It's been some time since we've had a proper flamewar here; I suspected it wouldn't last. To Mike Knapp: As I'm sure you know, ACF had, and still has an image problem. I won't go into whether or not there are good reasons for this right now, but I don't think anyone will argue that the majority of schools do not, in fact, play in ACF tournaments. Now, you may or may not also know that during the last three years, a dedicated group of quizbowlers have put a lot of working into revamping said image. The contribution of people like Subash and Kelly MacKenzie towards making ACF packets more accessible, and towards improving ACF's image in general have been inestimable. Understandably, when someone comes along and cracks a joke that's based on outdated stereotypes, people will become offended. It's easier to tear down than to build up, and one crack like that is, sadly, often given more creedence that ten worthwhile posts defending the ACF format. Please don't mistake this as an attack on you; I'm pointing out why people were so upset with your initial post (as well as your follow up with the PPG zinger), since you seemed genuinely confused by it (insofar as I am able to discern confusion over the Internet). To Chris Frankel: This complaining about "spam" is just silly. Over the course of the last two pages, not counting this thread, I saw one post from Knapp about Jeopardy and one post from James Dinan about the gameshow congress in which he invited people to participate in a quizbowl-like event. No one is telling you to go away or to shut up, while the amount of vitriol you heap on people who post on topics you don't approve of seems wildly disproportionate to their actual impact on your mailbox. A couple of posts you're not interested in can be deleted or avoided and if you have the messages in your mailbox you can just save the ones you are interested in, and any difficulty in finding other posts is a result of the threadless nature of this board rather than the fact that posts are forced off the front page. If the moderators thought that the messages were out of line or unnecessary, they would have deleted them. Ironically this thread is going to continue clogging mailboxes to a greater extent than Knapp's posts ever did. To everyone: I would like people to keep one thing in mind whenever they read about format wars. ACF is a philosophy of question writing; it is not a canon that consists of obscurata. The whole idea behind ACF-style questions is that they should be well-written, in the sense that they should be academic, pyramidal, use interesting and relevant clues, and be factually correct. ACF says nothing at all about the topics of the questions themselves, and I think Michael Adelman's assertion that schools don't play on ACF packets because the packets are hard has been disproven by statistical analysis to a sufficient enough extent that I don't need to reiterate it. It is far more likely that schools are scared away from perfectly legitimate and accessible questions written in the ACF style because of such claims. Back when Berkeley was still running high-school tournaments, we were feeding those kids ACF-type questions all the time and no one ever complained, perhaps because they didn't have a negative stereotype and a convenient nickname to attach to the format. I might be an ACF partisan, but I admit that ACF suffers from image problems that are left over from bygone days. With that in mind, responses to criticism (however misguided the criticism is in the first place) such as Frankel's, and Matt Weiner's (admittedly hilarious) screed, sound more mean-spirited than anything else. It doesn't attract people to your side and it draws sympathy for the recipient of the jab, thereby obscuring the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of any claims he might have made, as well as the quality of your response. Jerry
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