Online Tournament Guide
Online Question System
This page of the online tournament guide provides a very basic overview of NAQT’s system for displaying questions to moderators.
The goal of the system is to provide moderators with electronic access to the questions they need to read in a form that makes gameplay efficient, minimizes mistakes, and ensures question security (both within a tournament and across multiple tournaments). This system is not the same as having moderators read from a PDF file or using NAQT’s Locklizard system for securely distributing practice material.
The system starts with the “online control room” for a tournament. Moderators who are signed up to work at a tournament using the online question system can reach the control room for that tournament (once the tournament has started) via a link on their staff page.
From the online control room, a moderator can start a new game, specifying the round and packet that will be used. Then the system will display one tossup-bonus cycle at a time. After the cycle is over (the tossup goes dead, or the tossup is answered and the bonus is completed), the moderator will click one button (indicating whether only the tossup or both the tossup and bonus were read) to advance to the next cycle.
The moderator can also review previous cycles, see a record of the game, and access replacement questions.
In addition, the tournament director and their control-room staff have access to status pages that show what each team, room, staff member, and game is currently doing (including the tossup/bonus cycle of ongoing games).
People with naqt.com accounts may experiment with NAQT’s Tutorial tournament to see how game-creation and question-access work. (Tournament-director features are not accessible via this tutorial.) People without naqt.com accounts can create one and then experiment with the tutorial.
The system currently accommodates games using NAQT’s Official Rules (with or without the rule changes for online play) and some variations that are still essentially tossup-bonus gameplay. It will be augmented to support alternative game formats.
Teams participating in tournaments (either in-person or online) that use the online question system will receive access to the questions (for practices and other internal uses) after the conclusion of the tournament via Locklizard.
NAQT will be developing additional documentation for tournament directors and moderators about the system’s features. In the meantime, if you have questions, write to online@naqt.com.