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QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 6:40 pm
by Wartortullian
Hi everyone,

As many of you know, NAQT allows you to receive email notifications for nearby tournament announcements. The hsquizbowl.org database, however, does not offer such a service, which is why I decided to make one.

The site is at qbnotify.msmitchell.org, and the code is available here. It's a very rough prototype, and I'm open to any suggestions about how to improve it.

Thanks to Alex Damisch for the idea!

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 6:56 pm
by tksaleija
Firstly, awesome idea! Second, upon trying to use my college email to set up an account (.edu), I received a prompt saying that the email address was invalid. I'm not sure if it's because it isn't a traditional email server, but I might suggest including non-traditional emails like that.

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 7:04 pm
by Wartortullian
tksaleija wrote:Firstly, awesome idea! Second, upon trying to use my college email to set up an account (.edu), I received a prompt saying that the email address was invalid. I'm not sure if it's because it isn't a traditional email server, but I might suggest including non-traditional emails like that.
Hmm. I was able to use .edu addresses just fine when testing. It might be a bug in Flask-Security's email parsing. Post or PM me your address and I'll do some debugging.

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2018 9:08 pm
by tksaleija
A Very Long Math Tossup wrote:
tksaleija wrote:Firstly, awesome idea! Second, upon trying to use my college email to set up an account (.edu), I received a prompt saying that the email address was invalid. I'm not sure if it's because it isn't a traditional email server, but I might suggest including non-traditional emails like that.
Hmm. I was able to use .edu addresses just fine when testing. It might be a bug in Flask-Security's email parsing. Post or PM me your address and I'll do some debugging.
I tried it again and it either fixed itself or I typed it wrong. All good now!

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2018 5:00 pm
by Wartortullian
OK, so the notifications weren't going out for a couple days because the scraper was timing out. It's fixed now.

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Tue May 01, 2018 5:19 pm
by Aaron's Rod
1. This rocks and you rock. (And you were very kind to mention me!) It's one thing to have an idea about a useful quizbowl technology, it's another thing altogether to bite the bullet and put it together. The world needs more Matt Mitchells.

2. This obviously only works well if tournament hosts put their tournaments on the HSQuizbowl database with a usable address. I'm hardly the first to harp on that, but we need to stay diligent about it. People (myself included) are not particularly interested in digging through announcement threads.

3. I know embarrassingly little about how the hsquizbowl sites are maintained--is it possible to get a link to this put on the DB website, even if it's just in small print next to "more search options"?

4. Suggestions: You should probably change your unit of measurement from "meters" to "miles" or at the very least "kilometers." It would also be nice if I could input a ZIP or address instead of having to look up my lat/lon. Americans have a pretty poor sense of how many meters they'd be willing to travel for a tournament. This or this may be useful to you (disclaimer––I haven't personally used either). Also, you've got a trailing space between the email and the period on the logged-in page.

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Tue May 01, 2018 5:44 pm
by jonah
Aaron's Rod wrote:It would also be nice if I could input a ZIP or address instead of having to look up my lat/lon. Americans have a pretty poor sense of how many meters they'd be willing to travel for a tournament. This or this may be useful to you (disclaimer––I haven't personally used either).
The Google Maps API can geocode things for you. (It's what NAQT uses.) At the scale it would be used here, it should be free.

edit: I now see that one of the things Alex linked to is a Python library for doing just that.

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Tue May 01, 2018 7:49 pm
by Wartortullian
Great suggestions!

I'm already using Google Maps for geocoding, since address formatting is pretty inconsistent between tournaments. It should be pretty straightforward to support address entry, though I might have to implement some rate-limiting.

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 2:15 am
by Wartortullian
Users can now specify units, and address entry is coming soon (now that finals are done, I actually have time to work on the site).

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Fri May 11, 2018 10:05 pm
by The Goffman Prophecies
Aaron's Rod wrote:3. I know embarrassingly little about how the hsquizbowl sites are maintained--is it possible to get a link to this put on the DB website, even if it's just in small print next to "more search options"?
I'll see what I can do about this.

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Thu May 31, 2018 8:21 pm
by Wartortullian
Address entry is now supported! Thanks for the suggestions, Alex and Jonah!

Re: QBNotify: A email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 2:44 am
by Wartortullian
US and Canadian territories have been added to the list of notification regions. Time to step up the Nunavut outreach, people!

(On a more serious note, has anyone ever considered an outreach campaign in Puerto Rico? There might be some potential for a circuit.)

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Sat Aug 11, 2018 8:25 pm
by Wartortullian
I've redesigned the site to make it look less hacky. As always, let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2018 1:53 am
by Wartortullian
You can now view a map of your notifications!

(Caveat: this feature does not yet work for territories, Canadian provinces, DC, or the UK, since I don't have shape data in an easily parseable format. This will be fixed shortly.)

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:53 am
by Wartortullian
All regions now show up on the map, and the resolution of US states has been increased. GeoJSON is wonderful.

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2018 6:36 pm
by Wartortullian
QBNotify can now display a map of all upcoming tournaments! I've been working on this for a while, and it's finally here.

(no login required, check it out on the front page: https://qbnotify.msmitchell.org/)

Image

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2018 6:51 pm
by Wartortullian
Just a reminder that QBNotify can't see your tournament if it's not posted to the hsquizbowl.org database ahead of time. Please add a database entry, even if there's already one on NAQT's website (and, of course, post an announcment on these forums).

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2018 7:59 pm
by Wartortullian
It looks like notifications weren't going out for the last couple weeks, due to a bug that caused the parser to fail when attempting to process a tournament that had already been processed. It's fixed now, and some of you have probably recieved emails with a backlog of tournaments.

Re: QBNotify: An email notification system for tournaments

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2020 2:38 pm
by Wartortullian
QBNotify now lists online tournaments, and you can enable notifications for new ones! Apologies for not rolling this out sooner.

Apparently, passing "Online" (and other random words) to the Google geocoding API turns up an unincorporated community in southern KS. If any of you had notifications enabled for quizbowl tournaments in Kansas and just got a bunch of AQBL announcements, I'm sorry. An old version of the code assumed that "Online/Discord/The Internet" would be listed in the Host Location field, not the address one. Please don't actually drive to Fawn Creek Township.