Hello, !hockey@lemmy.ca!
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 did think the GDTs were drowning out discussion. I think as another alternative you could consider setting up a community dedicated to hockey GDTs and a permanent link stickied to this one.
Having a link to the community is a good idea. I was originally thinking linking to the posts from the other community in a once daily post, but that won’t work due to how Lemmy handles links to posts. But Lemmy handles links to communities just fine.
This is definitely a more viable option than what I was originally thinking for having the GDTs out of the community. I would ideally like to have it as part of this community if possible, so I’m thinking of this more as a backup if one post per day is still too much.