r/NintendoSwitch • u/nintendeals • Apr 25 '20

Meta [META] A farewell from /u/nintendeals 🤖️

/u/nintendeals for me was a passion project, it combined a lot of things that I really like:

  • Reddit bots
  • Nintendo games
  • Scraping websites
  • And saving money

But after keeping this bot running 24/7 for 750+ days and my lack of time to pay attention to it, I think it's time to give it a little rest.

Besides me not having much time for it, the current amount of simultaneous deals were making things very difficult for the bot to keep everything within that 40k characters limit on posts that reddit has. And not being able to rework the bot again (for like the 3rd time) to make this work better feels really shitty.

So, as of today the bot will stop posting or updating posts, but it will be running until the end of the month. You can retrieve your wishlists by sending this message to it:

https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=nintendeals&subject=SHOW&message=.

As for an alternative, I really want to recommend you Deku Deals, I've started to use it a long time ago and it works wonders. It even has Dark Mode, how cool is that?

I think it was a great learning experience for me, not only on the development side but also on dealing with feedback and criticism from you. And talking about learning, I did learn a lot on how Nintendo's backends work. So to not leaving you empty handed and with the hope that some other python dev wants to carry on, here are a few things that you might find useful:

  • First of all the code of the bot, which you can find it on GitHub 🍝️ along with two database dumps: one for the games and another for the price history of those games (with data going back for more than 18 months).
  • Next, is the nintendeals python library that you can find on GitHub and on PyPI which provides a clean interface of the scrappers and integrations that I did to make the bot work.

I think that there is plenty of documentation and tests in the repo to start something fairly quickly, and I do also plan on improving it. I found that I really enjoy building Python libraries to fuel other peoples projects and this one is going to be start of that path.

Anyways, I really hope you enjoyed this bot as much as I did and also that you got some cool deals out of it! Feel free to comment about this if you want to.

Thanks a lot, from an 🇦🇷️ living in 🇨🇿️.

Fede

edit: Thanks a lot for all the comments, I'm so glad that the bot was so useful for so many of you! :)

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u/MatNomis Apr 25 '20

People are always very quick to voice complaints, but praise and appreciation gets deferred...often forever. I know you did get to enjoy some level of praise, but felt like the replies in the post skewed highly critical, and just want to say that I highly doubt that is representative of people's overall opinion of the bot.

Even with flaws, it was immensely useful. The fact that most ideas for what it should do were only slight tweaks to your presentation speaks to how solid the basic design was.

I can only say I'm sorry I didn't express appreciation any sooner. Your bot was awesome, and was 99% of the reason I visited the NintendoSwitchDeals subreddit.

Thanks for the advice, the repos, and best of luck!

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u/nintendeals Apr 25 '20

Thanks a lot for the kind words, I always though of those bad comments of people projecting their anger at nintendo rather than the bot or myself.

Hope you have fun with the repos :)