Which packets should get uploaded to the archive?

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Recently, "2023 SHAWM Packets" was uploaded to the Collegiate section of the quizbowlpackets archive. As far as I can tell, these packets were not announced publicly on these forums or in the main quizbowl Discord, were not played online in the main quizbowl Discord, and do not have stats posted for any in-person readings. (I'm told they were announced in a different Discord server, but were not played on that server either.)

To give credit where it's due: I think these particular packets explore many cool topics that don't show up a lot in standard quizbowl tournaments. As far as I can tell, the author is a member of these forums (though they have not made a post) and is a player in good standing in the IRL quizbowl community. I enjoyed reading through them. I am very much in favor of people writing questions on their areas of interest and offering those questions for community use.

However, I think it's sort of odd that a packet that functionally wasn't in the quizbowl community's public record, and that wasn't possible for people to play prior to upload, is now a part of the collegiate archive.

In the recent past, there have also been worse and weirder uploads, including low-effort packets full of intra-team in-jokes (of the sort that might get played within a club's end-of-year social event) and a (now-deleted) packet that had unverifiable and bizarre clues that were likely produced by ChatGPT.

I do think there's some genuine uncertainty about what the "guiding philosophy" of the archive is. Should it be a comprehensive collection of everything anyone has ever written in the quizbowl format? If so, it wouldn't be a problem if random packets get uploaded out of the blue by people who feel like writing them. Should it maintain standards of quality or "historicity" that limit to events that had a wide audience and were clearly a part of good quizbowl's public history, so that teams looking to practice on good questions know they'll find them? If so, it may make sense to raise the standards for reviewing new uploads.

Now it is to some extent a good thing that a well-frequented site gives people who wrote some packets for a small audience (or who maybe didn't have any chance at an audience) a chance to push those packets out to a bigger audience. It'd be kind of callous to say "just host your packet somewhere else" when this one archive has had far more visibility than any other for over a decade. I also think that "a packet I put together for some friends" is a different kind of thing than a full set that got announced, written, edited, hosted, mirrored, and discussed by dozens to thousands of people, and it's beneficial to maintain that distinction in whatever archive we have. (The long-awaited impending overhaul is likely to change the specifics of what the archive looks like and how packets are stored/categorized, so more precise suggestions can wait till after that.)

So I suggest a minimal change -- add just two steps to the upload process:

• Ask for validation that a publicly accessible announcement was made
• Ask for results of the packet having at least one public reading

The maintainers of the archive could then manually review those links and either approve the upload or ask the prospective uploader for more details as needed. Seriously egregious packets could be denied, and more niche packets that didn't get a public reading can be diverted to a "Random" tab or similar.

As use of These Boards declines, we could construe each of these broadly: the announcement could be a forums post, message in the public quizbowl Discord, social media post set to Public visibility, independent blog, etc., and the results could be a stats page, a link to a public Discord with the quizbowl reader bot outputting a score, some confirmation on social media, etc. but both should be accessible to archive admins.

[Cheynem]

i don't really get why a public reading should be mandatory for posting on the archive. There are good packets that the author just didn't have the time or energy to host a Discord reading of and perhaps just read them at a practice or for personal edification or something. There are lousy packets read in Discord.

I generally think any packets, assuming they are not plagarized or offensive, should be posted, but ideally the archive should distinguish between categories (i.e., this is more niche or sillier or vanity).

[Owen Mimno]

I am going to assume (perhaps incorrectly) that Matt's message is primarily an attempt at addressing a general issue within the quizbowl community, and not one specifically targeted at me, the author of the set in question. Regardless, I would just like to weigh in.

First and foremost, I accept whatever blame may exist for this state of affairs. I don't wish for this post (and this forum topic in general) to become in any way accusatory.

As far as I can tell, these packets were not announced publicly on these forums or in the main quizbowl Discord, were not played online in the main quizbowl Discord, and do not have stats posted for any in-person readings. (I'm told they were announced in a different Discord server, but were not played on that server either.)

This is all true. I would add that they had been previously playtested on a private server, but obviously, this was private. I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the main quizbowl Discord; I simply do not feel any particular need to be involved in quizbowl in this specific way. I had the vague intention of at some point creating a forum post for this set, in which I perhaps would have offered to join the main quizbowl Discord exclusively for the purpose of reading the set. In retrospect, I absolutely agree that posting on the forum would have been smart; this was my first time uploading a set to the archives, and I will willingly admit that I am not familiar with the appropriate etiquette for this situation. Considering the relative rarity with which packet posting is a topic among the quizbowl community, I don't believe I am alone here, but there could very well be clear guidelines posted somewhere.

My primary objective for uploading the set was to allow the packets to be read by anyone. I had not even originally planned to upload them anywhere, but I felt sufficiently proud of my effort that I didn't want them to languish in my Google Drive. If people wished to play these packets, I imagined they would either read them themselves, or organize informal packet readings without my involvement. The extent of which this could be considered selfish and lazy of me is up to you. Ultimately, I do not think I was appropriately concerned with the outcome of the set, for which I apologize.

I am not entirely certain whether the purpose of the set announcement forum post is to 1) make the presence of the set public information, or 2) have a specific forum post associated with the set. If the former, one can hardly be ungrateful to receive such laudatory remarks from none other than Matt Jackson! If the latter, I would make a post with all due haste.

and is a player in good standing in the IRL quizbowl community

Bit of a digression but I was not aware that I had much of a standing at all! I appreciate it? I do hope it is not impacted by this whole situation.

I also think that "a packet I put together for some friends" is a different kind of thing than a full set that got announced, written, edited, hosted, mirrored, and discussed by dozens to thousands of people, and it's beneficial to maintain that distinction in whatever archive we have.

I think such a distinction is the optimal solution here. Inexperienced as I am with the entire network of forums and forum-adjacent platforms, I doubt I would have failed to notice something along the lines of different headers for "OFFICIAL PACKETS" and "VANITY PACKETS".

So I suggest a minimal change -- add just two steps to the upload process:

• Ask for validation that a publicly accessible announcement was made
• Ask for results of the packet having at least one public reading

The maintainers of the archive could then manually review those links and either approve the upload or ask the prospective uploader for more details as needed. Seriously egregious packets could be denied, and more niche packets that didn't get a public reading can be diverted to a "Random" tab or similar.

This sounds perfectly fine. The points about sets of dubious quality are absolutely a concern that I agree should be addressed by whoever runs the packet archives. I would not be in the least offended to have my set be labeled as "Random".

If SHAWM becomes a cause célèbre I suppose I ought to thank you — I can't say I was expecting such a response! More saliently, though, thanks for bringing the matter to community attention; your points are all very valid and I don't mind any personal notoriety that may arise from this.

[Nurostep]

I think it's kind of preposterous to require everyone to read their packets in public spaces for the purpose of having them be posted to the archive, or to go through the trouble of crafting any sort of formal announcement about the packets they are writing. If you wanted some sort of denotation for which packets have versus haven't been read/announced publicly before being posted, sure, but there's no reason to prevent people from posting packets for public use that they put energy into solely for the purpose of having some sort of public interaction with the packets before they are posted for anyone's use. The idea of separating them into a "Random" tab also seems kind of unnecessary, because if they're still accessible in the same space what is the point of putting them in a whole separate page simply because they were not read for a tournament or in a large space?

Also, your suggestion seems to revolve around this point:

Should it maintain standards of quality or "historicity" that limit to events that had a wide audience and were clearly a part of good quizbowl's public history, so that teams looking to practice on good questions know they'll find them? If so, it may make sense to raise the standards for reviewing new uploads.

This is almost certainly an elitist view of what "good" quizbowl packets should be for... no real reason. Why suddenly "raise the standards" for what makes a packet worthy of being posted to the archive?

The entire idea also assumes that everyone is completely connected to the broader quizbowl community by the forums and/or major quizbowl discord spaces, which is not true for everyone for various legitimate reasons. Personally, it feels like both unnecessary extra work and unnecessary relegation of packets to some sort of idea that they are "worse" due to being posted without a public reading.

[Turquoise]

This point has been made in previous posts, but I agree that it is a bad idea to preclude a good portion of packets due to not having a public reading. A visual denotation between packets that have been read at tournaments versus those that haven't would be a nice update for most users of the archives. However, if this benefit (as well as maintaining an appearance of historicity) were to require purging future packets from the site, I feel few players would be satisfied. This would not be an issue if there were other accessible spaces for packets to be shared, but as it stands, this site is the only place for packets of all qualities and niches to be shared.

[Cheynem]

I would also say that the archive should mark, for example, what packets are good for new teams/players and perhaps which sets have been judged to be of extraordinarily good quality or stuff like that. But none of that would involve removing packets that haven't been read anywhere or are just read at practice.

[henrygoff]

I support Matt's suggestion here. A verification that a packet or set has been used for a public reading is the easiest way to confirm that it is of adequate quality as good quizbowl, which is what the High School and Collegiate sections should be restricted to. I also like the idea to have a "Random" section that allows other writers to post their packets in a public and visible space without having to organize a public reading (and may be a good place to move the recent influx of poor-quality content in the Trash section, as well).

[modernhemalurgist]

I think most everyone is in agreement that the ideal packet archive would have some distinction between widely played, well-regarded sets and more niche or personal projects. Indeed, as Matt said, the archive overhaul will presumably have such structure, either explicitly, or implicitly through difficulty/subject tags. I rather suspect the people involved in that overhaul have put more work and thought into how this should be designed than most of us just writing a forum post on the subject, but perhaps this thread can nevertheless provide some ideas or suggestions about what this could look like. As it happens, I would actually support stronger criteria than what Matt has suggested - along the lines of being played in a tournament setting or some such - for whatever "curated pick" we end up with, since (as Mike pointed out) having a discord reading is really no bar at all for quality of the packet.

All this being said, I think it would be a shame if this distinction was such that it trivialized or even eliminated niche/vanity packets, which some parts of Matt's post might be interpreted to support. I admit, many such packets are of dubious quality, but I think people still find enjoyment out of playing these packets, as well as fulfillment out of writing them and having them played; moreover, I highly doubt that the current rate of such packets being posted is anywhere near the level that would be problematic to host/organize (at least in a post-overhaul world). More importantly, this kind of thing might discourage some high-quality vanity packets from ever seeing the light of day! I think SHAWM is a great example of this: it's a cool set that I very much enjoyed playing, and I would probaby never have gotten do so if the barriers to sharing such packets were higher. There is some floor of packets that should probably be dropped - the unmarked ChatGPT one comes to mind - but I would urge that this level be as low as possible so as to best encourage everyone to share their work with the community.

Ultimately, I don't want the label "archive" to give the idea that this site is meant as some sort of historical representation of quizbowl. The archive should be, first and foremost, a way to play quizbowl. People want to find the kinds of packets that they'd like to play, whether they missed a public reading, or whether none occurred. The purpose of the overhaul is to make this easier and more accessible, and I think any change to the archive should keep the same goal in mind.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I am going to assume (perhaps incorrectly) that Matt's message is primarily an attempt at addressing a general issue within the quizbowl community, and not one specifically targeted at me, the author of the set in question.

You assume correctly, i.e. it was indeed general -- I really didn't mean any of this as a personal attack on you, and I apologize if any of it came across that way. Thanks again for writing, and thank you for weighing in.

I think it would be a shame if this distinction was such that it trivialized or even eliminated niche/vanity packets

Strongly agree. (I would separately encourage people who write vanity packets to announce public readings of them, if they feel comfortable doing so, precisely because quizbowl is fun and people enjoy chances to play it...!) But yes, my hope with whatever change gets made by the Overhaul Overlords is that it improves the ability of people to share and find the kind of packets they want, without discouraging anyone from producing.

[AKKOLADE]

I don't really see why a public reading should be required for posting anything, but I definitely think we should filter vanity packets away from normal college tournaments to make the archive more useful for people.

[Auks Ran Ova]

I don't really see why a public reading should be required for posting anything, but I definitely think we should filter vanity packets away from normal college tournaments to make the archive more useful for people.

Came here to say pretty much exactly this--especially the former, but especially the latter, since a flood of one-off packets really bloats the list of tournaments and can make it harder to find normal sets. I also think that if you announce a packet or packets on the forums (and complete it, and hold whatever readings you want of it), it should be incumbent on you to eventually post it publicly afterwards.

[theMoMA]

I think the main issue here doesn't necessarily implicate the policy of the archive. That issue being: people generally enjoy playing quizbowl and appreciate the opportunity to do so, which means it's nice when writers of one-off events post a real announcement that gives players the chance to find and play the questions. This could have some relationship to posting packets on the archive, but I don't think it necessarily does.

I personally don't think it's a big deal to have limited-audience packets posted on the archive, regardless of whether they have some kind of official public reading. I'd rather have the packets posted than having them inaccessible or losing them forever. Plus, it's pretty obvious from the small size and narrow subject matter what kind of event these packets came from, and I don't think there's any real chance for confusion about whether this was some kind of "official" event.

I don't see the archive's overriding purpose as some kind of archaeological record of official events, but rather as a repository for questions that people might want to study or play. It would be more ideal to have a specific section for single-subject or vanity event packets, but I think it's fine as is if the maintainers of the archive have more important things to work on.

[Mike Bentley]

(Posting in the correct thread this time.)

I think I was the person who approved this set. In general, if I haven't heard of a set before, I take a very brief pass at the questions to see if this looks like a legitimate packet. I don't think it should be the job of the approver to go super in-depth into every single question in every single packet. Based on lots of past experience with quizbowl-related projects that require anything close to this level of regular, boring commitment, no one is going to do this beyond a couple of months.

To temporarily help deal with the poor metadata of the existing archive, I've taken to adding "Packet" or "Packets" to the end of sets that are just 1 or a handful of packets.

I think it's perfectly fine for the archive to be a little messy if it errs in favor of having more sets. Hopefully the overhaul that's going on fixes most of any potential issues here with some better metadata and more attention to recommended sets (although I'm sure this is going to hurt various people's feelings). No one anywhere is giving up on playing quizbowl because they're new to the game and found some packet of what we all in this thread would consider low quality. I'd probably argue that something closer to the case is someone new to the game happening upon a college packet like "2023 Chicago Open" and being more turned off.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

It looks like the consensus is that my suggestions in the first post are unnecessary, which has largely persuaded me of same.

The post-overhaul archive seems to do what folks generally want re: giving one-off and specialty packets their own section without gatekeeping based on the size of their original audience. I'm happy with that outcome.