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Game Day Bot Update

cross-posted from: https://fanaticus.social/post/22176

Just wanted to everyone subscribed to this community and update one the game day bots:

Some of you may have noticed there's a game day bot that's been posting to some of your communities. I forked the popular redball bot that's widely used on reddit and have been working to get it compatible with lemmy.

That project is not complete but I plan on putting in a lot of work this weekend in order to squash the bugs and add in the remaining missing features.

Once complete, I'll roll out a standard version of it to all of the baseball communities on fanaticus. That being said, I don't want to be the guy running every baseball community on fanaticus. Anyone who wants to run a community can ask to be a mod and I'll work with them to set up and configure their own baseball bot.

06/20/23 Update:

I've added about 10 game bots to your communities so far. You may have noticed that your community used to have a bot but doesn't anymore. That's because I've moved the bots to run on our beefed up server instead of my local machine and haven't re-created them there.

There are still a couple kinks I'm working through (see @royals_bot@fanaticus.social's mayhem yesterday) but otherwise things are going well. There is one major issue I'm running into now and would like some feedback on:

Lemmy only has a 10k character limit on post bodies. Reddit has 40k. The current bot easily pushes the 10k limit which breaks the post update. The main culprit is the highlight table. If there's a lot of action, we hit the limit. I can either:

  1. Check for 10k character limit and truncate (not ideal)
  2. Remove entire sections of the post (i.e. the highlights)

If I remove the highlights and just post them as comments, that might be ideal. Any thoughts?

23 comments
  • Update: All baseball communities should have a game bot now!! 🎉

    Please let me know if your community is missing its bot or you want to change the configuration or you want to start running it yourself.

  • 07/07 Update

    I've re-activated all the game bots. I want to see if the issue related to the panicking bots is fixed with the update to 0.18.1

  • 06/24 Update

    All of the game bots completed successfully last night. 29/30 of the bots ran on our beefy server with no issues. There was a slight hiccup initially with three bots but a quick restart of those three fixed the problem.

    You may have noticed though that we have an issue with unstickying post-game threads. We're investigating now.

    I will also be working on porting the side-bar bot today so get excited!

  • To-do:

    [x] Fix bug w/ 10k limit

    [x] Roll out baseball bot to all remaining teams

    [ ] Port the side-bar updater bot

    [ ] Add observability to redball app (I need to be alerted when there are errors)

    Also, I really want to encourage some of you guys to take over the communities and make them your own. I am obviously not a fan of every MLB team and don't want to moderate all the communities. Please let me know if you want to mod a community and/or take over your community's bot.

  • Can we pin comments within a post? Is the character limit also 10k in comments?

    Perhaps pinned top level comments for highlights?

    • I was watching today's game day thread in !chicubs@fanaticus.social . A couple of things I noticed:

      • Separate scoring summary and highlights takes up a lot of space in the past body. It takes quite a while to scroll through. Perhaps they could be combined?
      • Having scoring plays as top-level comments was kind of cool and not something I've seen before. I can imagine those sparking mini conversations as threads. But, they get a bit redundant with the scoring summary in the body.

      Those are just my impressions and, to be honest, I kind of avoided game day threads on Reddit. They could just get ... tedious, I guess?

    • I do believe there is a 10k limit in comments.

      We can "speak as mod" which lights comments but we can't pin them to the top.

23 comments