This is idea I had a few months back that I have not had the time to get around to working on or building out more, but since I am also considering authenticated APIs for other things, I figured it would be a great time to bring this up again. @james mentioned a while back when I brought the idea up that it would be good to bring it up to community and see what they think. Kind of let them help me design it.
Most people have seen the Discord bot Protector Venari in various Discord servers to announce Hunts. It is great and wonderful, but it requires you to have a Discord account so many players (especially PSN players) get left out. I had an idea of a ânext generationâ Hunt tracker to work in addition to Protector Venari (I do not want to replace the bot as many people have take the time to set it up on their Discord servers and I do not want to lessen that effort people have made).
The thought was to have
Protector Venari for the people that use Discord
A Forum âbotâ that you could DM and tell them the details of a hunt
This would allow me to aggregate all of the hunts into Boundlexx and then I could do the following so we can get the details of hunts out to as many players as possible (all in addition to the Protect Venari hunt pings):
Auto-post them to the forums similar to how we auto-post Exoworlds right now (probably under a new Hunts/Events category)
A dynamically generated calendar that you can view on Boundlexx UI or that you can import into your favorite calendar app on your phone etc. so you can automatically get notifications for Hunts as they happen.
I would love to see everyoneâs thoughts and feedback on the idea!
EDIT: Also something I would really love feedback on is thoughts for how to handle the forum posting. Do you think it would be betterâŚ
to have a forum thread per hunt event?
to have a single thread for all hunts and just add new comments to the post
to have a single thread per hunt organizer?
I can see it any of the ways but I do not want the hunts to become too âspamyâ.
Thread as a wiki is really good idea. Though if it is being managed by the bot, it does not need to be a wiki. So you are thinking of a single thread every 7 days that just says âhere are this weekâs huntsâ?
I played around with generating ical files until i ultimately gave up because google calendar only syncs additions every 12 hours or so. Then once the events are added to calendars they dont seem to update changes made unless you delete and readded the calendar and normal users arent going to do that.
Im not sure if apple calendar has the same issue, but for android users dont seem to get the updates.
I have been using https://sesh.fyi bot to do discord notifications and event signups. You can export calendars for events from that bot, but then we circle back to the issue of the ical files not updating google calendars.
And i thought well ill just allow multiple users to share a google calendar with me and merge them all into the siteâŚ
BUT⌠i run into the biggest issue I cant control⌠I cant really get users to just update data for their hunts if they are already doing it some way that works for them.
Out of everyone i approached not many responded when i offered to access to the maintaining a calendar of their own hunts. And the people that did take me up on the offer didnt keep their events up to date.
So i just added everyoneâs hunts i see based on the notifications in discord or posts on the forums. It was easier to just let people tell me when something needed to be changed and just ended up maintaining the list myself.
Edit: you could get around the google calendar issue by using google api and then just updating one directly then providing the share link to the end user
Awesome! I did not even realize someone always already trying to maintain a calendar. Do you have a thread for this? It is the first time I have seen it.
Also, I had not even considered the syncing issue with Internet calendars. I will have to do some research and dig into how to make that work better.
I love that calendar! The few hunts i can attend, i have to schedule time for, so itâs essential to my gameplay.
I also like the discord bot, but i donât see the real benefit to creating another hunt tracker, since both discord and the calendar are accessible to anyone with either a phone or a computer.
Thanks im happy it has helped, that was my goal in being able to determine a head of time when a hunt might be happening.
The biggest issue was refreshing the calendar, so if you just use google calendar api you could create a calendar specific for the hunts its and then just update that, then share the access to that calendar.
this gets around the google issue because they are good about syncing events(to other google calendars) and i believe apple devices dont have this issue with ical cache.
There is a bot i tried called discal that does this it, even has its own calendar on the site for it, here is a example: DisCal - Calendar Embed which is actually linked to this google calendar xyberviri events
the only issue with is it only really announces in the channel its in and its more of a per individual group thing not per community, then im back to having two bots shouting in discord nowâŚ
So i settled on having a reminder bot for the event in my discord that people can sign up for⌠which i have to admit i have been bad about setting up the events before hand and will probably ditch the bot since i really only see needing it for larger hunts that need roles to be organized well before they are ran.
It is all about convenience and visibility. I will definitely be bugging @xyberviri more about the calendar idea. Some people just prefer things in different ways. I use Discord for a lot of things already so Protector Venari already solves a lot of the issues for me as a player. But I know some people really love coming to the forums over many of the other methods.
The biggest problem I am trying to solve is that I am seeing hunts that only exist on Discord or only exist on the forums. I want to automate bringing them together to have parity so no one is left out.
Love this. As someone who doesnât run with any particular guild regularly and has a terrible memory, but loves occasionally dropping in on various hunts, having hunts posted to the forums would be absolutely wonderful. It takes more effort currently to track down hunt schedules than I care to expend. I often find myself wanting to set aside time for a hunt but not knowing when/where to be, and missing out. So I personally would definitely use and appreciate this.
Agreed with other posters that it might get spammy, so maybe just a single thread with new posts for each new hunt. It will continually get bumped to the top of the forum list that way, so it doesnât seem like a problem. Agreed that exo-world style posts might get messy and spammy.
This was the main issue i was trying to solve, the most common question/response on discord was âis there/there is a hunt tonight at Xâ.
The calendar i made was actually one i made for myself so i could keep track of when others were doing something a head of time and not 0-1 hour before.
Still waiting for us to get that calendar plugin for the fourms⌠though i suspect its due to it being in beta or being a 3rd party thing that the devs wouldnt want to add it.
I donât use Discord for a few reason, but Iâm not on PS (and wonât be), however I did have an idea similar to this to bridge the gap to PS/Steam users.
Basically, a discord bridge.
Using the various APIs ensure that folks on the other platforms also get text and hopefully audio updates from a given hunt chat.
I looked into it a bit, and I think I could (with a lot of difficulty, as Iâd be using Web APIs to make it happen, not properly hosted code or whatever) definitely get the chat part to work. I might be able to get the voice part down the line, not sure as Iâve not read up on the voice parts of discord. However if itâs just a matter of streaming the sound from an officially registered app node AT discord, then itâs possible. I think.
Otherwise, I guess Iâd just have 4-5 always on voice chats on discord, that can be hooked into from both ends or something.