The Quizbowl Resource Center

We will be hosting a Discord Tournament based off of NHBB/IHBB packets on 4/18/2019 @ 4:30PM PST.
Sign-up here: https://forms.gle/qD6oWqwH3jQM14dz9
Join the tournament center after sign-up here: https://discord.gg/Qre5bjT

Let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks

The preliminary tournament has been wrapped up!
Results are attached here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
The playoffs will be on Monday, April 22nd @ 6PM PST on the Discord Server (link above). The Wildcard game will be at the same day at 5PM PST.

Special thanks to Wesley Zhang, Dean Ah Now, Lewis Fuller, and Rishi Raman for helping run the tournament.

Also - the preliminary set for this tournament will be made public on quizbowlpackets.

TheScientists wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 12:49 am Also - the preliminary set for this tournament will be made public on quizbowlpackets.

Was this written by you (or a group involving you) in the style of NHBB? Because if, as seemed to be the case from the original postings, this was using old NHBB questions, #1 don't do that period, and #2 you absolutely can't post someone else's questions to the packet archive.

jonpin wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 4:22 pm #2 you absolutely can't post someone else's questions to the packet archive.

2018 Glenwood Winter Teacher Quiz Bowl should probably be removed then, considering it directly rips questions from 2017 Prison Bowl, 2015 Potatoville Varsity, 2016 HFT, 2015 BISB, and 2012 Ohio State+VCU Housewrite.

I probably should put a public clarficiation.
Based off of IHBB/NHBB packets is defined as basing our housewrites from the rossups tyles and type of topics that you would expect at an IHBB/NHBB match. Out of the 90 tossups we wrote, only 2 were direct copies and we redacted those 2 in the copies that have been uploaded to quizbowlpackets (currently pending approval)
Apologies for the lack of a public clarification.

And yes - the other 88 questions are housewrites. So will the Wildcard packet and Finals packet.

I've taken a look through the first packet and found that the majority of questions have been taken almost verbatim from existing question sets. Considering that this set will certainly not be posted on the archives and did not charge a mirror fee, I don't think this warrants much more than a stern talking to, but please note that attempting to affiliate this set with NHBB or market it as a "housewrite" is disingenuous. If you're going to compile existing questions for a shootout, then don't try to act like these were written from scratch.

https://imgur.com/a/1ZeARt3
This was posted in the moderation chat before I left the moderation team.

literatureboye wrote: ↑Sat Apr 20, 2019 3:26 pm https://imgur.com/a/1ZeARt3
This was posted in the moderation chat before I left the moderation team.

Ameya, even with "editing" and the fact that this tournament didn't charge anything, passing off someone else's work as your own and dishonestly promoting it as such is highly unethical, and this attitude toward doing so doesn't bode well for either your involvement in the qb community or your future academic career. For your own sake and ours, don't do this again. Thank you to Jordan for bringing this to our attention.

For what it's worth, Ameya actually said in the Discord that he would be taking questions from existing tournaments and then editing them to make them "more competitive"; not sure what that means but guessing it's a synonym for "making sure nobody can look up the exact wording and then cheat".

Also for what it's worth, Ameya, if you take a question from a different source and repurpose it (for lack of a better word), that doesn't mean it's your question, and you still shouldn't be posting it on the packet archive as if you produced it. I would advise that you either take Packet 1 off the archive, or re-upload only those questions that are your original work.

Given the fact that Ameya was pretty open in advance about the fact that the questions wouldn't be housewritten (I was actually surprised that two of the packets were entirely so!), and he demonstrated his good faith in other ways (such as asking the Discord what to do if two of the questions in a packet were taken verbatim, and if he should redact them from the final posted version), I don't think it's reasonable to accuse him of acting dishonestly or in bad faith.

I would, of course, have a very different opinion if he had presented the set in advance as being entirely housewritten, or if money had changed hands in the process of this tournament.

Hey so it should be
1) Clear that this event is not at all affiliated with NHBB
2) Understood that you should never run a tournament on questions written by another organization without their permission, and especially do not charge an entry fee for those tournaments.
3) Understood that you can never pass off other people's questions as your own, even if parts of them are tweaked. This includes sets from the archive.
4) Understood that, even separate from the other issues, advertising a tournament as a housewrite and then using previously published questions is a terrible idea.

In addition, even if you were somewhat clear that some of the questions were not originals, that should have been explicitly stated in the forum announcement.

A few clarifications:
- I just want to make clear that NHBB/IHBB has no affiliation or endorsement of the event. (This has been put in the first lines of the registration form and in the Discord server)
- I have made shortsighted decisions as to the creation of the first packet and clues in specifically that packet have been modified rips from old NHBB packets and from QuizDB. Jordan's screenshots are correct and there is no further context needed. The 88/90 claim is disingenuous due to the nature of Packet 1's clues.
- For the wildcard game and finals, we will be creating tossups from scratch.
- I will make sure that future online tournaments we run will be solely housewrites (and if not, be properly cited as such) and will be planned/run well in advance.
- Only the wildcard game and finals packets will be uploaded to quizbowlpackets and I've redacted the files for the Prelim questions.

If you want to see the Prelim packets, here are the google doc links:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/173Q ... sp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JiD ... sp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nkh ... sp=sharing

I apologize for the confusion, and questionable actions I have done with the Discord Tournament.

Thanks for reading all of the above.

Due to time constraints - we will be using older, obscure packets for the WC and finals game in order to not cause further delay.
Due to this - we will not upload any packets publicly.
Thank you for understanding!

TheScientists wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 2:37 pm Due to time constraints - we will be using older, obscure packets for the WC and finals game in order to not cause further delay.
Due to this - we will not upload any packets publicly.
Thank you for understanding!

They're already uploaded publicly. You're stealing them.

TheScientists wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 2:37 pm Due to time constraints - we will be using older, obscure packets for the WC and finals game in order to not cause further delay.
Due to this - we will not upload any packets publicly.
Thank you for understanding!

Sounds like you need a bailout.

Ok doing this demonstrates that you've learned nothing from what we said earlier about using questions from the packet archive. The next time more experienced people give you good faith advice, please take it.

Ok doing this demonstrates that you've learned nothing from what we said earlier about using questions from the packet archive. The next time more experienced people give you good faith advice, please take it.

Ameya has been told in every possible way, by everyone involved, on forums and on discord, that this is a terrible idea, yet he's persevering with it. I don't think at this point that he's going to learn anything.

Look, if you had just said "let's play some old NHBB questions on Discord," this would not be a problem in the slightest, and you would have saved a lot of effort on your part. Trying to turn it into an actual tournament with some house-written stuff and some modified versions of old packets just makes zero sense.

This is especially true when your approach to housewriting ends up like this: .

Final Results:
1st Place - Sam Brochin
2nd Place - Conor Thompson
3rd Place - Nate Rybner, Aadit Juneja, Alan Wu, Steven Wang

And if you are wondering, the finals were a 15 TU packet.

Do I plan on ever hosting a Discord Tournament like this? Well yes, but but I'll probably just go for only housewrites and plan it months in advance.

We plan on having an Kickoff Event around the time NHBB starts. Registration will open soon and more details will come out.

TheScientists wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2019 10:26 pm Final Results:
1st Place - Sam Brochin
2nd Place - Conor Thompson
3rd Place - Nate Rybner, Aadit Juneja, Alan Wu, Steven Wang

And if you are wondering, the finals were a 15 TU packet.

Do I plan on ever hosting a Discord Tournament like this? Well yes, but but I'll probably just go for only housewrites and plan it months in advance.

We plan on having an Kickoff Event around the time NHBB starts. Registration will open soon and more details will come out.

Fuddle Duddle wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 4:17 pm Ok doing this demonstrates that you've learned nothing from what we said earlier about using questions from the packet archive. The next time more experienced people give you good faith advice, please take it.

lmao

This is one of the few posts I'm making here, so here goes:
1) Ameya was warned many times that his plan wasn't good, and we told him he shouldn't have run it on stolen questions. However, he decided to do it anyway.
2) In addition, Ameya has attempted to use another set written by a couple of middle schoolers who aim to use it as a way to practice and is not being really edited for a "Summer Open" which none of the writers have consented to.

IMO Ameya has infringed the copyright of NHBB, and he must be duly reprimanded for his unseemly conduct in the face of all these dissenting voices.

TheScientists wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2019 10:26 pm Final Results:
1st Place - Sam Brochin
2nd Place - Conor Thompson
3rd Place - Nate Rybner, Aadit Juneja, Alan Wu, Steven Wang

And if you are wondering, the finals were a 15 TU packet.

Do I plan on ever hosting a Discord Tournament like this? Well yes, but but I'll probably just go for only housewrites and plan it months in advance.

We plan on having an Kickoff Event around the time NHBB starts. Registration will open soon and more details will come out.

I haven't been this excited for a sequel since Troll 2.

Ameya, have you realized that none of the other writers want you to host another tournament on our set? Don't try and run the set for another one of your discord tournaments.

You obviously don't have the experience to be a TD for a quizbowl tournament as a middle-schooler who has NEVER played quizbowl. In addition to that, this Discord Tournament was such a logistics nightmare and messup for you that you literally cancelled the bowl section. What would make you think that hosting another tournament while terribly inexperienced would be a good idea? Also, as others have already told you, stealing questions is exactly that, STEALING, and you are still making a conscious effort to continue in that vain. So please, if you want to save the slightest bit of your reputation, do not hold another Discord mirror.

Whatever plan I had with using the IS-level set we're working on has already been ceased I do not plan on doing a "tournament" for it

I should add that when confronted about his... rather poor decision to continue posting about the nhbb online tournament, this was his response:
https://imgur.com/OEmpgoQ

Pro tip:

When announcing and running a tournament, or a section of a tournament, to be run at a certain time, it is generally advisable to have questions for said tournament ready less than negative thirty minutes before that time.

also this hasn't been said but major props to Dean/Wesley/Rishi/the other writers who actually produced a bunch of cool questions which had substantially fewer issues than one might expect from a first-time writing team. (Props especially to Wesley, who was kind enough to his moderators to include correct! pronounciation guides for hard Eastern European words, and who was judicious enough to make his questions hard to linguistically fraud.)

anyway, on a lighter note, I played this bc I'd never done anything NHBB-related and wanted to see what the format was like; guess I got the full NHBB experience, questionable ethics and logistics included!

Also I'd like to add that Ameya said this when confronted about running a tournament on our set:

I wrote for this tournament, and in light of these recent developments, I have some comments to make.

First of all, it may not be clear from the original forum post, but in the Discord server, Ameya pretty clearly stated (like it was on the main announcements channel) that the tournament was not affiliated with NHBB/IAC. However, I don't know about the legality/ethics of using the name "NHBB Discord Tournament", so I'll defer to someone who does.

In addition, my original purpose in joining the "writing team" was to throw in a few questions. I was surprised to be assigned an entire packet, given that there were about 5 days until the start of the tournament. In order to not be writing questions literally as rounds were happening, I was forced to throw in all my stockpiled questions, which will now not be usable anywhere else (and, incidentally, why the quality of my packet was so bad).

Obviously, I did not know that Ameya had intended for us to rip questions off of QuizDB and old NHBB packets, and would have never joined the writing team had I known this was going to be the case. I only continued to write after I learned this because 1) I was almost finished with the packet, and 2) bad questions>copied questions in my book. I don't know if this will be my position moving forward.

With regards to the tournament itself, at best it could be described as problematic and full of delays. At worst (as this thread has suggested), it was built through unethical behaviors by someone who doesn't understand that what he's doing is wrong. I was willing to give Ameya the benefit of the doubt initially, but his repeated inability (or unwillingness!) to listen to others is incredibly frustrating.

Ameya, please just stop trying to run tournaments. It is abundantly clear that, at this point in time, you lack the experience and the willingness to listen to feedback to be a good TD.

Ameya, I find it extremely difficult to understand your stubbornness. Everyone here is giving you very sound advice, yet you choose to ignore each and every one of them. It’s impossible that you do not realize why your behavior is bad, since many people have EXPLICITLY told you the reasons. As we stand, you’ve not only harmed your own reputation in the QB community, but you’ve also left a bad taste in the mouths of everyone involved in it, including the writers and staffers who’ve toiled on your behalf. Seriously, for your own good, own up to your mistakes and, while this may be very difficult for you, try to listen to advice from people who have far, far more experience than you.

Here was my main plan for NHBB Online: Have a tournament with "compilation" packets where we'd collect a bunch of previous tossups and make relevant and normal edits to them to prevent them from cheating and whatnot. I also had the idea of throwing in some housewrites too. I promoted it on the Discord servers as such. I became negligent and had not clearly stated that we are doing mainly compilation packets in many of the promotions leading to this. I did not properly cite or say that I was using NHBB and QuizDB tossups in my packets and that lack of citations is a wrong thing I did. I dishonestly promoted NHBB Online with the housewritten claim. The improper acknowledgement of this is a major messup and I am really sorry for that. I am aware and agree that plagiarism is bad and that I had committed it by not properly citing the sources to the question I wrote in Packet 1. My decision to post the packets to the archive is another mistake and wrong thing I did.

As for the future - I do not plan on running any Discord mirrors in the forseeable future. For the record, I did have plans to make a Summer tournament with the IS-level like packet made by some MSQB members (I'm only really working on the miniscule sports section of it.), but won't due to not having permission to do so and with the mess I made with NHBB Online. The NHBB "kickoff" is scrapped as well.

I want to thank and apologize to the writers (Dean, Wesley) and the staffers (Rishi, Lewis) for their hard work and amazing help to the tournament and I wish I had never done the (arguably) border-line unethical decisions I made in marketing and directing of this tournament. I also want to thank whoever participated in the tournament as well.

TheScientists wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2019 1:08 am I am aware and agree that plagiarism is bad and that I had committed it by not properly citing the sources to the question I wrote in Packet 1.

Have you considered that you committed plagiarism not only by failing to cite your sources, but by blatantly ripping off previous questions and attempting to make cute edits to them to make them "original" in the first place?

Dropping in to give my two cents as a writer for this tournament.

Ameya asked me to be a staffer; I agreed, thinking that I’d only be reading whatever questions he got. Then he thrust the entire question-writing-process for Packet 3 on me unexpectedly. I had never written a set before, so I thought this would be good practice.

On the planning document, Ameya said to “either rework [existing questions] or write custom questions.” I thought nothing of this at the time, but decided that my set would be entirely housewritten.

I only had 17 done by the day before the tournament—other obligations prevented me from contributing more. It was at this time that Ameya plugged two questions into my set, based on answerlines that I had already devised. I thought nothing of them at the time, but when I looked them up later they were (besides the answerlines) carbon copies of other questions on QuizDB. I then had to delegate another two tossups to Rishi because we were running out of time, and even then we didn’t finish the packet in time for the tournament—I had to write no less than four tossups on the fly.

Then there’s the packet writing for the finals—the end result was 15 tossups consisting of extras from previous packets (one of which was read already in one room), shoddily-written tossups created from Ameya’s notes, and plagiarized questions. I took one look at it and described it as something that belongs in the Hadean Eon (I might have been overly harsh with that).

So, here’s some lessons for any future tournaments (and also some summary of the advice written before this):

• Don’t plagiarize.
• Don’t plagiarize.
• Provide ample time for preparation for any given event. Leaving some extra time is perfectly allowable…
• Listen to the advice of others—if the rest of the mod team tells you to cut something, cut it, even if you want to show off your 15 question finals packet.
• Don’t plagiarize.

Gae Bulg wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2019 2:16 am Have you considered that you committed plagiarism not only by failing to cite your sources, but by blatantly ripping off previous questions and attempting to make cute edits to them to make them "original" in the first place?

yes

weissnichtwo9 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2019 2:47 am ...shoddily-written tossups created from Ameya’s notes, and plagiarized questions. I took one look at it and described it as something that belongs in the Hadean Eon (I might have been overly harsh with that)

Nah - I'd say it was justified. They were really badly written.

TheScientists wrote: ↑Tue Apr 23, 2019 1:08 am...collect a bunch of previous tossups and make relevant and normal edits to them to prevent them from cheating and whatnot...

All this does is prevent a cheater from directly looking up the packet, which not an insurmountable barrier. If someone's going to cheat in an online tournament, they can still plug the first named thing in a TU into a search engine or Wikipedia.

Message from board staff: Any event that uses spoiled, publicly available questions should never be called a "tournament" or announced as such, and it is not appropriate for an announcement to suggest that an event will be freshly written when, in fact, it will be using questions compiled from old sets.

Board staff considers these sorts of events to be scrimmages, and we have written some guidelines for people to follow if they want to run them. These include: announcing up front and ahead of time that the event is a scrimmage on old questions; ensuring that the questions are not restricted from being used for scrimmaging; crediting the original authors of the questions after the scrimmage is held; and not charging a fee or otherwise profiting off of old questions.

Any future attempts to skirt these guidelines may result in a suspension or ban from the forums. Please follow them when announcing any future scrimmages, and please use the new practice forum for your announcements. Direct any questions about these guidelines to board staff in the relevant thread or via PM or email ([email protected]).