Read-only, and unauthenticated
Every public QBLive route is a GET that takes no credential. A QBLive link is the ability to read one tournament and nothing else; it cannot change a schedule, a result, or a standing.
QBLive
Follow the tournament as it happens.
QBLive is the public view of a quiz bowl tournament: the schedule, the standings, the statistics, and the announcements that tournament control has published. It opens in an ordinary browser, and it is read-only.
The product model
Where QBLive fits
Director runs the tournament. QBSheet scores the games. QBLive lets everyone follow along. QBLive is the last of the three and the only one that holds nothing.
- Director
- Runs the tournament and decides what is public. Everything QBLive shows was published from tournament control. About Director.
- QBSheet
- Scores the games in the rooms and returns results to tournament control. What scoring a game involves.
- QBLive
- Shows the published tournament to whoever has its link. It is a reader, not a participant in running the event.
- The QBLive protocol
- Open and vendor-neutral: a static host serving two JSON documents is a conforming QBLive server. Read the protocol.
What you see
Five screens, one tournament
QBLive opens on the team you follow, because that is what somebody standing in a hallway came to find out.
- Home
- One team’s day: the next event, the game in progress, where the team stands, its recent results, and anything urgent the tournament has announced.
- Schedule
- The followed team’s games, or the whole published schedule, grouped by round.
- Standings
- The standings tables the tournament published, at the scopes it published them for.
- Stats
- Team and player statistics, when the tournament has chosen to publish them.
- Updates
- Announcements from tournament control, shown as plain text and never as markup.
Public, and careful about it
Nothing publishes ahead of its round
A game becomes public when its round is released or closed. Brackets and tiebreakers exist in Director long before they go on the wall, and even a bracket’s name is a disclosure, so an unreleased phase contributes no table.
Player names are a separate decision
Many of these tournaments are school events. Player names and individual statistics are off unless the tournament turns them on, and Director says plainly what turning them on makes public.
No invented times
A published start time is one the tournament committed to. QBLive shows no estimated, projected, or inferred time — a game with no committed time shows no time at all.
Getting in
Opening a tournament
A tournament is reached through the link it published — a URL or a printed QR code from tournament control. Open it, choose a team to follow, and optionally a player whose statistics you want highlighted. There is nothing to install and no account to create.
The tournament's data comes from the server the tournament runs, not from us. live.qbsheet.com serves this client; a tournament's schedule, results, and standings never pass through anything QBSheet operates. Coming back later reopens the last tournament this device saw, with the last information it received and how old that information is, until the network returns.
Following a tournament today?
Open the link the tournament published and follow your team.