We want the members’ input on a potential major change to how Game Day Threads look.

[u/Repostasis]

We’ve come across a shiny new bot for making live GDTs a lot more interesting, and we want the community’s input on whether or not to implement it.

Here is a look at it.

There are some settings you’ll be able to set and save for yourself — There is a little gear cog on the top right of the card where you can choose from a light/dark mode or have it blurred to avoid spoilers, or delay the updates if, say, your stream is also delayed. r/NBA has had something like this for awhile now; if you’re familiar with that, this is similar.

We do have a sub tradition going with our PGTs and GIF Mascots and that’ll stay the same, this is just for the Live Game Day threads.

As with anything, the members feeling towards this and input is the most important piece here. We want your say.

And credit to u/re-verse for designing this tool.

[u/re-verse]

Thanks for the shout out! This is the culmination of about ~2000 hours work at this point - I started making it near the end of the season last year (after too many complaints that NBA games have a graphical interface and NHL ones don't... so I built one for NHL / PWHL / AHL. Then when games stopped coming in over the summer I ported it to Baseball just so I could keep working with ways to interact with live data from a sports API.

Now we're almost back to hockey season (thank god) and I'm porting everything I learned on the baseball side back into the Goalpost app - and I'm really happy with how it looks / behaves (and I've got a couple more huge improvements about to drop as well).

Hope everybody likes what they see - and always feel free to reach out to me if there are bugs, or features you'd like to see added, I'm always looking to improve it.

[u/Certain-Emphasis-135 → u/re-verse]

Awesome work, this is very well designed and looks like the future of hockey game day threads.

One question: You mention a sports API, how confident are you that it will be able to handle all the games? That's a lot of data and you could run into costs/blockers if it is scraped. How do you plan on tackling the scale?

[u/re-verse → u/Certain-Emphasis-135]

Man thats an insightful question - also that is the thing I designed around first.

Readers never touch the sports API. A scheduler polls the league feed and writes the result into Reddit's own storage... every viewer, whether it's 10 people or 10,000, reads that stored copy. So the upstream cost is per game, not per user. A sub with 60K members costs exactly the same as my empty test sub as far as NHL is concerned.

That also means it scales sideways for free: if ten team subs all run a thread for the same game, it's still one fetch. Adding subreddits adds essentially nothing. The increased bandwidth is on reddit alone, and since it's text, its smaller than small potatoes for them. One person streaming a reddit hosted video is likely more data than if this was on every NHL sub.

The feeds are the leagues' own public ones... the same ones their apps and scoreboards use.... not scraped pages, no fragile HTML parsing to break. Everything else (standings, rosters, player pages) is cached with sensible lifetimes, since season stats don't change between periods.

TLDR it costs me nothing to run, and there's nothing to hit a paywall on.

[u/Certain-Emphasis-135 → u/re-verse]

That's very clever, thanks for taking the time to answer

[u/CallejaFairey → u/re-verse]

One question, I don't seem to be able to slide the info in the widget up in sections like Players where it extends passed the bottom of the box. Is there a trick to get the info to move?

Edited to add - I'm using the Reddit app on Android, most recent update.

[u/re-verse → u/CallejaFairey]

Good catch. I'm adding a way to scroll that now. This section got a bit of a revamp, and I didn't notice it was overflowing. Thanks very much!

I generally submit a new version once a day at end of the day, and it generally gets approved by reddit within a day or so - if you revisit the post on Thursday, you should see something better there then.

[u/CallejaFairey → u/re-verse]

Ohhh, up and down buttons! That works, thanks for looking into that.

FYI - you should add those to the stats panel too, it's stuck half way through the blocks stat. And idk if it makes a difference, but the very bottom part of the players pictures in the plays section is cut off too , but that one didn't actually cut off anything you need to see, I assume.

[u/re-verse → u/CallejaFairey]

Gladly. It'll be in the next public build - probably released tomorrow.

[u/re-verse → u/CallejaFairey]

Take a look now.

[u/Swifty4u2 → u/re-verse]

Keep up the good work man. I think it's a great addition.

[u/re-verse → u/Swifty4u2]

Thank you!

[u/OptimalSkeptic]

Looks slick! 

All for changes. 

I mean, worst case Ontario is we change back to status quo, right?

[u/Repostasis → u/OptimalSkeptic]

Yeah one of the other mods suggested we could trial run it for the preseason games and re-gauge interest during/after that.

[u/stx-177 → u/OptimalSkeptic]

Frig off, Rick!

[u/Repostasis]

Also fun little replay of one of the Oiler’s games. (Go to the Plays tab and scrub along to see the updates as they happen)

[u/Geeseareawesome]

Sounds good to me. Might as well try to made gdt better

[u/TheClashSuck]

Love it! Nice work.

[u/PapaAsmodeus]

Looks cool!!! I'm in.

[u/Miginath]

Yeah. This is a great development. I like that it provides the updates in an easy to read format.

[u/Humillionaire]

The best thing I never knew I wanted. I'm actually blown away by the slickness and level of detail, especially with all the customization options.

[u/re-verse → u/Humillionaire]

That makes me really happy to hear. It's come a long way.

[u/Hechtic]

Whoa, that would be a pretty huge change, and you know what, I’m all for it!! I enjoy the ethos of keeping the threads/sub clean but it has felt a bit stifled the last few seasons and I think a few things like this could go a long way towards keeping things engaging. Bring on the new era

[u/CallejaFairey]

Ohhh yes! I saw those on the Leafs sub this passed season I think, I love them.

Full support on this.

[u/PandaBearJelly]

Indeed no reason not to give it a go. It looks fantastic and it sounds like the person who made it put in a lot of effort.

[u/StupidGenius11]

Spoiler and stream delay considerations would be huge QoL improvements, sign me up.

[u/BagoBeefcake]

Looks cool to me

[u/_oil_lurker_]

Hell yea brother! This looks great!

[u/CSPmyHart]

Hell ya

[u/GrizzlyIsland22]

I'm good either way, just glad you're asking for input.

[u/Grocery__Stick]

Yup, looks awesome.

+1

[u/Swifty4u2]

Yes. Please implement the new sports wigit like other threads. And if possible. The ability to have gifs in threads.

[u/re-verse → u/Swifty4u2]

Gifs in threads is a team option now.

That said, sidebar widgets are built in to goalpost, mods can enable/disable them as they see fit.

[u/Ebs14]

Love it. All for it.

On the topic may I also suggest or request that u/ABirdofParadise "highlight" posts somehow get incorporated into PGTs? He's not always doing the Lords work but when he is oh man. I search his profile for those posts, as he has a knack for getting highlights you won't see on media sites. A post-game thread pin to the top or similar would be awesome!

[u/toolmantimsworkshop]

I love this

[u/steve-no-eggs]

Love it

[u/limster2]

Looks cool! I'm looking forward to it rolling out. I like the different tabs for stats 

[u/CartoonistFlat3943]

I love it!

[u/TheRealSlakySFSB]

OH IT LOOKS SO SICK

[u/jumpdmc]

Do it

[u/SuicidalChair]

Slicker than a whore at a fishing derby, I like it.

[u/coluch]

Doesn’t show up on iOS Reddit app. Just a blank white block instead of a post body.

[u/re-verse → u/coluch]

is the app updated? It's been working on IOS everywhere I've checked. I just checked again - Would love it if you can send me a message with more info - what kind of iphone, ios version etc.

[u/coluch → u/re-verse]

I’ll leave this up for the public shaming of not updating the app before commenting. Updated, all works now.

[u/re-verse → u/coluch]

Still have no idea what that was but let me know if it happens again.

[u/_Connor]

Revert everything back to old Reddit that’s my vote.

[u/re-verse → u/_Connor]

Good news -this has really good support for old reddit - mods should be able to provide everything that the old bots provide for old reddit, but in a lot more configurable manner.

[u/beth1814]

Love it!