Protobowl

Protobowl is a website created by Kevin Kwok and Ben Vest in 2012 which allows users to practice quizbowl questions, both alone and against other humans. Likely still the best-known question reader, use of the site has been largely discouraged since at least 2014 due to the tendency to encourage bad habits and pervasive issues with misconduct in its public rooms.

In December of 2020, officials from NAQT, PACE, ACF, and IAC issued a statement on Protobowl, advising people not to use the site in light of Kevin Kwok's refusal to do anything about the misconduct issues with the site.

Info

Users may join a public or private room, and are provided with a random username consisting of a randomly generated adjective and noun, e.g. "exorbitant gull." Users may change their display names at any time, and can adjust the distribution or difficulty of questions that Protobowl displays. Protobowl is also available offline--which is probably a good thing, since it has historically crashed with great frequency and gusto.

Controversies

Though early complaints were mainly regarding technical issues, within the first few months it became very clear that public rooms like "lobby" were almost constantly bombarded with profanity and slurs. Though there were attempts to institute countermeasures like word filters, in-game ban tribunals, the implementation of accounts, and the assignment of moderators with ban privileges, this remained an incredibly pervasive problem. The severity of the problem was such that the community pushed the developers to implement a nuclear option like mandatory real-name policies or entirely removing all public channels, but neither of these options were ever implemented and Protobowl remains largely unregulated. Mounting negative public sentiment against the development team and their increasingly nonsensical justifications for not making changes culminated in the original announcement thread being locked on December 18, 2013: one year, three months, and twenty days after Protobowl being announced.

Several noted that Annandale High School, where both co-creators Kevin Kwok and Ben Vest attended, had never gone to a quiz bowl tournament. Ben went further and explicitly stated that Protobowl was meant to be a learning exercise for working with their web stack. This distance from the quiz bowl community has been cited as a reason for the site's reluctance to implement called-for changes.

The relatively small set of questions in the database at various points in Protobowl's history means that it was very feasible for players to memorize a significant fraction of them. This is especially true for at the middle school difficulty, which has significantly fewer clear sets in general.

Shortly before the thread was locked, it was found that Protobowl would display abusive messages at anyone who answered a sufficient number of questions incorrectly in a row as part of its rate-limiting response.

External links

• Protobowl

See also

• Quizbowl software#Practice tools