We’re kicking around the idea of a local Discord. Has anyone written any bots that query the IFPA or PinballMap APIs to post things to a Discord or Slack?
Use cases:
IFPA - New tournament registered within a certain location/radius
IFPA - Upcoming tournament reminder
IFPA - Results for a tournament posted
PinballMap - New machine shows up in a certain region
@Richthofen or @PressStart - are State Championship standings available through an API? I know I can see standings in the IFPA app, but didn’t know if state standings or the upcoming tournaments at a state level were available through an API.
I totally forgot about this. If you link your Match Play user up for Slack notifications it does come with a couple of slash commands: /ifpa to search IFPA players and /tournaments to search Match Play for tournaments. I don’t think anyone uses them – I just added them way back when to see how it could all work
OK, I’ve attempted to hack something together for Discord:
The IFPA Championship Series Discord Bot:
Link to add it into your server (need to be a Server Admin):
What it does:
Web scrapes the standings page for the State and Year you provide it
Returns Top 32 people in that state
It’s fairly brittle because it looks for specific CSS tags to get the table it needs
It only works for the NACS right now.
With a little bit of work I can make it work for the Australian series.
It won’t work for WNACS because those are custom rankings pages that don’t include the State/Province name in the URL; I’ll need a reference table to return the right pages.
It won’t work for many of the other country championship pages since those are mostly formatted differently; I don’t see a solution for this.
How it works:
Type $ifpachamps followed by the following two inputs:
Two-Letter State or Province Code
Year
I will attempt to return the top 32 players for the year requested.
Example: $ipfachamps PA 2022`
Also, Corey, I absolutely love this. I’ve never written a Discord bot and now I totally want to. Well done.
IMHO it would be super rad if we just added $ifpa as the command and offered verbs. There’s so much data, and we could provide it all. or, can we do slash notation like /ifpa nacs ri 2021 ?
my discord is Pinball Dad#7848 if you wanna invite me and chat about it.
I don’t know if anyone is using the bot yet, but last night I published an update to version 2.0.
Now includes the WNACS (Open and Women’s). It relies on data-scraping specific URLs from the website on the Custom Ranking page, and that’s maintained through a reference file.