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.
Absolutely, that's what I'm hoping for. I'm even thinking about keeping it with the current format for the playoffs, when there are fewer games per day and likely more engagement.
Actually, if we want to talk about details, the way I was thinking about doing it was having what types of games were posted in which way settable in the environment file. So for now, we could have preseason and regular season set to comment posts, then have postseason games set to one post per game. The reason for that is maybe we grow and we decide we like having regular season and post season as one post per game and only preseason as comment posts, but another community, say [email protected] wants to use the same bot, but they aren't big enough to have enough interaction to want one post per game, they could find tune it for whatever works for their community size. And if they grow, they can easily switch it without needing to touch actual code.
The configurability sounds great! On the topic of configurability, I haven't looked at your source since it was first posted a while ago, so perhaps this is already supported. But having the ability to only post and update for a single team may be a feature worth looking into if not. I'm sure individual team communities may be interested in that.
That's a great idea! I'll definitely implement that.