This contest was run out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Too Many Noodles consisited of 3 core members (Louis Moga, Jacob Moga, and me, Mark Conger), plus various friends and acolytes. In particular, 7 of my former students camped out with me in a classroom in East Hall, on the University of Michigan campus, with a lot of snacks, and served as chat hosts and graders throughout.
The contest was a week later than originally hoped, because of lack of trivia. I solicited help from the Trivia mailing list and received a number of very high-quality on-air questions that made their way into the contest. In alphabetical order, thank you very much to:
We are extremely grateful for that help, and (rationalizing here) I think it's a positive development for the Trivia community to collaborate in this way. We could possibly make this a regular thing, and create an easy mechanism for adding proposed questions to a list that the running team can choose from (but no one else, including other contributers, can see).
The contest started late because we discovered, shortly before 10:00, that the IRC client we have been using for the past few years belonged to a company that had gone out of business. So Louis scrambled and found a replacement. It was rather miraculous that he got things working before 11:00.
That said, it might be time to re-examine the whole chat system. It was cutting-edge in 2014 when Louis created it, and revolutionized the interactions between hosts and teams. But we should ask if maybe there might now be a more polished and reliable alternative. It would need to be integrated into the website, but that's something I can do.
Also, chat hosts started to notice a pattern in responses from the teams that played all night. When the song started, there was a long pause, followed by the pasting of a well-formed and complete answer into the chat. It seemed clear that these were generated by Google's AI.
My concern here is not so much fairness, as that getting answers from AI doesn't seem to me to be as much fun as the old back-and-forth between players and hosts. (There was almost none of that.) It seemed like kind of a slog for the players. But, I still miss the days of hosts talking with teams on the phone, so I may simply be totally out of touch here. I would like to hear from some newer players (and older ones) about whether they think changes should be made to the rules for on-airs to make AI less of a factor.