I'll be doing some server maintenance today around 11 AM EST. You will be unable to upload images to fanaticus until the maintenance is finished.

For the technical, I'll be (finally) migrating the pict-rs data to object storage. I was lazy last fall and simply upgraded the server size (and therefore the volume size) instead of doing the proper thing and migrating. This is bad for two reasons:

1. It's not scalable -- volume storage is limited and requires regular updates to increase the size of the volume. Object storage automatically scales. You pay for what you use and that's it
2. Our server is way beefier than it needs to be, soley so our volume size can be large enough to store all our images. That means I pay more for server power we just don't need. I knew this was an issue when I kicked the can down the road last fall but my life got busy and I needed to just buy myself some time.

I'll be following these docs:

• https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs/#user-content-filesystem-to-object-storage-migration

I'm not sure how long the migration will take, I'm guessing a long time considering how large the volume is. With any luck, we'll be back up and running within the hour.

Hi all, it was brought to my attention that Lemmy.World is not federating with Fanaticus as of about a week ago. I did a little digging and found that we were recently added to Lemmy.World's blocklist.

I've reached out to the admins on multiple channels and am hoping to resolve this soon. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Check out the new features here.

Fanaticus will be upgrading to 0.19.0 at 1:30 EST. According to the release post, this will likely take 30 minutes.

Check out the new features here.

Any idea what this is about?

Not a tech guy, can't code or anything. Just created a Real Madrid community here and would love to deploy one (pls join if you’re a football fan or curious).

Idk if I can do it but i'd love to hear how it's done.

Wondering how many instances fanaticus has defederated from or has been defederated from simce I haven't found fanaticus communities in my main account and similarly don't see many other here.

It might take some time. I've got resize the server's disk.

We understand that some users in the fediverse don't want to see sports content and are frustrated with Fanaticus's game bots' daily posts.

Currently, lemmy doesn't support blocking entire instance's at a user level. Because of that limitation, I am providing a list of the current communities on Fanaticus that have active game bots and a little python script so users can block those communities.

from plemmy import LemmyHttp

# must include protocol e.g. https://lemmy.world
pl = LemmyHttp("INSTANCE_NAME_HERE")

username = "USERNAME_HERE"
password = "PASSWORD_HERE"
pl.login(username, password)

fanaticus_communities = [
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
    "[email protected]",
]

for comm in fanaticus_communities:
    print("Getting community: ", comm)
    commRes = pl.get_community(name=comm).json()
    if commRes and commRes['community_view']:
        commId = commRes['community_view']['community']['id']
        print("Blocking community: ", comm, " communityId: ", commId)
        pl.block_community(True, commId)
        print("Successfully blocked community: ", comm)
    else:
        print("Failed to find community: ", comm)

In the future, we are planning on adding the game bots for the other major sports as well (they’re not in season now) so I will update this script as those bots come online.

I’d love to set that up for football games for /c/scgamecocks if possible!

Today is my first free Saturday since mid summer. With that time, I was able to fully migrate our game bots to their dev server and upgrade them to our latest version of code.

This should improve the stability of fanaticus as well as the bots.

@headie_[email protected] - are you able to reboot it? Ive been MIA for a bit since lemmy.world was having issues connecting but I made a new account which seems to be working.

Hi, everyone! A few of you have brought to my attention that lemmy.world is not receiving new posts from fanaticus and vice versa.

I've been debugging it and haven't been able to resolve the issue. Fanaticus' nginx logs are reporting that all requests incoming from lemmy.world are returning a 400. Additionally, we've found that outbound requests to lemmy.world from fanaticus are being responded to with a CloudFlare page.

I am reaching out to the lemmy.world admins to see if we can get fanaticus's IP whitelisted on their CF config. I'll update this thread with any news.

title

Well we just updated to 0.18.3 and a new one was released today. We'll update tonight.

Sorry for the delay! It's been a wild month, lots of vacation :)

We're going to be updating to 0.18.3 in 15 minutes. The upgrade should take 5 minutes or so.

Not the end of the world, but I don't see a pre or live game thread for twins v mariners on either side (7/26)

@headie_sage, I don’t know if you’ve seen this and I don’t know if we could/would want to implement this on fanaticus.social, but I thought this was an interesting post.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1941511

As requested by some users: 'old' style now accessible via https://old.lemmy.world

Code can be found here: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym , created by Ryan (Is he here?) (Yes he appears to be! @[email protected] ! Thanks for this awesome front-end!)

For a little bit there was someone regularly posting their Pickle/IG results each day, but it seems like that's fallen off. Would it be possible or desirable to have a bot post whenever those roll over?

We'll be upgrading to 0.18.2. Downtime should be minimal. There's no nginx configuration changes in this one.

We'll be updating later today.

Hello everyone! I'm back from vacation (was gone the past two weeks) and am ready to dive back into work on the game bots.

I just wanted to give everyone a quick update. You can check out my previous update thread here.

Status

• All 30 teams have their own game bots configured and activated
• 29 of the game bots run on the same server as fanaticus' lemmy code (big beefy box) with Cerevant running the phillies bot.
• The post limit has been increased in 0.18.1 to 50k from 10k so we no longer have a truncation issue
• The sidebar bot has been ported to lemmy but unfortunately is a bit more limited that we are used to (it only updates the standings of a single division) -- check out what it looks like here
• Cerevant has [identified an issue](Reported: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3544) where pinned posts are not being federated correctly on foreign instances
• There is an issue with the game bots that has occasionally taken down the fanaticus servers (I'll discuss this more below)

Current Issue

Game Bots Out of Control

There is an issue with the game bots that has occasionally taken down the fanaticus servers

Game bot will periodically hit a 503 while updating one of its game threads and enter a loop where it continuously attempts to update the post and fail. A bot that enters this state almost immediately spikes one of the server's four CPUs to 100%, then very quickly fills up the shared disk with the same log (GBs of logs). The GBs of logs produced by these rogue bots fill up the server and because the game bots share the same server as fanaticus, they cause the lemmy server to crash.

While I'm not entirely sure what causes this issue, my current hunch is that it's related to a rate limit either with our lemmy or nginx configuration.

When we first started bumping up to the max CPU & memory on our server I upgraded it to a beefy dedicated machine with a quad core and 8GB of RAM. I did not upgrade the shared disk space at that time. The server size was total overkill but I wanted to run the game bots on the same machine.

I've gotten a lot of questions regarding why the game bots were turned off last week and this is the reason. I had to basically babysit them and restart any that ran off the rails and because I was on vacation, I couldn't investigate the bug to fix it or babysit the bots.

Possible Fixes

These are some options I'm tossing around to fix this issue. They're not necessarily going to happen but I'm writing them here publicly so you all know that I'm working on it and to get some public comment.

1. Fix the bug, obviously :)
2. Move the game bots to another server, separate from fanaticus^1^
3. Create some sort of system that detects the bots are in a runaway state, alerts me, and/or programmatically restarts the bad bots

This is a top priority for me now that I'm back from vacation and I will be working on this starting today.

Future Work

1. Add more features to the sidebar bot to achieve feature parity with the former Reddit game bots (team/league leaders, multiple division & playoff standings, live league scoreboards)
2. Customizable periodic threads (e.g. a daily "Around the Horn")
3. Closer to NBA/NFL/NHL season, we'll port those game bots to lemmy

Contributing

First off, huge shout-out to Cerevant who has been working with me porting the bot to lemmy. He's done amazing work, added new features, fixed multiple bugs, and has been overall a great person to work with! Thank you!!

Another shout out to todrob99 for creating the original redball bots. He's been very responsive and encouraging as Cerevant and I work on the bots.

For any of you who want to contribute, whether it's coding, creating features requests, reporting bugs, or reviewing PRs, you can find my fork of the redball app here.

We are also discussing the work in the #lemmy channel of todrobb's Discord channel here.

Finally, another way to contribute is to take over your community's bot and run it yourself! The code is open source and I can help you set it up on your own server. That would make it easier on me so I don't have to run all the bots and you can configure it to your community's liking.

TL;DR bots are live, a little buggy, but are being improved daily!

^1^ This is definitely the correct thing to do but I'm hesitant to do this right away. I'm not a server admin by trade and this means 1) Extra overhead ($$) and maintenance 2) That I have to take time away from improving and extending the bots' functionality to do server admin work