protobowl-bot
Have you ever wanted to be good at Protobowl, but keep getting owned by middle-schoolers who memorized all the questions and buzz 2 words in? Well, now you can troll them even harder!
How do I use it?
All releases are in the dist folder. There are now two versions, the older Python version and the new JavaScript version. Here's a breakdown:
- Python version:
- more customizable setting-wise (done via the CLI)
- more prone to crashes (due to Selenium)
- more of a pain to get working (more on that later)
- JavaScript version:
- much easier to use (copy-paste
protobowl.min.jsinto your F12 console) - less customizability/missing features (that'll change with updates)
- potentially unstable (ie. could crash your browser)
- much easier to use (copy-paste
Do with that what you will.
I still wanna use Python.
Keep in mind this is a brief overview that skips over the specifics. Get ready to follow some instructions:
- Make sure you're using Python 3.x (2.x seems to cause issues).
- Install
requestsandseleniumwith pip. - Download a WebDriver for your web browser of choice and place it in the directory with
protobowl.py. I've provided the Chrome one with this repo, but there are versions for other browsers too.
But how does it work?
All of the questions played in msquizbowl can be found on QuizDB. QuizDB also internally uses an API to provide question set downloads that I used to get JSON data (with the answers) by reverse searching questions from Protobowl. For the Python version, I used Selenium to interact with the browser, and for the JavaScript version I used the jQuery events and handlers supported by the site.
A closing note:
anyone that wants to use this has to figure out how to run this. I'm not gonna help little kids try to be the coolest kid on their team. If you can get this working then it's fair game for you to use it imo have fun
With great power comes great responsibility.