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Where Stats Go

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2018 9:32 pm
by heterodyne
Quizbowl players like stats. One might even say they like stats too much. This surfaces every so often in a plague of people asking for stats in the thread of a tournament immediately after - or even during - the tournament happening.

Because of how annoying that kind of pestering can get, we might forget what the duties of tournament hosts are with respect to stats. It has been agreed for some time that keeping accurate stats is one of the things one implicitly agrees to when agreeing to host a tournament. I'd like to propose that those duties should be taken to also cover posting those stats in an easily accessible place that can be searched. Due to the vagaries of current quizbowl digital infrastructure, the only place that fits this description is the hsquizbowl.org database. Thanks to the wonderful work of Harry White, this database is searchable by player and team - an essential feature. While Neg5 and the vanilla hsquizbowl DB allow one to search by tournament name, tournaments often go by different names, and one might not even know what the name of the tournament they are looking for is - they might just want to see all of the tournaments a given person has played.

What does this mean for tournament hosts? Simply, if you are a user of Neg5, or the hosts of the Michigan EFT mirror, or Jonah Greenthal, the existence of semi-accessible stats in some place on the internet does not mean you have discharged your social duties as statskeeper or TD. Part of what you signed up for when you agreed to run a tournament was keeping a record of it. As much as I may like my last place finish at CO 2015 to remain hidden behind the awful search function on these forums, I still want to see the practice of uploading stats to the DB attain ubiquity.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Sun Aug 05, 2018 11:50 pm
by Auks Ran Ova
I heartily endorse this event or product.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 9:17 pm
by Aaron's Rod
I could not agree more with this. The quizbowl community is incredibly blessed to have people who are willing to work on very useful projects for free, and for no particular organization, simply because they should be done. (I have Harry White's player search saved on my bookmarks bar and I use it frequently.) Not to put words into Harry's or Matt's mouths, but I think the rest of us can help and show our appreciation by actually using the stats and tournament database these tools draw from. Finding CO stats was super cumbersome and annoying.

(Edited to link another great resource.)

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 10:31 pm
by Wartortullian
Everyone in this thread is extremely correct.

One thing to add: please put your tournaments on the HSQB database as soon as they're announced, not just when you upload stats. Plenty of people use the database to search for upcoming tournaments (some of them indirectly through QBNotify), and those who don't habitually check the forums should still be able to find your tournament announcement easily.

Also, please provide properly formatted addresses for your tournament. It makes parsing a hell of a lot easier.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 11:24 pm
by Whiter Hydra
With regards to Neg5, I'd like to include it in my question database, but as far as I can tell there's no easy way to get a list of every tournament hosted on the site. If there were, I'd certainly be willing to include it.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 11:40 pm
by UlyssesInvictus
Haaaaaaaarry Whiiiiiiiiiite wrote:With regards to Neg5, I'd like to include it in my question database, but as far as I can tell there's no easy way to get a list of every tournament hosted on the site. If there were, I'd certainly be willing to include it.
Inspecting the network request, it looks like this url gives you a JSON response of tournament names, dates, and links:

https://stats.neg5.org/api/t/byDateRang ... 00:00.000Z

Where you correspondingly change the startDate and endDate parameters for what you want.

I'm not sure if there's some limit to the time period/# tournaments you get back, but I bet you could try just including a very large date range to start with, and experiment from there.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:17 am
by heterodyne
UlyssesInvictus wrote:
Haaaaaaaarry Whiiiiiiiiiite wrote:With regards to Neg5, I'd like to include it in my question database, but as far as I can tell there's no easy way to get a list of every tournament hosted on the site. If there were, I'd certainly be willing to include it.
Inspecting the network request, it looks like this url gives you a JSON response of tournament names, dates, and links:

https://stats.neg5.org/api/t/byDateRang ... 00:00.000Z

Where you correspondingly change the startDate and endDate parameters for what you want.

I'm not sure if there's some limit to the time period/# tournaments you get back, but I bet you could try just including a very large date range to start with, and experiment from there.
While Harry would be very kind indeed if he did the extra work to integrate your database, another solution would be uploading SQBS files onto the DB instead of hoping someone else does the work.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:31 am
by UlyssesInvictus
heterodyne wrote:
UlyssesInvictus wrote:
Haaaaaaaarry Whiiiiiiiiiite wrote: [...] your database
While I greatly appreciate the work Harry does, and don't feel like the onus should be on him to do any extra work, I feel I ought to clarify that I have no formal relationship to Neg5. It's not "my database," and while I would happily help contribute code to the site (though I haven't to date), I don't want anyone to get any incorrect ideas about my relationship to the site.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:55 am
by Whiter Hydra
UlyssesInvictus wrote:
Haaaaaaaarry Whiiiiiiiiiite wrote:With regards to Neg5, I'd like to include it in my question database, but as far as I can tell there's no easy way to get a list of every tournament hosted on the site. If there were, I'd certainly be willing to include it.
Inspecting the network request, it looks like this url gives you a JSON response of tournament names, dates, and links:

https://stats.neg5.org/api/t/byDateRang ... 00:00.000Z

Where you correspondingly change the startDate and endDate parameters for what you want.

I'm not sure if there's some limit to the time period/# tournaments you get back, but I bet you could try just including a very large date range to start with, and experiment from there.
That's exactly what I was looking for! I really should have thought of that earlier.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2018 11:33 pm
by Beast Mode
heterodyne wrote:the hosts of the Michigan EFT mirror
I've done the stats. See my post in that tournament's thread for more on the incompleteness of the stats and what I did about it.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:20 am
by vinteuil
I was reminded this weekend that last year's Penn Bowl Northeast stats are only available on Neg5.

This is inexcusable. We as a community have committed to maintaining the stats repository on hsquizbowl.org precisely because 3rd party/external sources do, and have gone down in the past. (Stats from surprisingly recent ACF nationals are only available through archive.org, and some are just gone, it seems.)

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2018 2:11 pm
by AGoodMan
vinteuil wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:20 am I was reminded this weekend that last year's Penn Bowl Northeast stats are only available on Neg5.

This is inexcusable. We as a community have committed to maintaining the stats repository on hsquizbowl.org precisely because 3rd party/external sources do, and have gone down in the past. (Stats from surprisingly recent ACF nationals are only available through archive.org, and some are just gone, it seems.)
This will be uploaded by the end of this week.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2018 4:46 pm
by AGoodMan
AGoodMan wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2018 2:11 pm
vinteuil wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:20 am I was reminded this weekend that last year's Penn Bowl Northeast stats are only available on Neg5.

This is inexcusable. We as a community have committed to maintaining the stats repository on hsquizbowl.org precisely because 3rd party/external sources do, and have gone down in the past. (Stats from surprisingly recent ACF nationals are only available through archive.org, and some are just gone, it seems.)
This will be uploaded by the end of this week.
By end of this week, I mean today: prelims & combined.

Re: Where Stats Go

Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2018 4:50 pm
by vinteuil
AGoodMan wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2018 4:46 pm
AGoodMan wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2018 2:11 pm
vinteuil wrote: Sun Oct 21, 2018 9:20 am I was reminded this weekend that last year's Penn Bowl Northeast stats are only available on Neg5.

This is inexcusable. We as a community have committed to maintaining the stats repository on hsquizbowl.org precisely because 3rd party/external sources do, and have gone down in the past. (Stats from surprisingly recent ACF nationals are only available through archive.org, and some are just gone, it seems.)
This will be uploaded by the end of this week.
By end of this week, I mean today: prelims & combined.
Thanks for the quick turnaround on this!