Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

tksaleija wrote:
Iamteehee wrote:You could select every category except science.
Yeah, I was just wondering if there was a way to omit without doing this.
Only in the Admin portal: advanced search (i.e. including stuff with negating conditionals) is far off since I'm working on Moxon primarily.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by tksaleija »

Any updates on the current state of Moxon?
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

tksaleija wrote:Any updates on the current state of Moxon?
Hmm...I'll admit, it's not promising. I have designs drawn up, and some local code, but then--well, to be totally open, Ashwin made his mobile app, and people seemed pretty happy with it, so my motivation got decreased further.

I do want to promise that Moxon will be here eventually! I code for a living, so it's not like I can ever really get away from this >.> I thought I had accounted for this potential lack of motivation in my initial estimates, but, you know, Hofstadter's Law...
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by ashwin99 »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:
tksaleija wrote:Any updates on the current state of Moxon?
Hmm...I'll admit, it's not promising. I have designs drawn up, and some local code, but then--well, to be totally open, Ashwin made his mobile app, and people seemed pretty happy with it, so my motivation got decreased further.

I do want to promise that Moxon will be here eventually! I code for a living, so it's not like I can ever really get away from this >.> I thought I had accounted for this potential lack of motivation in my initial estimates, but, you know, Hofstadter's Law...
Speaking of that, as Tycho is a hybrid app made using Ionic (HTML and Angular), you can also use Tycho online: http://tycho.outplayedapps.com/ I haven't worked much on it so some things such as text-to-speech will need to be reimplemented and the design may need to be changed to make it better use the desktop's larger screen size, but it's there.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

2017 Penn Bowl
Lederberg 2
GRAB BAG
2018 ACF Regionals
2017 EFT

Questions uploaded today. Sorry that I haven't uploaded in two months: it may be significantly faster, but I still have to work up the effort to get it done...

Gonna try and do a bunch of MS/easy HS next, but it looks like there aren't that many MS questions on the archives. If you have any that you've been sitting on, please do upload them!
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

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Are they any intentions to add the new released hs sets once summer comes around?
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by jorgeiswang »

This is a minor issue, but the error/correction box always appears at the very bottom of the page to the left.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

tksaleija wrote:Are they any intentions to add the new released hs sets once summer comes around?
Yep! I work on a Machiavellian love/fear of the community basis, though, so best way to get the sets you want uploaded is to post about specific ones here, and I'll do my best to upload those first :)
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by tksaleija »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:
tksaleija wrote:Are they any intentions to add the new released hs sets once summer comes around?
Yep! I work on a Machiavellian love/fear of the community basis, though, so best way to get the sets you want uploaded is to post about specific ones here, and I'll do my best to upload those first :)
Here's some: 2018 AGOGE, 2017 RMBCT, 2017 PSACA, and 2017 WHAQ. Thanks!
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by vinteuil »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:I work on a Machiavellian love/fear of the community basis
moxon or pitchfork mob, your choice
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

vinteuil wrote:
UlyssesInvictus wrote:I work on a Machiavellian love/fear of the community basis
moxon or pitchfork mob, your choice
:( I got halfway through last Sunday until midnight hit and I turned back into a pumpkin. (Or work called, your choice.)
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

tksaleija wrote:
UlyssesInvictus wrote:
tksaleija wrote:Are they any intentions to add the new released hs sets once summer comes around?
Yep! I work on a Machiavellian love/fear of the community basis, though, so best way to get the sets you want uploaded is to post about specific ones here, and I'll do my best to upload those first :)
Here's some: 2018 AGOGE, 2017 RMBCT, 2017 PSACA, and 2017 WHAQ. Thanks!
RMBCT and WHAQ have been uploaded to QuizDB, but AGOGE and PSACA were uploaded to the archives in PDF only, so they'll be lower priority than other sets in the archive that already have Word versions uploaded.

EDIT: I just discovered PSACA has a GDrive link, which gave me easy access to the Word files, but the formatting is extremely non-regular, which would take some time to correct--as it has to be done manually--so I'll continue to leave it lower priority.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by literatureboye »

If possible, could you upload some MS and Novice HS sets?
2014 SCOP MS 5
2016 SCOP MS 7
2017 SCOP MS 8
2015 SCOP Novice 6
2016 SCOP Novice 7
2017 SCOP Novice 8
This website is a godsend and it's ok to keep these at lower priority. If you want any help formatting or anything, I have lots of spare time to help. Thank you!
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by tksaleija »

Just your weekly reminder:

M O X O N
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

literatureboye wrote:If possible, could you upload some MS and Novice HS sets?
2014 SCOP MS 5
2016 SCOP MS 7
2017 SCOP MS 8
2015 SCOP Novice 6
2016 SCOP Novice 7
2017 SCOP Novice 8
This website is a godsend and it's ok to keep these at lower priority. If you want any help formatting or anything, I have lots of spare time to help. Thank you!

User was reminded to enable a signature. --Mgmt.
I'd love to! Unfortunately, right now it looks like most of the SCOP sets are only uploaded as PDFs, which can go through some Cronenberg-esque mangling when being parsed by Augur (my doc-to-quizdb parser), so I try to avoid doing so. Where human effort would be very helpful is pasting these into Word docs, checking for formatting errors (i.e. making sure the copy-paste hasn't result in weird errors like f's becoming Chinese Unicode, or just text going missing), and then organizing the text further if needed.

If you do feel up to challenge, PM me with the Word-ized sets, and I can get on that right away!
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

tksaleija wrote:Just your weekly reminder:

M O X O N
Thanks -_-

Vacation time is coming up for me this week, so expect progress!
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by CPiGuy »

Math Monstrosity got PDF-mangled, but the LaTeX files are also uploaded on the database -- would those work better?
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

CPiGuy wrote:Math Monstrosity got PDF-mangled, but the LaTeX files are also uploaded on the database -- would those work better?
Sorry, I'm woozy and misunderstanding context: do you mean I've uploaded mangled questions for MM to QuizDB, or whether you should upload LaTex packets for MM?
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by CPiGuy »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:
CPiGuy wrote:Math Monstrosity got PDF-mangled, but the LaTeX files are also uploaded on the database -- would those work better?
Sorry, I'm woozy and misunderstanding context: do you mean I've uploaded mangled questions for MM to QuizDB, or whether you should upload LaTex packets for MM?
You've uploaded mangled questions. The LaTeX versions are also available, if you'd like to try pulling from that to get non-mangled MM questions. (They'll still have LaTeX markup in them, but that's not a huge deal -- the only thing you'll probably want to deal with are the black circles for powermarks).
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Oh yeah, it looks like these are pre-Augur questions. I'll mark it down and work on parsing the TeX at some point. Thank you for the update!
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by literatureboye »

Do you have any updates on Moxon?
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by tksaleija »

Good afternoon. Just a friendly reminder of what the people want, and what the people want is

M O X O N.

Also, thank you for all of your work with QuizDB so far. I always have a tab open on my phone and use it often.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by tksaleija »

If you could add the new GSAC to QuizDB when you're free, that would be cool.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by tksaleija »

At the request of a certain elite rising 9th grader who will remain unnamed, I'd like to remind you of the importance of

M O X O N

to the quiz bowl community. Hope your summer is going well. Best wishes.

-A Dedicated Member

EDIT: Sorry, I'll stop posting these.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

tksaleija wrote:EDIT: Sorry, I'll stop posting these.
I don't mind too much, since I really should have finished a prelim. Moxon by now, and I did tell people this was the best way to get me off my ass. (Regrettably, it doesn't seem to be working either. Maybe I'll manage it after the Boston Open..?)

I've gotten some reports that QuizDB is starting to crash. I haven't looked at the logs yet, but this is almost definitely due to a rise in people trying to pull the questions from the API. I applaud and appreciate the effort, but the system really isn't structured for really-fast/repeated requests, so if you are pulling from the API, I request that you:

- Use the SQL database dump instead, if a raw DB dump works for you. This is vastly preferable from my POV, since it's a single download that doesn't even hit my servers. You can find the most recent dump here, and the S3 bucket here. I will update the dump very soon.
- Use the official API, accessible through the admin portal. (The "unofficial" endpoints, the one the QuizDB client uses, aren't off limits, but they're not optimized.)
- Please limit your requests to less than one every ten seconds, and less than 500 questions per download. (If you use the unofficial endpoints, which includes using the "Download as JSON/CSV/text" GUI, there is a (sort of) secret limit anyway.)
- Refresh your list of the questions (i.e. re-downloading everything) at most once a month. I'm not going to be updating the database much more frequently than that, anyways.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

QuizDB may be down intermittently down over the next day or two as I carry out some much needed infrastructure upgrades. For example, it's down right now :P

EDIT: And it's up again, after isolating the issue as a dependency that broke 12 hours ago during a new release, meaning I perfectly updated packages between the buggy version and when the maintainers noticed the issue and reverted to a stable version :(
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Things should be stable now, more or less.

Since my last packet posting update, the following packets have been uploaded:

2017 HFT XII
2018 CMST
2018 FACTS
2016 PACE NSC
2017 PACE NSC
2017 SMT
2018 SMT
2015 BASK
2017 GSAC
2015 SCOP MS 5
2018 IMSAnity 5

As always, people are invited to help edit/moderate these sets (especially subject/category correction) by becoming an admin at quizdb.org/admin
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by Abdon Ubidia »

UlyssesInvictus wrote: 2017 SMT
Does this exist?
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by AGoodMan »

ansonberns wrote:
UlyssesInvictus wrote: 2017 SMT
Does this exist?
I think he means EMT.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

I'm actually not sure what I mean--it says SMT in my notes--but EMT is probably a good guess. Thanks for catching.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by Eddie »

When I type in a parenthesis (i.e. the "(" symbol or the ")" symbol) into any of the search parametres, the whole page suddenly goes blank until I refresh. I'm using Ubuntu and Firefox.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Eddie wrote:When I type in a parenthesis (i.e. the "(" symbol or the ")" symbol) into any of the search parametres, the whole page suddenly goes blank until I refresh. I'm using Ubuntu and Firefox.
Thanks for reporting. I've found the source of the error, and I generally know how to fix it, but it might be two or three days until I have the bandwidth to make sure the fix is implemented.

(If anyone wants to make a PR and save me some time, the apparent error triggering line is below.)

Code: Select all

// Question.js:40
newStr = newStr.replace(new RegExp(query, 'gi'), `<mark class='question-highlight'>$&</mark>`);
`

edit: it's fixed
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by Wartortullian »

QuizDB is down right now.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

A Very Long Math Tossup wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 9:55 pm QuizDB is down right now.
It's working for me as of 10:08 PM. Could you describe the issue you experienced?
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by iarehavethestupid »

UlyssesInvictus wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 10:08 pm
A Very Long Math Tossup wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 9:55 pm QuizDB is down right now.
It's working for me as of 10:08 PM. Could you describe the issue you experienced?
Can confirm it is working, using Chrome.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by Wartortullian »

UlyssesInvictus wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 10:08 pm
A Very Long Math Tossup wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 9:55 pm QuizDB is down right now.
It's working for me as of 10:08 PM. Could you describe the issue you experienced?
OK, it's working again. For about an hour (9pm-10pm eastern), attempting to load the site returned a generic Heroku error page.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Wanted to give a quick update, since nothing has happened in a couple months:

As mentioned in another thread, I'm moving to a new job right now, and it's adding a lot to my plate in terms of any free time whatsoever. In addition, I volunteered some of my time to help out Neg5.

However, I very much still want to update QuizDB questions, especially as new sets start rolling in, since it's more or less easy to add those in the background. And yes, Moxon is still supposedly a thing.

Expect new questions by the end of October, and more updates about features by the end of year.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

I'm aware of the occasional timeout issues for QuizDB, we're basically hitting the server limits as the site (and QB) gets more popular. I still plan to migrate off of Heroku to Azure, but that doesn't really solve the cost issues, just scales the cost down. (I don't really have the bandwidth to implement a really elegant rolling servers solution on either Heroku or Azure, but it might be easier than I think.)

I'll upgrade the Heroku servers if it gets really excessively broken (i.e. constantly crashing), but right now if you just wait 2-3 minutes, the server will usually load in time for you, and then delays shouldn't be noticeable afterward.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by herbie.brock »

First of all, thank you for making this database. It is my go-to for creating study material for my team!

I'm writing because I used to use Quinterest (which is down now), and it seems that QuizDB gives me back significantly fewer results than Quinterest did.

I think I read that QuizDB is a larger database, so maybe I'm doing something wrong. Here's and example, if I search for John Jay and set the filter to "answer", I get only nine tossups. Barack Obama only gets me five tossups.

Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something wrong or if the database is still being built and those are just the questions that are added as of now?

And, if that is the case, does anyone know of a database or some searchable way that I can see past questions on a topic?

Any help is greatly appreciated and thanks again for all you guys do for our students!

Herbie
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by herbie.brock »

Also, since I use your site so often, I set up a recurring donation for $3 a month in perpetuity. I know it is not much, but maybe others who use the site will pitch in too.

If there is anything else I can do to help, let me know.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by AGoodMan »

herbie.brock wrote: Tue Nov 27, 2018 5:34 pm First of all, thank you for making this database. It is my go-to for creating study material for my team!

I'm writing because I used to use Quinterest (which is down now), and it seems that QuizDB gives me back significantly fewer results than Quinterest did.

I think I read that QuizDB is a larger database, so maybe I'm doing something wrong. Here's and example, if I search for John Jay and set the filter to "answer", I get only nine tossups. Barack Obama only gets me five tossups.

Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something wrong or if the database is still being built and those are just the questions that are added as of now?

And, if that is the case, does anyone know of a database or some searchable way that I can see past questions on a topic?

Any help is greatly appreciated and thanks again for all you guys do for our students!

Herbie
The most comprehensive quiz bowl question database is aseems.db, though I think QuizDB has a better UI experience.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

herbie.brock wrote: Tue Nov 27, 2018 5:34 pm First of all, thank you for making this database. It is my go-to for creating study material for my team!

I'm writing because I used to use Quinterest (which is down now), and it seems that QuizDB gives me back significantly fewer results than Quinterest did.

I think I read that QuizDB is a larger database, so maybe I'm doing something wrong. Here's and example, if I search for John Jay and set the filter to "answer", I get only nine tossups. Barack Obama only gets me five tossups.

Can anyone tell me if I'm doing something wrong or if the database is still being built and those are just the questions that are added as of now?

And, if that is the case, does anyone know of a database or some searchable way that I can see past questions on a topic?

Any help is greatly appreciated and thanks again for all you guys do for our students!

Herbie
It's a little odd that your search queries differ from Quinterest, since the QuizDB questions are built directly on top of Quinterest i.e. every Quinterest question was directly imported into QuizDB.

The only reasons I could see for a difference would be: dupe questions in the original Quinterest database that were de-duped, your possibly applying a filter without realizing it (that wasn't present when you originally searched in Quinterest), or maybe (!) a bug.

A bug is unlikely given that nobody else has reported it yet, but otherwise the search behavior is exactly the same (e.g. QuizDB breaks up your text and parses for it the exact same way Quinterest used to).

If you can continue providing examples, I'll continue researching the issue.

Otherwise, thank you for the feedback, appreciation, and support! $3/month is more than generous, and os hugely welcomed.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by tksaleija »

This may have been previously mentioned, but when downloading questions as a JSON and then converting to Excel files to import into Anki, some punctuation marks like apostrophes or accents translate into jumbles. An example would be "this author's" becoming something like "this author&%€s" which can sometimes make reading difficult.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

tksaleija wrote: Wed Nov 28, 2018 10:18 pm This may have been previously mentioned, but when downloading questions as a JSON and then converting to Excel files to import into Anki, some punctuation marks like apostrophes or accents translate into jumbles. An example would be "this author's" becoming something like "this author&%€s" which can sometimes make reading difficult.
Yeah, this is a result of:
- Questions being malformed due to copying them from PDFs.
- Storing those questions as received, due to not wanting to (automatically) "guess" at what they should be and potentially further corrupting the question.
- Displaying those questions as "fixed" because I can process them when "showing" them without affecting their permanent condition.

I've been going back-and-forth on whether to fix them in storage is the lesser of two evils, but it's just an editorial decision.

Anyways, I uploaded the following packets yesterday:

2017 Philly Cheesteak
2018 Cambridge Open
2018 Great Lakes Regional Academic Championship (GLRAC)
2018 Historature
FILM
Words and Objects
WORLDSTAR
2018 Penn Bowl
2018 HORROR 1
2018 BHSAT
edit: also added 2018 CO Trash

I would really Word packets for the following, so that I can upload them:
- 2018 ACF Fall
- 2018 Prison Bowl

If you would like me to upload certain packets, please let me know what they are and make sure that they are:
- Present in Word doc form.
- Properly bolded for titles, powers, etc.
- Fixed of all formatting issues resulting from direct copy-paste from PDF.
- Using standard (or at least consistent) paragraph + numbering for questions.
Last edited by UlyssesInvictus on Thu Dec 27, 2018 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War »

How should I send you the Prison Bowl 2018 packets? I think I can get them into word document form without too many format issues
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War wrote: Mon Dec 24, 2018 9:34 pm How should I send you the Prison Bowl 2018 packets? I think I can get them into word document form without too many format issues
Thank you! You can email me them (see my user profile for address), or PM me a link to a Google Drive.

EDIT: I'm a clunking doofus, and forgot--it would also probably be better for the community in the long term if (assuming you own the set's archives entry, or are connected to the person who does) you just upload it to the archives as well.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

It's been brought to my attention that QuizDB is "broken" on mobile--I'm fairly certain that cause is actually the stupid code I wrote to get it to have offline functionality, which doesn't even properly give offline functionality. If that's the case, then you should be able to go to Private/Incognito, and it should work fine. I'll try and have a fix in the next two weeks, but I remember being fairly stumped by this code the first time I wrote it, so it may take longer.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Uploaded the following packets in prep for nats:

2018 HFT XIII
2018 EFT
2019 ACF Regionals
2019 Terrapin

Apologies for the lack of packet uploading recently. Part of that is because I've been busy, but the other is that there just haven't been many DOCX packets being uploaded recently. (If you can afford it, pony up and pay for NAQT study packets, I guess.)

If you're one of the many people who've built clients for QuizDB, I'll upload another database dump soon. If the version on S3 isn't at least as recent as the date on this post, ping me and I'll make sure you can get the freshest set of questions.

If you have access to Word (.docx) versions of the following, or otherwise packets you'd like to see uploaded, please get in touch with me:

2018 ACF Fall
2019 ACF Nats
2019 PIANO/Minnesota Open
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

https://www.quizdb.org/reader

This isn't admitting defeat, it's just...acknowledging setbacks. Thanks to Ashwin for his great website, and I hope people keep using the QuizDB API to make these great 3rd-party clients.
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Re: Announcing QuizDB: "Knowledge is Power"

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Some changes:

- updated QuizDB's Resources page with some yet more 3rd-party QuizDB-sourced apps
- added a feature written by Noah Bresler that auto-updates the page URL when searching, and will auto-search if you navigate to a URL with a recognizable search params (it'll make more sense when you do a search for the first time after this feature is added)
- added a feature to hide question answers; you can enable this by default for all questions if you go to the settings page (this setting is itself off by default). Note that, like all settings, this is only locally saved (so it's device specific)

I don't exactly do user / UI testing, so if you have issues with anything / have suggestions for usability improvements, comment here or make a pull request in the GH. (I'll probably turn the second item above into a disable-able feature at some point as well).
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