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