QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Packet databases and other quizbowl sites, apps, or software should be discussed here.
Post Reply
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

Hi everyone,

As many of you know, NAQT allows you to receive email notifications for nearby tournament announcements. The hsquizbowl.org database, however, does not offer such a service, which is why I decided to make one.

The site is at qbnotify.msmitchell.org, and the code is available here. It's a very rough prototype, and I'm open to any suggestions about how to improve it.

Thanks to Alex Damisch for the idea!
Last edited by Wartortullian on Sat Aug 11, 2018 8:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Matt
User avatar
tksaleija
Wakka
Posts: 240
Joined: Fri Jun 30, 2017 8:27 pm

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by tksaleija »

Firstly, awesome idea! Second, upon trying to use my college email to set up an account (.edu), I received a prompt saying that the email address was invalid. I'm not sure if it's because it isn't a traditional email server, but I might suggest including non-traditional emails like that.
Aleija Rodriguez
University of Michigan 202x
MCMC/MCCC 2019
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

tksaleija wrote:Firstly, awesome idea! Second, upon trying to use my college email to set up an account (.edu), I received a prompt saying that the email address was invalid. I'm not sure if it's because it isn't a traditional email server, but I might suggest including non-traditional emails like that.
Hmm. I was able to use .edu addresses just fine when testing. It might be a bug in Flask-Security's email parsing. Post or PM me your address and I'll do some debugging.
Matt
User avatar
tksaleija
Wakka
Posts: 240
Joined: Fri Jun 30, 2017 8:27 pm

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by tksaleija »

A Very Long Math Tossup wrote:
tksaleija wrote:Firstly, awesome idea! Second, upon trying to use my college email to set up an account (.edu), I received a prompt saying that the email address was invalid. I'm not sure if it's because it isn't a traditional email server, but I might suggest including non-traditional emails like that.
Hmm. I was able to use .edu addresses just fine when testing. It might be a bug in Flask-Security's email parsing. Post or PM me your address and I'll do some debugging.
I tried it again and it either fixed itself or I typed it wrong. All good now!
Aleija Rodriguez
University of Michigan 202x
MCMC/MCCC 2019
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

OK, so the notifications weren't going out for a couple days because the scraper was timing out. It's fixed now.
Matt
User avatar
Aaron's Rod
Sec. of Cursed Images, Chicago SJW Cabal
Posts: 851
Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2013 7:29 pm

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by Aaron's Rod »

1. This rocks and you rock. (And you were very kind to mention me!) It's one thing to have an idea about a useful quizbowl technology, it's another thing altogether to bite the bullet and put it together. The world needs more Matt Mitchells.

2. This obviously only works well if tournament hosts put their tournaments on the HSQuizbowl database with a usable address. I'm hardly the first to harp on that, but we need to stay diligent about it. People (myself included) are not particularly interested in digging through announcement threads.

3. I know embarrassingly little about how the hsquizbowl sites are maintained--is it possible to get a link to this put on the DB website, even if it's just in small print next to "more search options"?

4. Suggestions: You should probably change your unit of measurement from "meters" to "miles" or at the very least "kilometers." It would also be nice if I could input a ZIP or address instead of having to look up my lat/lon. Americans have a pretty poor sense of how many meters they'd be willing to travel for a tournament. This or this may be useful to you (disclaimer––I haven't personally used either). Also, you've got a trailing space between the email and the period on the logged-in page.
Alex D.
ACF
http://tinyurl.com/qbmisconduct

"You operate at a shorter wavelength and higher frequency than most human beings." —Victor Prieto
jonah
Auron
Posts: 2383
Joined: Thu Jul 20, 2006 5:51 pm
Location: Chicago

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by jonah »

Aaron's Rod wrote:It would also be nice if I could input a ZIP or address instead of having to look up my lat/lon. Americans have a pretty poor sense of how many meters they'd be willing to travel for a tournament. This or this may be useful to you (disclaimer––I haven't personally used either).
The Google Maps API can geocode things for you. (It's what NAQT uses.) At the scale it would be used here, it should be free.

edit: I now see that one of the things Alex linked to is a Python library for doing just that.
Jonah Greenthal
National Academic Quiz Tournaments
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

Great suggestions!

I'm already using Google Maps for geocoding, since address formatting is pretty inconsistent between tournaments. It should be pretty straightforward to support address entry, though I might have to implement some rate-limiting.
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

Users can now specify units, and address entry is coming soon (now that finals are done, I actually have time to work on the site).
Matt
User avatar
The Goffman Prophecies
Quizbowl Detective Extraordinaire
Posts: 1611
Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2004 10:25 pm
Location: Wichita, KS

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by The Goffman Prophecies »

Aaron's Rod wrote:3. I know embarrassingly little about how the hsquizbowl sites are maintained--is it possible to get a link to this put on the DB website, even if it's just in small print next to "more search options"?
I'll see what I can do about this.
Dan Goff
HSQB sysadmin

Virginia Tech '13
South Carolina '15
and a couple other places
Not Thomas Dale HS

STAAATS
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

Address entry is now supported! Thanks for the suggestions, Alex and Jonah!
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

US and Canadian territories have been added to the list of notification regions. Time to step up the Nunavut outreach, people!

(On a more serious note, has anyone ever considered an outreach campaign in Puerto Rico? There might be some potential for a circuit.)
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

I've redesigned the site to make it look less hacky. As always, let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

You can now view a map of your notifications!

(Caveat: this feature does not yet work for territories, Canadian provinces, DC, or the UK, since I don't have shape data in an easily parseable format. This will be fixed shortly.)
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

All regions now show up on the map, and the resolution of US states has been increased. GeoJSON is wonderful.
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

QBNotify can now display a map of all upcoming tournaments! I've been working on this for a while, and it's finally here.

(no login required, check it out on the front page: https://qbnotify.msmitchell.org/)

Image
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

Just a reminder that QBNotify can't see your tournament if it's not posted to the hsquizbowl.org database ahead of time. Please add a database entry, even if there's already one on NAQT's website (and, of course, post an announcment on these forums).
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

It looks like notifications weren't going out for the last couple weeks, due to a bug that caused the parser to fail when attempting to process a tournament that had already been processed. It's fixed now, and some of you have probably recieved emails with a backlog of tournaments.
Matt
Wartortullian
Rikku
Posts: 376
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2016 10:02 pm
Location: New Haven, CT
Contact:

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Post by Wartortullian »

QBNotify now lists online tournaments, and you can enable notifications for new ones! Apologies for not rolling this out sooner.

Apparently, passing "Online" (and other random words) to the Google geocoding API turns up an unincorporated community in southern KS. If any of you had notifications enabled for quizbowl tournaments in Kansas and just got a bunch of AQBL announcements, I'm sorry. An old version of the code assumed that "Online/Discord/The Internet" would be listed in the Host Location field, not the address one. Please don't actually drive to Fawn Creek Township.
Matt
Post Reply