The tournament is on your computer
Director keeps the tournament in a local database in its own application data directory. It is not a client of a service we run, there is no account, and no part of running the event depends on reaching us.
QBSheet Director
Tournament control that stays with you.
Director is the desktop application for setting up, running, reviewing, and publishing a quiz bowl tournament. It runs on the computer in front of you, and the tournament stays there.
Before the event
Director is a desktop application.
Install Director on the computer that will run the tournament, and open it once before the event rather than on the morning of it. There is no web version and this website does not run it: the tournament's authoritative state is a database in Director's own application data directory, and the QBTCP listener that scoring rooms pair with is a network service on that machine. Neither is something a browser tab can provide.
The scorers are the other half, and they are the web application. Rooms open QBSheet in a browser and connect to the Director machine; nothing is installed in a room.
Scope
One system, three parts
Director runs the tournament. QBSheet scores the games. QBLive lets everyone follow along. Director is the only one of the three that holds the tournament's state.
- Director
- The desktop application. Owns the schedule, the room assignments, the accepted results, the standings, and the statistics.
- QBSheet
- The browser scoresheet in each room. Scores one game at a time and keeps working when the network does not. QBSheet for tournaments.
- QBLive
- The public, read-only view of a tournament Director has published. Optional. What QBLive shows.
- QBTCP and QBJ
- The open protocol between Director and the rooms, and the open document format the tournament travels in. Read the protocol or the QBJ profile.
Tournament day
Set up, run, collect, publish
Director follows the tournament from the plan to the final standings.
Set up
Plan the tournament.
Enter the tournament, its teams and rosters, the format and its phases, the rooms and the staff in them, and the packets. Director generates the schedule from the format, the confirmed teams, and the available rooms.
Run
Run the rounds.
Prepare, release, monitor, and close each round from one view. Director serves QBTCP on the venue's network, and every room is invited with a one-time code scoped to that room alone. What a connected room does.
Collect
Take the results in.
Completed games arrive over QBTCP, or on a USB drive, a shared folder, or a download when the network cannot be relied on. Each one waits in the results inbox to be accepted or rejected, and the submission as it arrived is kept.
Publish
Publish what people need.
Standings and player statistics are derived from accepted results and the tournament's tiebreak configuration. Export printable standings, CSV, QBJ, a full SQBS tournament file or SQBS roster, or a portable archive — or publish the tournament to QBLive for participants.
Local control, by design
Rounds do not need the internet
Rooms pair with Director over the venue’s own network. QBTCP is traffic between the scoring devices and the machine in front of you, so a failed venue uplink is not a failed round.
Publishing cannot block the tournament
Publishing to QBLive is optional and is never required for scoring, scheduling, result acceptance, advancement, statistics, or recovery. Director writes locally first and publishes afterwards from a durable outbox that retries.
A wrong result is correctable
An accepted result can be corrected, and the result it replaced stays in the tournament’s audit history. An exported tournament carries that history and its schema version with it.
Getting Director
Installing it
- Releases
- Builds are published on GitHub. Open the releases page.
- From source
- Director is a Tauri application under
apps/directorwith its own build commands. Read the Director build notes. - The tournament network
- Rooms reach Director over the venue's network rather than the internet. Serve the scorer over HTTPS so rooms keep their offline shell.
- Open source
- Director is part of the QBSheet repository and licensed under the GNU AGPL. Read the license.
Run the next one from your own machine.
Install Director on the tournament computer before the event.