Search

Happy New Year, [email protected]! 🎉

As you may have noticed, the game day thread bot is back up! 🥳 For anyone that missed it, it went down because the NHL dramatically changed their API, and a good portion of the bot needed to be rewritten. I have mostly updated the bot to use the new API. A couple of caveats: 1. They no longer provide data for which goalie was in net when a goal was scored. Currently this field is empty in the posts. I might remove the column entirely if I don't find a good way to get the data (without for example looping through the whole play by play just for this one piece of data). I also might just replace it with if the net is empty or not, since info is provided. I'm definitely open to feedback on this. 2. The bot is still occasionally freezing and crashing. This will get cleaned up over time. If you notice data not updating, or any data is incorrect or wonky-looking, please take a screenshot and send it to me!

By the way, the bot is open source! If you want to contribute by writing code, reporting issues, or even just donate beer money to me as a thank you, you can do so on the github page here.

Seeing as this is [email protected] and not [email protected], is anyone watching the non NHL games goes on? The World Junior Championship is currently going on. The PWHL just started their inaugural season! US-based fans can watch every PWHL game for free on their Youtube channel here.

Is there any interest in having game day threads for these non NHL games?

Edit: OH I forgot to mention, highlight videos for goals are now attached in the game posts by the bot!

Hello, [email protected]!

Great news: The GDT bot seems to be working great. It has been up for 4 straight days with no crashes. There were a few hitches that I was able to fix on my end. There's one outstanding one that rarely causes the bot to get stuck for about 15 minutes, but that is currently in the hands of the people who make the Lemmy python library that I am using. I created an issue for it on github, and it appears that they have agreed to fix it.

I hope everyone has had a chance to look at the posts that the bot is making and follow along while you watch your favorite team. But let's be real, how could you avoid the posts the bot is making? That's actually what I want to bring up. I know it is still preseason and interaction is bound to be low, but having 80% of the posts in the community just be GDTs seems like too much. I have been discussing with the folks that are interacting with the GDTs to see if it seems like too much to them as well. We have also had some people brainstorm ways to improve this, too. I just wanted to say that I have really appreciated the honest feedback from those of you that have had this discussion with me!

We have tossed out a lot of ideas, most of which will not work due to the way that Lemmy handles linking things, but I think that I have come up with one possibility that allows us to keep all of the content of the current format, but only have (wait for it) ONE post per day. Here's an example of what I am thinking. Instead of having one post per game, we have one post per day. And under the daily post, each comment contains all the information that each game post currently has. Folks can reply to the comments with the game details to have a discussion about the game they are watching, and the community won't get flooded with this.

But before we get ahead of ourselves -- because this will take development time, and I don't wan't to put time into something that the community doesn't want -- I want to know what you all want. Does this sound good to you? Would you rather keep it as is? Do you have another suggestion? Please let me know your thoughts!

Once again, the bot is open source, and you can contribute to it here. I even added a sponsorship button so if you so chose, you could help me fund drowning my depression in beer while I watch my favorite team, the San Jose Sharks, fight for last place again this season.

I have been working on this pretty heavily over the past week and a half and wanted to share my progress.

https://lemmy.ca/post/5577416

This is a random game from last year just so I had some real data to work this. This is the game, in case you wanted to compare and make sure everything is correct.

It should be ready to go for the preseason. Let me know if you have any other suggestions of what could be added!

The next thing I want to add is a daily thread with links to all the GDTs. It would get pinned each day so everyone can easily find the thread for their favorite team. But I haven't started on that yet.

Hi All

I am currently in the early stages of working on a GDT bot for this community. I wanted to communicate early in case any one else started working on the same thing so we can combine our efforts instead of duplicating them. This is for the community, so I wanted to know the community's thoughts on what features are important or not, or if there are any features that you want.

I am taking heavy inspiration from the reddit GDT bot for formatting and feautres, but definitely don't expect all of those features right at launch. Questions for the community:

• Are there any features that you wished the reddit GDT bot had?
• Are there any features that you wished the reddit GDT bot didn't have, say if it is a distraction or takes up too much space on the screen?
• How would you feel about having the bot leave a comment with additional info instead of cluttering up the main body? (not sure if this is possible with the Lemmy API I am using)

My goal is to have a functioning minimum viable product by the preseason so I can test it out during the preseason and have it ready by the first day of the season. I can run full tests with historical data now, as the NHL API lets me pull data from all old games (which is amazing, btw!), but I am sure I am going to have issues with creating posts and updating the post bodies, and the testing of that feature sounds tricky without live data updating.

Current minimum viable product features planed:

• Post GDTs 30 minutes or 1 hour before the start of each game
• Title contains the teams playing and the start time of the game (in the Eastern Time Zone?)
• Body contains the score, game clock, other basic stats, and updates throughout the game.
• Body contains who got each goal, along with who got each assist
• Possibly have some details like the status of the game (Not started yet, In progress, completed) in the title
• Open source so anyone can contribute
• UNIT TESTS
• Self-hostable via container, so if another hockey community on another instance wanted to have a GDT bot, they would just need to change a few variables in a .env file and host it themselves.

Edit: I wanted to provide an update on my progress. I posted the source code on github here. I also have tested it on a community in my own instance here. Since there are no games currently going on, this game is a random one I chose from last season. It's actually this one