It’s been exactly one week since the Discord server (join it here!) went live - with it came a lot of suggestions, ideas and, most important, a lot of new PS5 consoles to the people. After a week I’ve learned a lot regarding Discord server management - and I also found some time to add some new shops to the bot.
See below for Discord updates.
All newly added shops do have one thing in common: determining stock status is not really possible. To understand why we briefly need to talk about how the bot works: the bot always needs some kind of explicit stock information to determine the exact stock status.
An example: look at the PS5 at Alternate. It’s a dedicated page just for the PS5 and it tells you “Artikel kann nicht gekauft werden” (which basically translates to “out of stock”).
The new shops do not provide such pages and instead show a PS5 promotion page. Just take a look at the Otto PS5 page. It doesn’t tell you that a certain product isn’t in stock - it just tells you
Vielen Dank an alle, die eine PlayStation 5 bestellt haben. Aktuell ist die PlayStation 5 auf otto.de leider ausverkauft.
That’s not exactly what my bot is looking for a very simple reason: it could still be possible that you can’t buy the PS5 on Otto even if this notice is not visible (because it’s not a product page, just information regarding a group of products).
So keep in mind that these shops are not tracking for a product and instead for an “out of stock” notice to be removed. That’s why the stock will never change to “In Stock” and instead to “In Stock (Assumption)“.
With more than 2.300 members on the Discord server some measurements had to be taken to improve quality of the Discord. But don’t worry; we’re not charging a few bucks for just using the server - the server and the bot are and always will be free.
During the week the rules have been altered multiple times, especially since some folks do think they can use the Discord to promote their own stuff. The rules can be found on the server itself, but here’s a copy of it:
Since the german community is by far the most active there are now two new voice channels (which benefit from increased audio quality thanks to server boosts!).
The server quickly developed a very helpful and generous community which is a perfect complement to the bot. Shops that are not being tracked by the bot are tracked by the community and announced if something is in stock.
Discussion channels are very active and fast moving which makes it easy to miss an announcement. For that reason I’ve added a new “Custom” category which can be used for custom announcements.
To prevent people from discussing in these channels the MEE6 bot is the only one that can write to these channels. To make the bot post to these channels please use the following command:
!ps5-drop {Link to the shop}Example:
!ps5-drop www.awesome-shop-which-has-everything-in-stock.comImportant notes:
It’s only possible to use this command with the “Trusted” role (or by boosting the server since I don’t think you’re going to pay for the server just to get banned). This role can be gained by being active on the server. This hopefully prevents abusing this command.
All commands can be listed with !help commands. The following commands are available:
!report {user} {reason} to report a user, e.g. !report @baduser did something bad!shops gives information about all shops and products!tech a brief technical explanation on how the bot works!tips where to find additional tips (like the MediaMarkt.at cart hack)!support how to support this project!twitter lists all Twitter accountsThe Discord server has been a feature request since the beginning of this entire project. And even if it brought a decent amount of work with it (mostly in terms of organisation) I’d like to sincerely thank everybody for being part of this community, for helping each other, for the boosts, for the support and for helping me with administration (and better understanding Discord because I’m obviously a Discord noob).
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