College quizbowl calendar static site

Post Reply
User avatar
hftf
Lulu
Posts: 62
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2008 7:28 pm

College quizbowl calendar static site

Post by hftf »

This is the announcement for collegequizbowlcalendar.com, a static site that is intended to centralize information about the college quizbowl calendar.


Motivation

It’s not easy to explain how the college quizbowl season works to a novice player or a new team. Information is distributed across many pages – global announcements, mirror announcements, scheduling reform threads, and tournament database entries – which tend to be poorly maintained, interlinked, advertised, or referenced. We take for granted plenty of confusing nomenclature like tournament names and difficulty ratings, even for the established events that stay consistent year after year. There’s no great place to find the answers to frequently asked questions, such as “when’s the next easy tournament in my area?” or “is this set clear yet?”

Additionally, the college quizbowl calendar generally comes together in a very ad hoc way. Clubs usually claim dates early on to avoid conflicts, rarely participating in open communication to serve the best interests of the community. People who are interested in writing questions often struggle with getting involved because most set-writing collaborations are planned out behind the scenes, leaving the community out of the loop until an announcement is posted.

Collegequizbowlcalendar.com is trying to solve these sorts of communication issues. As an easily accessible website with a memorable name containing links to all tournament announcements and much more, it can fill the need for a “landing page” for college quizbowl. Instead of teaching new players and teams how to navigate the forums to search for basic information, you can now point them at this site.

Of course, you are free to decide whether to use this site or not. I do understand that adding a responsibility to update another online listing seems counterintuitive. Remember that the site is merely a central hub of information and links to the usual places; it is not normative in any way.

Read more on the site’s about page.


Sample screenshots (click to enlarge)

Image    Image


Contributing

Collegequizbowlcalendar.com is an open-source project licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is hosted on a GitHub repository and served from GitHub Pages. More details and guidelines about contributing are on the repository’s home page. Hopefully I’ve built a suitable foundation so far, but I welcome improvements to make it better.

Pull requests are the main way to contribute to an open-source project. The basic workflow is: make changes to your copy of the project, submit them in a “pull request” back to the main project, wait for the community to review your changes, then hopefully have them merged in. This entire process can now be done directly on GitHub; all you need is a GitHub account. But if you make any non-trivial changes, you’ll want to test them out on your own computer first.

Stewards will mainly be tasked with merging pull requests once sufficient community review has taken place. They will adhere to the contributing guidelines and encourage others to do so. Besides having commit permissions, being a steward is nothing special; it’s just unrewarding work.

If you’d like to be a steward, email me a blurb with your GitHub name. I’m looking for people who are friendly, objective, and have experience with Git, GitHub, and project maintenance. If you’re short on qualifications, over time I will also be recruiting trusted people who I see collaborate in good faith and set a good example. Even if you aren’t a steward, nothing prevents you from contributing issues and pull requests. If you don’t understand how, just ask someone for help. In the future, I might create a few demos teaching people how to contribute.

I would like to entrust this site to the community over the next few months. For now, I will remain nominally in charge as the owner, with restrained veto power to resolve disputes if necessary.


Final remarks

This thread is intended to be about the site in general. Please use GitHub issues for:
  • requests to update specific information
  • ideas for improving the site
  • technical matters
  • assistance
and any discussion related to those narrow topics.

If you have any questions or comments for me, send me an email. I will mainly respond to emails and issues, not to this thread.

I only registered the domain name for 1 year, so if I’m no longer around next April, email me so that I can transfer it.
Ophir
Maryland
Walter Johnson
A Dim-Witted Saboteur
Yuna
Posts: 973
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2016 12:31 pm
Location: Indiana

Re: College quizbowl calendar static site

Post by A Dim-Witted Saboteur »

This looks great; thanks for making it!
Jakob M. (they/them)
Michigan State '21, Indiana '2?
"No one has ever organized a greater effort to get people interested in pretending to play quiz bowl"
-Ankit Aggarwal
User avatar
ValenciaQBowl
Auron
Posts: 2558
Joined: Thu Feb 05, 2004 2:25 pm
Location: Orlando, Florida

Re: College quizbowl calendar static site

Post by ValenciaQBowl »

Unsure where to put this, I've decided that here would be a good idea, as Ophir's excellent calendar site correctly noted Delta Burke as having been announced for November 10, 2018, as that was what I wrote on this site. As a matter of fact, I said this:
DB will always and forever be the second weekend of November, nanny-nanny-boo-boo.
Well, nuts to me, as I'm officially noting that Delta Burke in Orlando will be played on the weekend of November 2-3. I have always endeavored to not interfere with ACF Fall in Florida, but personal scheduling issues have precluded the November 10 weekend for me. The good news is that I ran this by the CC coaches in Florida, and there were no beefs. The bad news is that I'm guessing there's a decent chance we'll conflict with ACF Fall, which I hate, but very few CC teams have played ACF Fall the last five years, so I hope we're not harming any four-year sites of that tournament.

Anyway, I'll have an announcement here sometime, but now you know.
Chris Borglum
Valencia College Grand Poobah
Post Reply