For new subscribers to this community, I plan to write a bot which will automatically find and post deals (likely using the fantastic resource that is https://isthereanydeal.com!)

So hopefully we’ll soon have awesome deals being posted here automatically :D

EDIT: The bot is live: /u/gamedealsbot!

At present, this is pulling data from yesthereisadeal.com
I plan to add support for more deal sources in the near future!
  • Lodion@compuverse.uk
    3·
    2 years ago

    Any chance you’d publish your bot code? I’d like to do similar with she content relevant to some other interests.

      • knyuen@feddit.de
        2·
        2 years ago

        Given the majority of your repo are in Java, I guess your bot is written in Java as well? As a Java guy, I’d love to help! Cheers 👍🏻

        • Cameron@compuverse.ukOPM
          2·
          2 years ago

          Ah, most of my public stuff is indeed in Java, but I haven’t made any new projects in Java for quite a while now haha.

          Most of my projects have actually been in NodeJS until rather recently.

          As my introduction post states, I’m trying to learn Rust at the minute! So the bot is actually written in Rust!

          Unfortunately, not knowing a language leads itself to writing terrible, unreadable code that goes against all the conventions haha! Hence the horrendous state the bot is in right now :)

          I’ve temporarily taken the bot down whilst I rewrite it and make it more general and clean. I’m trying to make it more… modular :)

          I’ve just had an idea however, I could implement a system which would enable to bot to run an external command, parse in the output (likely JSON), and then treat it as posts to make, that would enable anyone to write a “provider” in any language they like, the main bot would just call that, and so long as they returned data in the right format, it’d just work.

          Something to think about for sure! 🤔

          • Lodion 🇦🇺A
            2·
            2 years ago

            That might be handy. I can probably cobble together some sort of python scraper for the datasources I’m interested in… but am guessing the lemmy API side to be outside of my capability.

    • Cameron@compuverse.ukOPM
      2·
      2 years ago

      The first version of this bot is now live! I’ve got many more plans for it in future, but I think I’ve got a good proof of concept working now :)

      • Jarmo@lemm.ee
        2·
        2 years ago

        I saw that! I dig it so far. Not even sure if this is possible but I was wondering if there was a way to put the Metacritic or Opencritic score on the post and add filtering by score?

        I saw you were able to snag when the game was historic low which was pretty cool too. Filtering for those things would be really neat.

        • Cameron@compuverse.ukOPM
          2·
          2 years ago

          Good ideas! I’ll take a look and see what I can do :)

          At present the information (including the historic low indication) is coming from the same source as the deals themselves (https://yesthereisadeal.com), I’ll have to look into trying to extract the game’s name, and attempt to match it to an OpenCritic / MetaCritic score!

          Thanks for the suggestions, if you have any more ideas, please do let me know :D

    • Cameron@compuverse.ukOPM
      2·
      2 years ago

      This is a great point! At present I’m using a UK dataset, but I could likely cross reference with the datasets from other regions and try to find the price in those too. Maybe give prices like [£5/$6/€5.50] or something!

      I’ll have a look and see what I can do :)

      • LedgeDrop@beehaw.org
        1·
        2 years ago

        Wow, I noticed the prices in different currencies. Fantastic work!

        I’ve got one question: since the community is rather small, would it be possible to enable the downvote button? I’m not certain if this is a site-wide setting or not.

        This would allow us to weigh “good deals” vs “okay deals” vs “shovelware”… which means more relevant deals will rise to the top and would probably attract more people (creating a positive feedback loop)

        • Cameron@compuverse.ukOPM
          1·
          2 years ago

          Hi, many thanks for the compliments! The bot is having a couple of problems atm which I’m trying to solve, so it’s not live at present. The downvote button being enabled / disabled is set by the home instance you are using. For example, the downvote button is enabled on my own compuverse.uk instance, however it appears Beehaw does not enable the downvote option, and thus you don’t have the option there.

          • LedgeDrop@beehaw.org
            2·
            2 years ago

            Wow, is that how Lemmy really works? Beehaw disables the downvote, but since I federated through it - I cannot downvote anywhere in the fediverse.

            I wonder if this means that people from outside of Beehaw can downvote threads posted in Beehaw (anyone is welcome to downvote my Beehaw responses - in the name of science, mind you :)

            I’m really going to have to think about hosting my own Lemmy server. It sounds like whoever’s site you register through has quiet a bit of control (especially outside of their respective site).

            You mentioned that you’re hosting your own Lemmy server. Have you had any issues accessing or being accessed by others in the fediverse?

  • LedgeDrop@beehaw.org
    2·
    2 years ago

    Oh this is awesome. Losing /r/GameDeals is one of the things I’ll miss most about Reddit.

    This group here will help soffen that blow :)

    • Cameron@compuverse.ukOPM
      2·
      2 years ago

      I don’t know if this is something that is possible to do unfortunately. It’s not something I’ve seen available in any of the settings and such I’m afraid :(

  • jedwards@beehaw.org
    1·
    2 years ago

    Sounds wonderful! Take a look at Wario64’s twitter page. The deals he posts are always super fast.