all the work that entails.
Heh, I actually graduated this past May and moved to Seattle, so I've been busy with a new job and the stuff that comes along with moving. Once things die down a little bit, I'll have more time to spend on the website.
Joshua Rutsky wrote: If you are, are you ok with other people cloning your work and trying to work on improvements in a different development branch
Of course! That's why the project is on GIthub, it's meant to be worked on by other people. I do have quite a few bit of changes I've made that might interfere with new work that would start now, so starting on this would need to be a coordinated effort.
Mostafa Bhuiyan
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by AGoodMan »

Neg5 is down right now.... this is not ideal considering that we're in the middle of HFT. Anybody know what is going on?
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

The database is under a lot of load for some reason - I'm rebooting the db and I'll post here with any updates

EDIT: Restarting the server to see if that helps.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

The reason the database is under a lot of load is because of stat calculations (the backend is essentially doing a fresh calculation each time stats are requested, so basically for each person that goes to the stats pages). It's the same issue that happened at PACE. I should have had more foresight and implemented some some of caching mechanism after that.

The next release of Neg5 will have this stuff in place so this is no longer an issue.

There's no good way to immediately fix this problem besides asking people to not hit the stats page as the tournament is happening. This completely defeats the purpose of Neg5 and I'll be addressing these issues in the next few weeks.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by AGoodMan »

Neg5 is unfortunately down again; we have reverted to using Google Spreadsheets.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by AKKOLADE »

Nobody should use neg5 until this is fixed if you think anyone at all is interested in following your tournament remotely. It will cause significant delays for your tournament.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

We discussed this a little locally at the tournament, but as Neg 5 grows and becomes a more popular tool, perhaps it's worth exploring monetization opportunities? This comes from someone who loves open source, but it seems reasonable to help pay for servers and give something back to Mostafa for his hard work.

I'm fairly confident that Neg 5 as is in a fairly stable state, it just needs either:

- better DB servers so that it can handle the repeated queries
- to store individual stats so that they're not recalculated on every view, or at the very least do something kind of paginating so people can't load detailed individual stats in a group vs. for, say, one team

I've looked around at the code a couple times, and as I start up writing QB software again, would love to help contribute tiny things.
I'm also working on tech as a side-hobby outside of a tech job, so I get not being able to really focus a lot on this stuff as the only priority in your life.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by jonpin »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:We discussed this a little locally at the tournament, but as Neg 5 grows and becomes a more popular tool, perhaps it's worth exploring monetization opportunities? This comes from someone who loves open source, but it seems reasonable to help pay for servers and give something back to Mostafa for his hard work.
I like Neg5 (in theory), and have used it in the past (both to good and bad results), and we all do want a more modern stats program, but it's a bit strange to see the program blow up in a big spot and almost derail a tournament for the second time in six months and immediately think "Should the person who made this start charging for it?"
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

I'm not suggesting that Neg5 become paid by default, or rely on monetization to keep its server going, just that the issue here is servers and I'm willing to put money toward improving that issue since it's something that would definitively come back the other way.

Anyway, I don't speak for Mostafa and I don't know what he would prioritize with money if he got it, so this is all just aimless conjecture for now.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by a Joe »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:We discussed this a little locally at the tournament, but as Neg 5 grows and becomes a more popular tool, perhaps it's worth exploring monetization opportunities? This comes from someone who loves open source, but it seems reasonable to help pay for servers and give something back to Mostafa for his hard work.
To be quite blunt, I really don't care how good the software is, or how convenient it is, or how much people like it. I will never pay a dime for it non-voluntarily, especially since an excellent free alternative (SQBS) exists currently, and I'd rather keep paper stats than use paid software. I also will be unhappy if ads are placed, though it wouldn't be the end of the world. (although I will say, if you think the server is slow now, wait until you put ads in it...)

I think you guys found a problem (the stats recalculation) that can be potentially solved and would make the software far better without having to pay for a larger server. I think that is the solution rather than throwing up a paywall.

As for giving something back to Mostafa, I'm sure if he asks for donations he shall receive.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

To summarize the issues Neg5 faced yesterday, here is a quick breakdown.

The main issue was the database being under heavy load from repeatedly running stats calculations, which caused a bunch of requests on the stats pages to time out. The web server itself was fine. This is why pages
would initially load, but would either be empty or have no data on them. Anyone trying to go to a stats page probably noticed this issue.

This is a classic problem when trying to scale up a website, and luckily for me there are a lot of good ways to solve it. The method I will be implementing involves two steps:

1) Server-side caching stats. When someone initially wants some stats for a tournament, the server will do the calculation and save it somewhere. When someone comes along 15-30 seconds later and
asks for the same stats calculation, we'll give them the previously calculated result. This will prevent the database from running too many queries when the results are already saved. We'll mark the saved stats
as "stale" after some short period of time (say like 2 - 3 minutes) and recalculate at that point so stats stay up-to-date.

2) Creating a read-only replica of the main database that stays up to sync. We'll redirect traffic for stats calculations from the main database to the read-only database. This will split the load between the two
databases quite nicely and, in the case that the replica db goes under heavy load due to calculations, a moderator's ability to run their tournament and enter data won't be affected.

I'm currently spending around $30 a month to maintain the web server and database, but a quick evaluation of adding in a read-only database and adding more storage tells me that this will be going somewhere up to $80. This is a considerable amount of money to spend out of my own pocket, and servers are expensive, so I'll be adding a donate button/widget/something on Neg5's front page. I'd appreciate any amount people can help out with!

I think, once the above solution is fully implemented, the website should be able to handle the load for a tournament of any size. I have a big update to push to Neg5 (hopefully) this week which already addresses the first point above. I've also upped the database server yesterday night. It got some activity and seemed to be chugging along just fine when it got requests to calculate stats.
Snoopy wrote: To be quite blunt, I really don't care how good the software is, or how convenient it is, or how much people like it. I will never pay a dime for it non-voluntarily,
This is a non-issue, so I'm not entirely sure why you'd bring it up. Neg5 will remain a free piece of software.

As an addendum, I'd love to have some sort of Skype/Google hangout sort of thing in which people interested in Neg5 and/or the code behind it can talk about what they want to see/improve in the program. It's easier for me if I can have everyone discussing at once rather than trying to remember to come back to this forum post every few days.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by a Joe »

BlueDevil95 wrote:I'm not entirely sure why you'd bring it up. Neg5 will remain a free piece of software.
Well, Raynor brought it up, I was giving my reaction.

Glad to hear it will remain free.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by t-bar »

BlueDevil95 wrote:1) Server-side caching stats. When someone initially wants some stats for a tournament, the server will do the calculation and save it somewhere. When someone comes along 15-30 seconds later and
asks for the same stats calculation, we'll give them the previously calculated result. This will prevent the database from running too many queries when the results are already saved. We'll mark the saved stats
as "stale" after some short period of time (say like 2 - 3 minutes) and recalculate at that point so stats stay up-to-date.
What's the reasoning for being so stingy with saving results--is the resulting reduction in storage space a major factor in the cost of your website? Unless I'm imagining the backend completely wrong, it would seem you only need to recalculate anything when a new game is submitted, not when a request to view the stats is made.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

t-bar wrote:
BlueDevil95 wrote:1) Server-side caching stats. When someone initially wants some stats for a tournament, the server will do the calculation and save it somewhere. When someone comes along 15-30 seconds later and
asks for the same stats calculation, we'll give them the previously calculated result. This will prevent the database from running too many queries when the results are already saved. We'll mark the saved stats
as "stale" after some short period of time (say like 2 - 3 minutes) and recalculate at that point so stats stay up-to-date.
What's the reasoning for being so stingy with saving results--is the resulting reduction in storage space a major factor in the cost of your website? Unless I'm imagining the backend completely wrong, it would seem you only need to recalculate anything when a new game is submitted, not when a request to view the stats is made.
That would also be a good approach. The problem I saw with it is that you'd also have to recalculate if you change anything to do with a player, team, or match - this got pretty unmaintainable code-wise when I gave it a shot. The calculated stats contains not only ids, but also names, so those would need to be updated. It also get pretty messy when dealing with the different phases a match can be in.

There are some issues with my current implementation that your suggestion would fix. I can experiment with it and see how it goes.
Mostafa Bhuiyan
Norcross High School '13
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https://stats.neg5.org
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by jonah »

I don't know much about the Neg 5 stack, but I'm skeptical that the problem is just what's been described. NAQT's database also recalculates stats for every page load, and handled the demand of a 304-team HSNCT without blinking. (It runs on an AWS T2 small instance.) I have to wonder if Neg 5's calculations are being done inefficiently, or if there are deadlocks or other race conditions, or something like that. It just doesn't seem likely that the loads we're talking about should, on their own, cause such problems.

Given that this issue was well known five months ago (having affected quite a prominent tournament) and not fixed, it probably just wasn't/isn't a good idea to use Neg 5 for anything likely to have much of an audience (like HFT). That defeats the point of Neg 5, obviously, so maybe it's just a bad idea to use it until this issue is fixed. (Not to mention all the other ones.)


If the calculations are being done on the database side, just materializing some views might help.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

I just pushed a massive update to the website. Please look around and tell me if you notice anything funny, This update includes server-side caching of stats and uses a readonly database for stats calculations.

Stats now live at: https://stats.neg5.org. The landing page is somewhat elementary for now.

Repository for the stats application is here: https://github.com/mostafab/neg5.stats.web-server
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

It looks really good, Mostafa! Thanks for putting it up so quickly.

One quick question: is the homepage of stats just every tournament by default currently? (And would it be possible to make it a more intuitive single column list?)

I also noticed that the styles for the main site changed as well. Was this intentional? It's too soon to tell whether they make it harder or easier to read, but it's certainly different.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by AGoodMan »

It sure looks better - but your (-5) and (15) labels are switched, and therefore the total points scored calculation is off.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by AGoodMan »

AGoodMan wrote:It sure looks better - but your (-5) and (15) labels are switched, and therefore the total points scored calculation is off.
To further clarify, this is when I try to add a new match or edit an old one. When I increase the number of powers for a player, the total points they scored drop by increments of 5. I am therefore assuming the labels for powers and negs are switched.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

AGoodMan wrote:It sure looks better - but your (-5) and (15) labels are switched, and therefore the total points scored calculation is off.
Fixed. The bug should have only been on the editing a match page.
UlyssesInvictus wrote:
One quick question: is the homepage of stats just every tournament by default currently? (And would it be possible to make it a more intuitive single column list?)

I also noticed that the styles for the main site changed as well. Was this intentional? It's too soon to tell whether they make it harder or easier to read, but it's certainly different.
The homepage defaults to the tournaments from the last month; I'm open to changing how it looks if the current design is confusing.
Yep, I also changed the styles of the main site as part of the update.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by bmccauley »

I was playing around with the new layout a bit and the scoresheet seems to have some functionality issues. If you select a team and accidentally click on a player score (easier to do on a laptop with the pad click), it doesn't allow you to create a new scoresheet or add an opponent...just locks to that team's tally and doesn't bring up the full scoresheet to the right. It has no way, at least that I can find, to go back and reset to a blank scoresheet.

EDIT: If you leave the tournament completely and then re-enter is does reset...but that's still suboptimal, in my opinion
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

bmccauley wrote:I was playing around with the new layout a bit and the scoresheet seems to have some functionality issues. If you select a team and accidentally click on a player score (easier to do on a laptop with the pad click), it doesn't allow you to create a new scoresheet or add an opponent...just locks to that team's tally and doesn't bring up the full scoresheet to the right. It has no way, at least that I can find, to go back and reset to a blank scoresheet.

EDIT: If you leave the tournament completely and then re-enter is does reset...but that's still suboptimal, in my opinion
I'll take a look at this and see if I can reproduce it.

Also, there were at least 3 tournaments today that used Neg5. For the most part, it looks like caching and a read-only database have helped. I noticed that generating full individual stats ran into some issues; either the stats would take forever to load or the stats wouldn't load at all. It's most definitely a slow query issue, and it's probably the bottleneck for the HFT problems. I have a few ideas on how to fix it and I'm going to try and spend the next few weeks addressing the problem. I've also been steadily chipping away at the issues outlined on Github.

If anyone who used Neg5 today has any feedback or ideas for improvement other than what I outlined above, feel free to email me at mostafa0104 AT gmail DOT COM or leave a post here.

EDIT: There also seems to be a bug with tournaments not showing up on the stats home page if its date is the same as the current day. This should be an easy fix but the workaround for now is to just increase the range of the selected dates to end after the current day.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Maxwell Sniffingwell »

How does one delete a player?
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

cornfused wrote:How does one delete a player?
If the player in question has played a game, you can't delete them. Otherwise, you can remove them by going to the player's team and clicking the delete button next to the player's name.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by dbeck84 »

I am currently trying to create a practice tournament to see some of the features of neg5 and how it used, but I can't seem to find out how to create a tournament. I keep getting an error message saying could not create tournament. Is there an instruction page that I am missing somewhere?
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

dbeck84 wrote:I am currently trying to create a practice tournament to see some of the features of neg5 and how it used, but I can't seem to find out how to create a tournament. I keep getting an error message saying could not create tournament. Is there an instruction page that I am missing somewhere?
There's an issue with tournament creation that I've narrowed down the cause for. I can fix it in a few hours.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

dbeck84 wrote:I am currently trying to create a practice tournament to see some of the features of neg5 and how it used, but I can't seem to find out how to create a tournament. I keep getting an error message saying could not create tournament. Is there an instruction page that I am missing somewhere?
This should be fixed now.
Mostafa Bhuiyan
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Joshua Rutsky »

Mostafa--

We ran Neg5 successfully at the HIT today with no glitches. It handled our 70 teams without a problem, so whatever you did seems to have helped a great deal.

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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Captain Sinico »

Is the capability to export HTML scoresheets still present? If not, can it be put back?
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BlueDevil95
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

Captain Sinico wrote:Is the capability to export HTML scoresheets still present? If not, can it be put back?
Unfortunately, that functionality is not currently available. The HSQB db expects very specific, old HTML formatting which I don't want to add into Neg5. I' reached out to Dan Goff a few months ago about perhaps allowing Neg5-generated reports to be uploaded, but I haven't heard back from him.
Mostafa Bhuiyan
Norcross High School '13
Georgia Institute of Technology '17

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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Captain Sinico »

BlueDevil95 wrote:
Captain Sinico wrote:Is the capability to export HTML scoresheets still present? If not, can it be put back?
Unfortunately, that functionality is not currently available. The HSQB db expects very specific, old HTML formatting which I don't want to add into Neg5. I' reached out to Dan Goff a few months ago about perhaps allowing Neg5-generated reports to be uploaded, but I haven't heard back from him.
Cool. Several coaches around here like to see the round results question-by-question, in order to check how their players are doing on topics for example, so I can say that'd be very useful for me. I don't particularly care if it's machine-readable for this application.
Mike Sorice
Former Coach, Centennial High School of Champaign, IL (2014-2020) & Team Illinois (2016-2018)
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by TheDoctor »

(I emailed Mostafa about this at the beginning of the school year, so I don't expect a separate response, but this seems germane to the conversation)

The HTML scoresheets are also useful for calculating question-by-question conversion data, which I haven't been able to do with Neg5 stats this year. It would be nice, if possible, to be able to download the scoresheets again instead of effectively forcing SCOP hosts to use paper scoresheets with Neg5 to get the discount.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by CPiGuy »

dablasian wrote:Sorry for the many questions but Neg5 is not letting me delete a team from the entry because that team has a game already saved. However, when I attempt to click the game to delete it, an error pops up ("Could not load game"). Is there any explanation for this? We even added additional games to see if they could be deleted and they could be.

Edit: To be more specific, the game score is 20 - (-10) for the glitchy game. I created another Neg5 entry and tried to delete a match whose score was 20 - (-10) and the match couldn't be loaded there either...
This is also happening to me; I created some test games for a tournament that hasn't happened yet, to test carryover, and when creating the matches it said "No phase specified" but let me create the match anyway.

Then, it showed them in the match entry but didn't let me delete them.

The stats are at https://stats.neg5.org/t/r12Fg4IrG/wint ... -standings if you need to take a look. I think it may be related to the fact that I entered two matches between the same team in the same round, but that may be wrong.

Seeing as this is a potentially tournament-breaking bug (if such a game were mistakenly entered, it would ruin the entire standings), it would be really great to have a fix for this.

EDIT: The way to get around this is to delete the phase affected, and then create a new phase in its place and reassign all the non-bugged games to that new phase. This is suboptimal but should work (?).
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

Obviously, Neg5 has stagnated the last several months, and that's my fault since I haven't worked on it. The backlog of things to do has only grown, and feature work has been non-existent. I am personally unable to dedicate the time on weekdays and/or weekends required to work on a project as big as this. When I do find myself with some free time, working on the project has felt more like a chore than something I had started for fun and for learning new technologies.

I think Neg5 would be better off in the hands of someone who can dedicate the time required to take the project to where it needs to be (and further). This is my post to solicit people who would be interested in taking over the project.

I ask that people who are interested have a background in programming and experience with SQL, and, perhaps most importantly, are able to dedicate the time required. I am willing to keep paying for the websites and databases until enough progress has been made that the cost can be brought down. At that point, I'll no longer fund it but the cost will be around $30 a month.

I would be most comfortable if more than one person maintained the project in the future, since my experience has been that it's a lot of work for a single individual. I am happy to keep on contributing on the code base, but not as the owner.

If you're interested, let's talk! Feel free to post in this thread or email me at mostafa0104 AT gmail DOT com
Mostafa Bhuiyan
Norcross High School '13
Georgia Institute of Technology '17

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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Captain Sinico »

Thanks for taking it as far as you have! Let's hope we're lucky enough to find someone as capable and giving as you've been,
Mike Sorice
Former Coach, Centennial High School of Champaign, IL (2014-2020) & Team Illinois (2016-2018)
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Hi Mostafa: I'd like to talk about possibly taking over management of Neg 5 for you. I can't promise that I'll devote time every weekend (or even any weekends) into outright implementing new features, but that I will occasionally look over any PRs from forks, as well as do general maintenance to make sure the site doesn't just totally crash.

If this is something you're looking for, please email me, and I'd love to talk over potential for the future of Neg5.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by ashwin99 »

By the way, I think it would be good to move all these Quizbowl-related websites such as Neg 5 under the purview of (or sponsorship by) the nonprofit organizations that already exist in quizbowl. Microsoft offers $5,000 a year for nonprofits to run applications on their cloud, Azure, which would take care of any foreseeable costs in the future (I think AWS has a similar discount but it's less). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure
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Try this free mobile app Tycho: Play Quizbowl and Science Bowl to study or read packets while on the go.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

ashwin99 wrote:By the way, I think it would be good to move all these Quizbowl-related websites such as Neg 5 under the purview of (or sponsorship by) the nonprofit organizations that already exist in quizbowl. Microsoft offers $5,000 a year for nonprofits to run applications on their cloud, Azure, which would take care of any foreseeable costs in the future (I think AWS has a similar discount but it's less). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure
Yeah, I've already had talks with PACE about this for QuizDB, and Mike Bentley has already offered me the credits for hosting, which I deeply appreciate. (I just have to find the time to move it from Heroku, which does not look available anytime soon, so I'm OK just paying out of pocket for the time being.)
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Joshua Rutsky »

OK, so I don't know if this is going to motivate anyone anywhere to do anything with this project, but I'm still hopeful that there is a person out there willing to take it on, so I'll give it a shot.

ASCA, the Alabama Scholastic Competition Association, has undergone a number of changes in the past ten years, including a slow move toward adopting the more or less standardized 20/20 format. We have a few lingering bits and pieces from the "old world", however, and that includes the existence of worksheets at the middle and elementary school tournaments.

We have successfully used Neg 5 at multiple tourneys, including our HS state tourney last year, but have been unable to do so at our MS tourney because Neg 5 cannot handle worksheets. I don't know anything at all about database programming, .json, or anything similar, and I cannot go down the road of investigating it and learning how to program myself just to add this feature to already excellent software, but I would love to see it implemented.

Is there anyone in the community who is willing to take this project on? If so, please PM me. We may be able to work out compensation for your time and effort.
Joshua Rutsky
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by vinteuil »

Please stop using Neg5 as a substitute for more stable stats (SQBS) at your tournaments.

This post outlines the current problems with using Neg5 quite well:
In general, neg5 has two major issues: first, that oftentimes people forget to save the rounds stats, which are subsequently lost to the sands of time; and second, that, at least to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to export stats as sqbs files and upload them onto the quizbowl resource center or be accessed by harry white’s search tool, which makes those stats much harder to access in the future.
This is to say nothing of the server hiccups that almost derailed a past NSC, etc. etc.

Until these issues are fixed, Neg5 will only cause your tournament headaches; there's been no sign that a solution for either is forthcoming.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

I fully understand that the past server issues with Neg5 have done enough damage to stop some people from trusting it to use at bigger tournaments, but I wanted to address some of the other points you brought up:
This is to say nothing of the server hiccups that almost derailed a past NSC, etc. etc.
I've been actively working on fixing the root cause (stats calculations being done at the database level) of the vast majority of Neg5 crashes.The stats site has been using this solution for the past several weeks (and a different solution over the past several months), and I've seen no issues with database overload or site crashes on weekends with tournaments, so I'm going to go ahead and say this shouldn't be a concern anymore.

Your other points are valid. Making sure to save scoresheets is unintuitive and can lead to some really frustrating situations. I'm working with Raynor to come up with a better scoresheets workflow, so it's definitely something that I'll be addressing. As for uploading stat reports from Neg5 to hsquizbowl.org, this is something I've wanted to do for a long time. However, I've hit a couple of pretty major roadblocks along the way that have prevented it from being completed. I'm going to try and tackle this one again in the near future, though.

Overall, the point I'm trying to make is that the major gripes people have with Neg5 have been or are currently being addressed. I can't promise any timelines on when the solutions will be implemented because I'm balancing this out with everything else going on in life, but they are actively being worked on. As always, I am open to feedback so feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions or suggestions.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Monstruos de Bolsillo »

vinteuil wrote: Sat Oct 27, 2018 10:31 pm Please stop using Neg5 as a substitute for more stable stats (SQBS) at your tournaments.

This post outlines the current problems with using Neg5 quite well:
In general, neg5 has two major issues: first, that oftentimes people forget to save the rounds stats, which are subsequently lost to the sands of time; and second, that, at least to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to export stats as sqbs files and upload them onto the quizbowl resource center or be accessed by harry white’s search tool, which makes those stats much harder to access in the future.
This is to say nothing of the server hiccups that almost derailed a past NSC, etc. etc.

Until these issues are fixed, Neg5 will only cause your tournament headaches; there's been no sign that a solution for either is forthcoming.
Regarding the the first point, yes, that can sometimes happen, although I think the current version is better about preventing this than it used to be. As to your second point, this is true, but all you have to do is create a separate SQBS file and spend a few hours after the tournament and manually enter the games. You still do the same amount of work, but it's being done after the tournament. If hosts aren't doing this, they should be, it's not that hard, and literally only takes a few hours at the most.
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by Father of the Ragdoll »

Monstruos de Bolsillo wrote: Mon Oct 29, 2018 11:38 am
vinteuil wrote: Sat Oct 27, 2018 10:31 pm Please stop using Neg5 as a substitute for more stable stats (SQBS) at your tournaments.

This post outlines the current problems with using Neg5 quite well:
In general, neg5 has two major issues: first, that oftentimes people forget to save the rounds stats, which are subsequently lost to the sands of time; and second, that, at least to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to export stats as sqbs files and upload them onto the quizbowl resource center or be accessed by harry white’s search tool, which makes those stats much harder to access in the future.
This is to say nothing of the server hiccups that almost derailed a past NSC, etc. etc.

Until these issues are fixed, Neg5 will only cause your tournament headaches; there's been no sign that a solution for either is forthcoming.
Regarding the the first point, yes, that can sometimes happen, although I think the current version is better about preventing this than it used to be. As to your second point, this is true, but all you have to do is create a separate SQBS file and spend a few hours after the tournament and manually enter the games. You still do the same amount of work, but it's being done after the tournament. If hosts aren't doing this, they should be, it's not that hard, and literally only takes a few hours at the most.
Or you can do this which takes all of like 30 minutes for an average sized tournament
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by BlueDevil95 »

Hi all,

I just pushed out a UI update that will hopefully make scoresheet submission easier and harder to forget about. If you experience any issues with CSS or weird errors, please first try clearing out your browser cache. Otherwise, please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or feedback.
Mostafa Bhuiyan
Norcross High School '13
Georgia Institute of Technology '17

Developer of Neg5
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https://stats.neg5.org
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Re: Neg 5 : Quizbowl for the Cloud

Post by AGoodMan »

BlueDevil95 wrote: Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:18 pm Hi all,

I just pushed out a UI update that will hopefully make scoresheet submission easier and harder to forget about. If you experience any issues with CSS or weird errors, please first try clearing out your browser cache. Otherwise, please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or feedback.
Out of curiosity (and I haven't yet checked out the update), is it difficult to implement an autosave feature for the scoresheets, kind of like what Google Docs does?
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