quizbowlpackets.com future

[cdcarter]

Hey Everyone! It's time for my annual return to the quizbowl community.

George Berry, who has been manning the qbpackets archive for a while now, unfortunately, has to step down. I'd really like to thank him for all his hard work and his ability to work with me to make sure this service is still available.

I am now forced to ask a few questions. First of all, is the maintenance of this service still useful? I know that sets can be linked to the tournament DB, and with the ease of creating a Dropbox public link, are people still actually using qbpackets a lot? I hope the answer is yes, but I understand if new technology is taking over.

If people do want to keep the service around, I am happy to keep paying the domain registration and the actual cost of hosting the sets, but I would like to find a new administrator to ensure the prompt posting of tournaments as they are released by the editors. The job is easy (though relatively thankless) and hopefully rewarding? Certainly a great way to stay active in the community!

So, please, use this thread to discuss the utility of the archive, and if you are at all in becoming the maintainer of the archive please post here or email me directly! If it is determined that the archive is fading in usefulness, I will of course keep it up and running, just not have anyone posting new packets.

Thanks!

[jonah]

I think this is useful. If nothing else, it's a concise, easy-to-remember address to direct new teams/players/coaches to, and it's really good to have everything in one place.

I would be happy to take this project over either in the form of "Christian keeps hosting it and I maintain it" or "I host it and maintain it", or something else.

Eventually, I think it would be good to move to a system in which sets can be tagged (target audience, difficulty, specialty subject if any, etc.) and searched. I've been casually looking to see if such a thing already exists, but haven't found any that seems particularly ideal for such a use. Suggestions are welcome.

[Horned Screamer]

I love quizbowlpackets and still use it all the time and would cry if it went away.

[GymnogypsCalifornianusWKU]

Not only do I use quizbowlpackets on a regular basis for my own purposes, but I recommend it to a large number of high school teams that attend our tournaments. It's an easy to remember name that is a simple way to teach people how to practice and study on good questions.

[Huntur]

I, too, would be very sad to see quizbowlpackets fall to the way side. The archives there are the primary source of questions we play on during practice at Tech. And I used them extensively during high school practices as well.

[theMoMA]

Adding to the 'keep it running' chorus. It's great having all the good sets in one place.

[Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1Z_hskvz1M

[idrayer]

I'd also be willing to work on it as far as maintenance so it can stay up.

[ScoBo]

Clearly quizbowlpackets.com needs to stick around as it's a fantastic one-stop resource for everyone at an easy-to-remember address.

This seems like something that could be eventually integrated into and hosted by the Quizbowl Resource Database, assuming that would be OK with Matt. Any desired categorization functionality, etc, could easily be added to the existing Question Sets section, and packets would be hosted here instead of the current fragmented state of having a partially filled database of links to packets hosted elsewhere. That would also open up the possibility of allowing people to upload the sets themselves (and, if necessary, designated administrative people could review the uploads and approve them before they are publicly available to ensure that people don't upload uncleared sets, sets they don't own, files that aren't packets, etc.) You'd also have the advantage of easily being able to see which tournaments used a particular set and statistics to see how well it played.

We could then either redirect quizbowlpackets.com to the Question Sets section of the database, with a vastly overhauled main page to make it easy to use for newcomers, etc., or have a custom dedicated frontend application for quizbowlpackets.com that uses the same database backend as the Resource DB. (I'd lean toward the former to keep things unified and reduce maintenance.)

If that's not an option, then I would prefer there to still be a dedicated website hosting everything rather than a site that links to packets hosted on other servers, so we don't have the problem of some packets disappearing, etc, like was the case when stat reports were hosted all over the place.

[Matt Weiner]

Moving maintenance and/or hosting of quizbowlpackets.com to here is fine with me.

[tintinnabulation]

Quizbowlpackets.com is fabulous because it is easy for me to find what I'm looking for. (I regularly get lost on the database on this site, but perhaps that is because I don't use it much.) As mentioned above, it would be great if there were some sort of difficulty ranking/organizing for the packets so I don't have to go on a scavenger hunt around the internetz for difficulties. Keep quizbowlpackets.com around!

[Ukonvasara]

I love quizbowlpackets and still use it all the time and would cry if it went away.

Me too! I especially like it for google in-text searches when I'm away from my packet archive.

[Weighted Companion Cube]

I'd cry myself to sleep for ten years if this went down. I do 99% of my studying from this website.

[Auroni]

I love quizbowlpackets and still use it all the time and would cry if it went away.

Me too! I especially like it for google in-text searches when I'm away from my packet archive.

Yeah, this is exactly what I use it for.

[theMoMA]

If I have a packet set to send (Collegiate Novice 2), is there someone who can post it on qbpackets at this time?

[The Toad to Wigan Pier]

If I have a packet set to send (Collegiate Novice 2), is there someone who can post it on qbpackets at this time?

I believe I can post things to collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com (but not the high school site).

[The Toad to Wigan Pier]

Since uploading stuff to amazon s3 is annoying and I don't have access to the high school section of quizbowlpackets.com, I've created a temporary packet repository on dropbox to hold sets from this year until the powers that be figure out the future of quizbowlpackets.com(integration with hsquizbowl.org?). I've only put three sets on it, but if you want me to put your set here for now, send me an email. If a permanent solution has not yet been implemented after high school nationals are over, I'll probably systematically go through all of the sets that happened this year and ask for a copy to post here.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/80759358/index.html

[ScoBo]

Integration with the Quizbowl Resource Database is being planned but work probably won't begin until after NASAT.

[The Toad to Wigan Pier]

Since uploading stuff to amazon s3 is annoying and I don't have access to the high school section of quizbowlpackets.com, I've created a temporary packet repository on dropbox to hold sets from this year until the powers that be figure out the future of quizbowlpackets.com(integration with hsquizbowl.org?). I've only put three sets on it, but if you want me to put your set here for now, send me an email. If a permanent solution has not yet been implemented after high school nationals are over, I'll probably systematically go through all of the sets that happened this year and ask for a copy to post here.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/80759358/index.html

BARGE has been added.

EDIT:
List of Packets being stored here that are not on quizbowlpackets.com:
BHSAT
OLEFIN
BARGE
LIST II
Coming Soon:
Collegiate Novice 2011

[ScoBo]

I'm currently going through the quizbowlpackets.com archive in preparation for the transition to integrate the site into the Quizbowl Resource Database in the next couple of weeks and I came across a set with multiple versions for some rounds.

2008 BHSAT has a folder called "Edited Final Packets" with different versions of rounds 8, 9, 10, and 13. (The corresponding zip file is the same way.) It seems confusing to have multiple versions of the same round in the archives, so I'd like to only migrate one of them. Does anyone know which version should be used? I would assume the Edited Final Packets versions, but it would be nice if someone who knew more about this set could provide some clarification.

I'll edit this post with any other discrepancies I find.