The Song Fight Bulletin Board

The forums automatically send an e-mail when a new message is posted to a topic one is following. Is there any reason why we couldn't have some sort of notification when there is a new fight title posted? One easy way to do it would be to have a single "administrator posts only" forum or topic. Admins would post the new song titles in that forum solely so that people will get that notification e-mail. Alternately to avoid tying in to the forums, someone could easily set up a PHP script to send a notification whenever a new title is posted. Then fighters could signup for the notification if they want it.

Just some thoughts. I've been having a lot of ideas this week. Don't know why....

I like anything that makes my life easier, but I have no idea if this is a pain for the Admin here.

If the FMs were interested in doing something like that, doing it with a thread on the boards seem like the least effort route. People could opt in and out without the FMs having to run or manage a mailing list. If that were available I'd sign up, but I'm OK without it.

why dont you get a mailserv account somewhere and start a new fight notify list?

Lunkhead wrote:If the FMs were interested in doing something like that, doing it with a thread on the boards seem like the least effort route. People could opt in and out without the FMs having to run or manage a mailing list. If that were available I'd sign up, but I'm OK without it.

Exactly! It would be as easy as copying and pasting the exact same message from the "pre-fight" threads into the "Song posted!" thread. Someone could even volunteer to admin that topic (if that functionality is available).

Well, if there was a new title for the weekend I'd get busy while I had a guitar available. Otherwise it's the hotel room instrument set only...[hint hint]

roymond wrote:Well, if there was a new title for the weekend I'd get busy while I had a guitar available. Otherwise it's the hotel room instrument set only...[hint hint]

Your Weeeener?

One of the best notification strategies on the Internet these days is RSS, which is a lot easier for everyone to deal with.

RSS feeds are also (in certain contexts) called podcasts.

What you do with this information is up to you.

Question: What the Doctor puts on your pod if you break it...

fluffy wrote:podcasts.

fluffy wrote:One of the best notification strategies on the Internet these days is RSS, which is a lot easier for everyone to deal with.

RSS feeds are also (in certain contexts) called podcasts.

What you do with this information is up to you.

this is a fine point.

Surely PHPBB provides RSS feeds of threads? If it doesn't, that sucks.

There are mods for it(*) but my point was that we already have a podcast which is updated when a new fight goes up, which is usually at about the same time as the title. So if you just use any old RSS reader and point it at the songfight podcast, instant notifications.

Ironically I didn't have notification enabled on this thread so I didn't think to check up on it.

* I don't really like comment RSS feeds. It's a just management hassle, and current readers aren't smart enough to only request things which are likely to have changed and so after a while you end up with a whole bunch of RSS readers constantly pinging every thread on a forum. Not very scalable.

I started using the podcasts with iTunes. Works great. Thanks!

Or you could be really clever (and annoy your wonderful songfight hosts) by running a cronjob that pulls a copy of the front page every hour or so, and when it detects a change in the songfight title area, you get an email.

I don't do this for songfight, but I've done it (with a 30-second polling interval) when concert ticket availability was being announced on a website) with success.

or you could be smart about it and have your cron job just ask the server for the "last modified date" of the front page.

a) the podcasts work great, download ridiculously fast, and can be set to
play the songfight when the songs are downloaded. (like an alarm!)
2. It's kind of funny watching everybody hang around on SF! when they
think the next fight is about to be posted.

jb wrote:or you could be smart about it and have your cron job just ask the server for the "last modified date" of the front page.

That won't work since php always uses 'right now' as the modify date unless you specifically override it in the script.

Also the front page has random content ordering so you can't just look at the diff of the file.

It's really best to just poll the RSS feed.