QBDB is (mostly) dead; resurrection ongoing

[grapesmoker]

Hi friends,

I haven't been following this forum very closely at all, but occasionally I check in to see what's happening. I've seen a lot of people make occasional reference to QBDB, my old database that I wrote way back in 2005. I'm here to tell you that you should probably not be looking at it anymore, and pretty soon you won't be able to at all. I'm taking it down in a few days for the foreseeable future.

There are a number of reasons for why I'm doing this, but the foremost is that I'm working on a redesign of the database. The truth is that QBDB was written, in PHP, with hand-written SQL queries, back in a dark, dark age before good web frameworks and other niceties of modern web design (and back when many of the readers of this post would have just entered elementary school). Frankly, it sucks and has a lot of bugs and is not nice to look at. Since then I've had lots more web programming experience, and although I am by no means a design wizard, there now exist tools like Bootstrap to help visual incompetents like myself at least not break your browser.

One of the problems that everyone who works on such projects runs into is that quizbowl packets are hard to parse because of nasty Word surprises like unprintable characters and various other cruft. I've updated my toolset to reduce much of the pain of the parsing process, but it's still far from automatic. With all my other constraints, I've been unable to devote a great deal of time to producing useful content for QBDB, but I hope that with the new tools I will be able to import tournaments much more easily. Given how laborious it is to get stuff into QBDB, it's fallen terribly out of date, which is another reason why I'm shutting it down.

Finally, I'm migrating my web hosting to another location and this means that all the stuff currently hosted on grapesmoker.com will disappear. It should reappear soon, though.

The good news is that QBDB will be back in the near future; the main framework already exists, redesigned from the ground up to run on Node with a Mongo backend, and a frontend laid out with Bootstrap. It will be fast, easy to use, (moderately) attractive, and, hopefully, comprehensive. If you're interested in helping out with this, get in touch with me ([email protected]). Thanks to those people who have used it over the years; I'm sorry I didn't produce a more useful tool for you all, but I hope to remedy that soon.