Discord
Discord is an online messaging platform that hosts both online quiz bowl communities and online quiz bowl tournaments. It is one of the main options for online quizbowl due to its combination of video, voice, and text functionality in a single platform, replacing previous options like Skype and Google Hangouts. Its primary competition as a tournament platform is Zoom, which gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Communities
Since the founding of the Quizbowl Discord in 2017 to replace the IRC, many quiz bowl communities have moved completely or partially to Discord servers. The high school Discord was founded in 2018 and regional high school Discords now exist for most major circuits in the nation; similar servers have been started for college classes but do not have the same level of engagement.
Usage of Discord is now common enough that it has become a major option for organizing groups of quiz bowlers; it is now common practice to create Discord servers to organize writing tournaments, holding playtesting sessions, or discussing questions and providing feedback.
Tournaments
Discord servers are differentiated from other platforms like Zoom by their increased level of customizability. Voice and video functionality are provided by special channels that are part of the larger server; this is in contrast to Zoom, which has nothing above the level of a call. Access to individual rooms, text or voice, can be gated behind specific "roles", which can be assigned to specific teams or staff members and ensure that players cannot inadvertently enter rooms out of either confusion or malice.
While it has a webapp which can be accessed via a browser, it is generally recommended that individuals using Discord for tournaments download the standalone app for their computer to avoid any problems with using the webapp.
Resources
Mike Bentley wrote "Best Practices for Running a Discord Tournament" to describe important steps for running and attending Discord tournaments.
Em Gunter wrote "Using Carl-Bot to Assign People to Teams for Discord Tournaments" to illustrate how to use the multipurpose Discord bot Carl-Bot to help run tournaments and assign competitors pronoun roles.
Aalok Bhattacharya of AQBL wrote "Quiz Bowl Tournament Discord Server Templates".
Karan Gurazada created a Discord bot for automating the process of creating a tournament Discord and moving teams to and from rooms. Use of this bot is the method recommended by PACE as part of its Online Tournament Guide.