The Quizbowl Resource Center

kevink wrote:

Crazyflight wrote:There's a new ProtoBowl app. Yay.
It doesn't work for iOS6. >.> Nay.
I don't want to update my iPhone to iOS7, but...

I didn't make the iOS or Android apps, but the creator says that there is currently a bug which causes it to crash on iOS6, but that it's designed to support both iOS 6 and 7 and that an update which should fix the compatibility issues should be deployed over the next few days pending Apple's approval.

Yeah, it works now. I'm loving PB mobile. I use it for trash questions before tournaments.

I'm working on a new version of Protobowl which uses Github as a central question repository. This means that anyone can add their own packets with their own questions or fix broken questions.

Get started here: http://github.com/neotenic/packets

All the main questions are in /qb/ Folders are organized by year and tournament.

kevink wrote:I'm working on a new version of Protobowl which uses Github as a central question repository. This means that anyone can add their own packets with their own questions or fix broken questions.

Get started here: http://github.com/neotenic/packets

All the main questions are in /qb/ Folders are organized by year and tournament.

It might make sense to have someone approve all submissions as to stop troll questions from being submitted.

Weighted Companion Cube wrote:

kevink wrote:I'm working on a new version of Protobowl which uses Github as a central question repository. This means that anyone can add their own packets with their own questions or fix broken questions.

Get started here: http://github.com/neotenic/packets

All the main questions are in /qb/ Folders are organized by year and tournament.

It might make sense to have someone approve all submissions as to stop troll questions from being submitted.

It's done via github so it's trivial to revert any set of changes and to see the entire version history. At the moment I have to approve all changes (I'll probably appoint users who contribute significantly to review pull requests and have direct access to the repository contents).

If you look at https://github.com/neotenic/packets/tree/master/qb you can see that we only have questions up to 2011, so there's quite a bit of work to be done.

So this happened:
Any ideas? Further proof that ban system should be created.

Hi,

Whenever I enter the room, and get points, the next time I'm back my score isn't saved. Do you know how to get it to save on the leader board?

Wow, my favorite feature is totally the thing where if you miss too many questions Protobowl sends you an automated message that says (and I am not making this up)

Protobowl wrote:you suck like seriously you suck. you are a turd.

Jesus H. Christ (the H stands for "high school section"), why on earth would I ever recommend this product to anyone I wanted to ever play quizbowl again?

Frater Taciturnus wrote:Wow, my favorite feature is totally the thing where if you miss too many questions Protobowl sends you an automated message that says (and I am not making this up)

Protobowl wrote:you suck like seriously you suck. you are a turd.

Jesus H. Christ (the H stands for "high school section"), why on earth would I ever recommend this product to anyone I wanted to ever play quizbowl again?

My brother (currently a junior in high school) noticed this feature months ago, when he was intentionally playing terribly with one of his friends on the team. He thought it was fricking hilarious.

Corry wrote:

Frater Taciturnus wrote:Wow, my favorite feature is totally the thing where if you miss too many questions Protobowl sends you an automated message that says (and I am not making this up)

Protobowl wrote:you suck like seriously you suck. you are a turd.

Jesus H. Christ (the H stands for "high school section"), why on earth would I ever recommend this product to anyone I wanted to ever play quizbowl again?

My brother (currently a junior in high school) noticed this feature months ago, when he was intentionally playing terribly with one of his friends on the team. He thought it was fricking hilarious.

Maybe some people don't intentionally play terribly and don't necessarily convert questions and wouldn't really appreciate this

Yeah I thought someone was PMing me and it made me feel bad, because I [am permanently banned for posting under a fake name after being banned the first time --Mgmt.].

Corry wrote: when he was intentionally playing terribly

So not only is insulting people obviously a bad idea, but having features that encourage people to play badly on purpose is not helping this site's case.

Ndg wrote:

Corry wrote: when he was intentionally playing terribly

So not only is insulting people obviously a bad idea, but having features that encourage people to play badly on purpose is not helping this site's case.

I'm not going to defend this "feature" of Protobowl because it's obviously indefensible. I'm guessing it was just a leftover piece of pre-release joke code, which the developer forgot about.

...having features that encourage people to play badly on purpose

However, this line of logic is absolutely silly. I don't want to put words in my brother's mouth, but he wasn't playing "badly" because Protobowl had encouraged him to do so. He did it because he was goofing off with friends. We used to do the same thing back in our actual high school quiz bowl team practices, from time to time, before Protobowl even existed. Because, you know, that's a thing that high schoolers do.

Apologies for the strong wording of that post. I not trying to specifically criticize anyone for how they use the site, I'm more just kind of disappointed that this feature is undercutting the site's image as a potential tool for actually learning things for quiz bowl. But I'm not going to argue any further because yes, I recognize that this really isn't a big deal.

Frater Taciturnus wrote:Wow, my favorite feature is totally the thing where if you miss too many questions Protobowl sends you an automated message that says (and I am not making this up)

Protobowl wrote:you suck like seriously you suck. you are a turd.

Jesus H. Christ (the H stands for "high school section"), why on earth would I ever recommend this product to anyone I wanted to ever play quizbowl again?

It was something that was added a while ago in tandem with a bunch of rate limiting features to mitigate server abuse. It wasn't meant to insult the player's ability so much as chide them for contributing to lag for other users, and it's not an action that I imagine gets triggered often enough that I bothered remove. Anyway, the threshold of 10 consecutive interrupts might have been too low- it certainly wasn't intended to trip up well-intentioned use.

I'm getting the impression that there are some people who are actively searching for reasons to give protobowl flak: actively searching for reasons to frame it as some metastatic cancer of the quizbowl community and me as some kind of willful plotter for the dissolution and decay of the said community. It's not generally a terribly opinionated or ideological site- sure there are a few easter eggs, and there are probably some people who would rather them not exist. And there are probably some technical decisions with unforeseen social ramifications- in part because they're unforeseeable, and in part because of indiscretion or ignorance on my part.

More than anything, it's a reflection on the people who use the site. I haven't ever spent much time on the website, but I would be inclined to attribute the immaturity to the demographic rather than the design of the tool. I'm not a community builder, in part because that tends to entail gate-keeping and I tend to opt for inclusivity over exclusivity. The hsquizbowl community, its stringent real-name policy and enforced etiquette is pretty daunting and ends up excluding a lot of people who like quizbowl. But it's all okay, because the moderators have the idea that the community is better without the ones it excludes, and that's a perfectly respectable opinion.

I don't see protobowl as some entity which requires or even has its own culture. It's not like hsquizbowl- it's not a public forum for discourse or discussion which needs to maximize political correctness. I've always envisioned it as a place where a group of friends can take their existing culture and merely continue it online with quizbowl as a backdrop.

kevink wrote:The hsquizbowl community, its stringent real-name policy and enforced etiquette is pretty daunting and ends up excluding a lot of people who like quizbowl. But it's all okay, because the moderators have the idea that the community is better without the ones it excludes, and that's a perfectly respectable opinion.

I can't BELIEVE we require people to use real names and actually be respectful to each other.

kevink wrote:I would be inclined to attribute the immaturity to the demographic rather than the design of the tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_di ... ion_effect

kevink wrote:The hsquizbowl community, its stringent real-name policy and enforced etiquette is pretty daunting and ends up excluding a lot of people who like quizbowl. But it's all okay, because the moderators have the idea that the community is better without the ones it excludes, and that's a perfectly respectable opinion.

No, what's exclusionary is the fact that your website is a safe refuge for racists and garbage internet culture, and your cavalier attitude about this fact.

This thread has gotten kind of long and out of hand, so I'm locking it. If people wish to continue discussing ProtoBowl, they can create a new thread. This thread will remain in this forum for reading/reference until our regular archiving.