Policy change/clarification on set discussion embargos

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Matt Weiner
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Policy change/clarification on set discussion embargos

Post by Matt Weiner »

The board staff has reached the following policy conclusions about the discussion of question sets here on the forums:

Firstly: The board will assume that all sets are clear for public discussion once their last announced date of use has passed. Discussion includes mentioning specific question and answer content and posting the entirety of a reasonable number of questions for discussion purposes. For the line between what is "posting questions for reasonable discussion purposes" and "circulating sets without their editors' permission," see recent NAQT discussion threads. NAQT does not allow its sets to be posted online, so specific-question posting up to and including the amount in those threads is ipso facto allowable in any thread about a set that is not going to be posted.

Secondly, there are a limited and defined number of ways to establish what the "last announced date of use" is.
**It is your responsibility to make sure all uses of your tournament are listed in the DB correctly.
**If you are actively seeking mirrors of your tournament that do not yet have enough specific information to make a DB entry, then this information should be clearly communicated in the original message board thread announcing the tournament or its mirror availability, and should have a reasonable, specified end date. For example, if it is November 22 and the last scheduled mirror of your set has just passed, and you say "we are trying to get a site for this set in the Northeast in January," then the board staff will enforce a moratorium on question content until the actual date of that tournament, or until we reach January and nothing specific has been announced. We will NOT acknowledge unreasonable statements like "this tournament may be mirrored at some point in the next two years" if the staff perceives that they are simply an open-ended attempt to block discussion.
**The board staff is not going to acknowledge announcements about mirrors or potential mirrors in any other way but the above. If you expect this website to accommodate and enforce your wishes about set discussion, then you must use the DB and the message board on this website in the way that we have chosen to require. The list of methods of announcing tournaments that we are not responsible for caring about includes but is not limited to: any other websites besides this one; Facebook groups for quizbowl regions; private communication to board staffers by e-mail, board private message, Facebook, or IRC; or posting in threads that are not either the announcement thread for the main tournament or a thread about mirroring the tournament set.
**To sum this up again: You must use the DB, a tournament announcements thread, or a mirror request thread to accurately track mirror dates if you wish for the board staff to police discussion of your set.

As before, we encourage editors of sets that will be used over multiple weeks to request the creation of a private forum, which the editors themselves will be given the ability to control access to. The above rules will be used to determine when private tournament discussion forums are made public.

The purpose of this rule is to allow board staff a reasonable opportunity to do their jobs without having to track dozens of disparate information sources, and to require people who wish to benefit from hsquizbowl.org's value as a tournament promotional tool and a moderated forum to put in reasonable effort that allows those functions to be performed properly. We also believe that it balances the need of editors to maintain security on their question sets during the period of active use with the quizbowl community's right to discuss cleared material.
Matt Weiner
Advisor to Quizbowl at Virginia Commonwealth University / Founder of hsquizbowl.org
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