Hey all,

Baseball season is almost upon us! For those of you who were around last year, you’ll recall that @cerevant@fanaticus.social and I ported over the redball baseball bot to Lemmy and subsequently created a bot for each team.

While that was a lot of fun to work on, not many people interacted in the gameday threads. This year, I am considering scaling back the game bots to an on-demand basis (although you’re certainly welcome to create your own!). For those communities that want a baseball bot for your team, let me know in this post and I’ll set it up. If you want to run your own and want some help with that, I can help you with that too. Let me know your thoughts! I am open to suggestions.

If you found your home team’s community is without a mod, let me know and I’ll turn over the keys. I’m really excited for this year’s season and am hoping we get a lot more participation and posting from all you lurkers!

Big shout out to @runwaylights@lemmy.world for keeping us going through the offseason! Offseason MVP right there!

12 points

Not all interactions are comments and replies.

Seeing the daily post with the details of the game is a great resource, just like it was on Reddit. Just because users don’t have anything to say doesn’t mean the posts are useless.

If you’re looking to reduce the amount of bot traffic:

  • Don’t need the “off day” post.
  • Don’t really need the post game thread. (Can bots instead change the title of a post, uh, post post?)
  • Don’t need play by play comments.
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4 points

I agree with everything you said, including the bot traffic prioritization

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3 points

Just because users don’t have anything to say doesn’t mean the posts are useless.

Thank you for saying that! I feel the same way but it was a long season of defending a whole army of bots that seemingly weren’t being used by anyone.

Reducing bot traffic in order to prevent user-created posts from being drowned out is really my goal here so I think by default I’ll leave the pre and post game threads turned off (unless someone really wants them). I also didn’t really find the play-by-play comments useful for my purposes so I’ll leave those off as well.

Can bots instead change the title of a post, uh, post post?

They certainly could if it was coded that way but I’d have to extend the bot a bit more to do that (and add another config option probably).

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2 points

Is there a repo?

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2 points

Here’s our PR into the original redball repo. The Lemmy version of the bot is still on a fork.

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3 points

Phillies, btw.

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2 points

@cerevant@lemmy.world runs the Phillies bot and I’m sure he’ll have it back and running this year!

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5 points

Would love to have one in the Red Sox community!

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5 points

You got it! What do you think of skipping the Pre-Game and Post-Game threads and just having a single Game thread? Just thinking that three posts a game is a little much. It might be good to consolidate until at least there’s more volume.

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4 points

Yeah I think having just the game thread would be ok. Especially if the bot can update the score in a comment or something. Fantastic work by the way and thank you!

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3 points

I would like to see the game day bot back for the Twins community!

Your work and dedication to this project is appreciated. Thank you!

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2 points

You got it and you’re welcome!

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2 points

Great job on the bots! And a good idea to scale back based on demand, there’s probably a lot of work in those bots. And thanks for the shout out :)

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2 points

Would love to see it return for the Braves community. I live in a completely different state and am typically not able to watch the games live, so the gameday threads were a great way and easy way of staying up to date.

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