TAFT and the 2008 and 2009 PACE NSCs

[Whiter Hydra]

The 2008 and 2009 PACE NSCs were hosted using TAFT, a web-based statkeeping program developed by Evan Silberman back in 2007. It was ahead of its time in that any moderator could enter their games and there was a central repository of stats (instead of various now-extinct Geocities sites), but it suffered from not being free and many schools not having reliable WiFi at the time. TAFT ultimately stopped being maintained and the domain allowed to expire, but thankfully we have an archive of tournaments found here. As an aside, you can see how popular pseudonyms were back then, and frankly I'm glad that's no longer a Quizbowl tradition.

As part of an attempt to properly archive older NSCs, I have taken all the available games and created SQBS files for those tournaments, which have been uploaded for 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately due to the nature of TAFT, we don't have full stats for the consolation bracket from 2008 or the final placement rounds from 2009. Furthermore, some of the games were not entered properly, as there were cases of teams getting negative bounceback points in a game or more points than was possible, so I attempted to correct them to the best of my ability. Regardless, it was a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, as those were the two NSCs that I competed in, and I saw a lot of names that I had not thought about in many years.