alt.college.college-bowl

alt.college.college-bowl

Usenet newsgroup
Abbreviations	a.c.c-b; "ACCB" (subject tag, from 1997)
Hierarchy	alt.* (unmoderated)
Topic	College Bowl and collegiate quizbowl
Created	Announced 18 April 1993 by Joel Furr[1]
Active	1993–1997 as the circuit's main forum; sporadic quizbowl posts to 1999; last on-topic exchange in the main archive March 2003
Peak	1994 for the community (3,592 posts; 835 in April); 1996 for raw volume (16,228 archived posts, mostly cross-posted floods)[2]
Status	Dormant as a quizbowl forum; the group itself lingered on Usenet for years afterwards
Successors	Quizbowl mailing list (by 1996), automated as the "qb" list at Iowa State in June 1997;[3] a "Yahoo! Quizbowl Club" (by 2000, per a quoted history);[4] groups.yahoo.com/group/quizbowl (by 2003)[5]
Archive	31,976 posts, 1993–2003

alt.college.college-bowl (commonly a.c.c-b, and in its later years tagged ACCB) was a Usenet newsgroup for College Bowl and, in practice, for all of collegiate quizbowl. Joel Furr created it in April 1993, after a College Bowl thread on alt.folklore.college grew beyond what that group could hold, and announced it on 18 April.^[1] For about four years it was the college circuit's bulletin board and newspaper of record. Tournaments were announced there and their results posted, often within hours; it hosted the College Bowl/ACF Top 20 poll; and its monthly FAQ, contacts list and question-writing guides gave programs across the country a common reference.

It was also where the circuit argued. The contest between CBI's format and that of the Academic Competition Federation broke out within a week of the group's founding and ran through every year that followed (see CBI–ACF debates on Usenet). In May 1996 the group was where NAQT was announced,^[6] and that October it was where the power tossup was first argued over, before most of the people arguing had heard one read.^[7]

From February 1996 the group was drawn into a cross-posting campaign — the meow floods — that had nothing to do with quizbowl except that one of its targets played it. By the autumn floods, forgeries and spam made up the great majority of its traffic. The regulars spent two years trying to replace it with a moderated rec.games.quiz-bowl, which never came to a vote, and meanwhile moved to a mailing list. After 1998 the group carried almost no quizbowl; the last genuine exchange in the main archive, in March 2003, ends with one poster pointing another to a Yahoo! group.^[5]

History

1993: founding

Ted Frank, who had started the alt.folklore.college thread, and Furr, the group's creator, later explained the origin: the group was created without a vote, after only brief discussion on alt.config.^[8] Furr, who no longer played, announced it to the folklore group in a six-line post:

Loading post from the archive…

The group's first week coincided with the CBI national championship at USC, whose results a USC volunteer posted, and its second with the first format war, set off by Maryland's Vishnu Jejjala.^[9][10] Over the rest of the year Penn's Pat Matthews built most of the group's infrastructure, including the first FAQ on 4 September,^[11] and in December the group survived a news administrator's suggestion that, at 39% propagation, it was due for "reevaluation".^[12] It carried 1,029 posts.

1994: the first peak

The group's busiest year as a community (3,592 posts). Chicago won both national titles — ACF Nationals at Maryland and the CBI championship at Florida, where BYU declined to play the Sunday finals for religious reasons.^[13][14] Matthews compiled every CBI region's results into a single 1,019-line post,^[15] Jim Dendy and Matthews argued the case against and for CBI at length, and the Philadelphia Experiment summer tournament was organized almost entirely on the group. In May Matthews proposed moving to a "real" rec.* newsgroup.^[16] The archive has no posts for August and is thin for parts of the summer and fall.

1995: the ninety-day year

The archive's 1995 effectively ends on 30 March, a week before both national championships.^[17] What survives covers Penn Bowl V (64 teams), both sets of regionals and some of the group's best comic threads; Harvard's double national title that spring is known only from the January 1996 FAQ.^[18]

1996: NAQT and the siege

After a stormy CBI national championship, Michigan's David Frazee announced NAQT on the group on 9 May.^[6] Penn deaffiliated from CBI in September,^[19] and NAQT's first Sectionals drew more than a hundred teams in November. Meanwhile the meow campaign, which first reached the group on 5 February, grew into floods that peaked at more than 15,000 posts between 13 and 17 September; the archive holds 16,228 posts for the year, the large majority of them cross-posted junk.^[2]

1997: the conversation moves out

NAQT's first national championship, won by Chicago in overtime, followed a public argument over special packets for Imperial College that ended with NAQT changing its plan.^[20] Virginia won the ACF and CBI titles and then announced on the group that it was leaving CBI;^[21] ACF's founders retired. In June the community's mailing list was automated at Iowa State,^[3] and by December regulars agreed it had largely replaced the newsgroup.^[22]

1998–1999: afterlife

Perhaps 90 of 1998's 1,547 posts and 30 of 1999's 685 came from people interested in quizbowl.^[2] Stanford's Eric Albert and Tim Young answered newcomers and pointed them to the list; a last attempt at a moderated group stalled in August 1998;^[23] and Matt Colvin's "ACF Nostradamus" of September 1999, posted as a test, was the decade's last real quizbowl conversation on the group.^[24]

2000–2003: the empty room

Of 766 posts in four years, perhaps ten concerned quizbowl, five of them Myron M. Meyer's reposts of 1994–95 articles.^[25] Football fans, bowlers, spammers and returning cross-posters filled the rest. The last on-topic exchange in the main archive came in March 2003.^[5]

Features and rituals

The FAQ and the monthly postings

From September 1993 Matthews posted, each month, the FAQ, a College Bowl question-writing guide from Stanford, Marc Swisdak's ACF guidelines, a contacts list for college programs and a tournament calendar.^[11] The FAQ passed to Minnesota's George Atendido in May 1996 and was then cross-posted to news.answers.^[26]

The poll

Matthews's College Bowl/ACF Top 20, later a Top 25, ran from 1993 to 1996 on e-mailed ballots, with Darrell Frye and Bowling Green's Michael Haynes later doing the counting. It generated rival rankings, regular complaints of regional bias and, in 1996, a long argument over which tournaments were "majors".

Results posting

The group's most practical function was as a results service. Directors and players posted "quick results" within hours of a tournament and full statistics within days, often explicitly "for web-less folks".^[27] Matthews compiled the season — ten fall tournaments in a "Comprehensive tourney result list" of December 1993,^[28] every CBI region in 1994 and 1995 — and in 1996 Matt Colvin's "Winners list" covered about seventy events of the season.^[29] Before the big weekends came prediction threads and pools; afterwards, post-mortems in which tournament directors answered their critics in public.

Question writing and archives

Standards were set in the open. Stanford's College Bowl guide (1993), Swisdak's ACF guidelines (1993) and the Michigan Memorandum (1996) circulated through the group, and threads such as "Pyramidally-structured Tossups" and "The Worst Tossup Ever Written?" (both 1995) turned craft into communal discussion, and occasionally communal comedy.^[30] Packet archives were publicized through the FAQ: Peter Freeman's anonymous-ftp site at Chicago, Paul Harm's FTP/WWW site at Pitt, and from May 1997 Eric Albert's mirror at Stanford.^[31]

Conventions and running jokes

Off-topic posts ended with a token "ObCB" question; signatures carried mock titles ("Generalissimo", "Portable Curmudgeoness"), and in March 1995 a craze for styling oneself "the X of Academic Competition". Regulars posted under nyms, which the year pages note where they matter. And every December, football fans arrived looking for bowl games; Julie Stahlhut's 1994 open letter to them remains the best answer.^[32]

Notable participants

A short list of regulars and their roles on the group. Many more people posted; see the year pages.

Trolling and decline

Until 1996 the group had no trolling; its only spam was the occasional chain letter and Canter & Siegel's "Green Card" advertisement of April 1994.^[33] On 5 February 1996 a post naming Harvard's Matt Bruce "Commandante Meow-Meow" arrived, cross-posted to eight groups.^[34] The archive preserves three incompatible accounts of how the campaign began; all agree it began outside quizbowl. It escalated through cascades, a mailing-list subscription bomb and fake binaries to the flood of 13–17 September 1996, and then to forgeries aimed at the regulars themselves and the November "Dork watch", which listed about two hundred players' real names and addresses as mailbombing targets. From lines in this period are routinely forged; the articles in this set do not attribute flood or forged posts to the people named in them.

The community responded by filtering (killfiles, subject tags), by fighting back (Petrea Mitchell's daily "Cascade watch" of the floods' real origins), by drafting a moderated replacement group, and finally by leaving. Meow posts fell sharply in 1997, but other mass cross-posting grew; by 1998 alt.fan.karl-malden.nose appeared on the Newsgroups line of most of the group's posts.^[2] The cross-posters went on treating a.c.c-b as conquered territory and as the place, by their own account, "where the MEOW was born".^[35]

Legacy

Posters at the time believed the group had made the circuit. In October 1996, defending the case for a new newsgroup, Pitt's Joe Wright put it this way:

The final RFD for rec.games.quiz-bowl, in 1998, made the same claim more formally, crediting a.c.c-b with helping to build the student-run circuit.^[23] Whatever the weight of that claim, the group's archive is the principal surviving record of a great deal of 1990s college quizbowl: results from dozens of invitationals, every CBI region in 1994 and 1995, the founding announcements of NAQT and its first season, the first public discussion of the power tossup, and the departure of leading programs from CBI. Its threads on pyramidal tossups, consistent difficulty and graded bonus parts are an early public record of ideas that later became common currency.

The group's end also left a lesson its regulars drew explicitly. Eric Albert summed up the collapse in 1998 as one member's unwise actions, the worse reactions to them, the flood and the move to a list;^[36] Tim Young concluded that any useful group now had to be moderated.^[37] The community's later homes as the archive records them — the qb list and the Yahoo! club — were both moderated.^[38][4]

Archive coverage

This article and its sub-pages are based on a local archive of 31,976 posts from April 1993 to December 2003. It has significant gaps, which matter for any month-by-month claim:

• April 1993. The first hours of 18 April are missing; several early posts survive only as quotations.
• October–November 1993. Nineteen days (18 October – 6 November) are empty.
• 1994. August is missing entirely, and parts of the summer and fall (22 June – 19 July, 14 September – 24 October, 29 November – 12 December) are thin. A regular noted in September that about 300 summer posts had expired from the regular's server unread.^[39]
• 1995. The archive effectively stops on 30 March 1995 and resumes in January 1996; only cross-posted strays survive in between. Even January–March is incomplete. Harvard's 1995 double national title, the ACF and CBI nationals and the summer tournaments are known only from the January 1996 FAQ.^[18]
• January 1996. Thin; posters at the time complained that their feeds carried the group only in part.
• September 1996. Four flood days (13–14 and 16–17 September, 13,203 posts) were not downloaded; about 40 sample posts survive. Some real posts from late 1996 survive only as text quoted inside troll replies.
• After 2003. A copy of the group in the Internet Archive continues to 2014 (272 more posts). It includes a genuine on-topic thread about Ken Jennings from June–July 2004 that is not in the local archive app.

"Posters" counts distinct display names. From 1996 most are one-off flood aliases.

See also

• alt.college.college-bowl/1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998–1999, 2000–2003
• Meow Wars on alt.college.college-bowl
• CBI–ACF debates on Usenet
• a.c.c-b Top 25 poll
• alt.college.college-bowl FAQ
• rec.games.quiz-bowl
• qb mailing list
• NAQT
• Penn Bowl

References