Pickems X

[Midnight Modding]

Finally getting this submitted any day now hopefully. So hopefully someone is still left who wants it. I went through all kinds of things, had to get php8 eventually, and on and on.

[Midnight Modding]

I submitted a new version of this. I forgot to mention in the changelog that I also took category permissions into effect for latest poll widgets and other pages where it was showing them regardless of those settings.

Once it is downloadable and you install the new version, you will need to edit your categories because I changed a permission and added a new permission in it.

I had mostly finished brackets, but still some hiccups, so took most of the code for it back out and will have to add those some other time.

There are some new features, such as ability to let members predict which team will win a pickem and which scorer will be the top scorer. These are all custom features someone had me add in, which were allowed to be in the download here. Another feature is ability to let members predict exact scores instead of only the winner of a game.

If you do not want to use those new features then you might as well turn advanced tiebreakers off because that pretty much just uses those new features to break ties at the end of the pickems.

[Midnight Modding]

ok version 1.1.3 is available now.

the changelog explains the new features. like I said, they were custom, so no idea if anyone else will care to use them. they are pretty nifty, though, especially in small pickems/tournaments. In bigger ones you'd have to spend forever adding all of the choices for top scorer or top team.

[BradTBP]

I'm very interested in this.  Is there a demo somewhere, or would someone that has installed it share their URL to look at it?

I also would love to have the bracket to use basketball conference championships and NCAA champ.

Will you continue to develop and support this?  With the price, I'm a little nervous after reading the history, TBH.

Thanks.

[Midnight Modding]

16 minutes ago, BradTBP said:

I'm very interested in this.  Is there a demo somewhere, or would someone that has installed it share their URL to look at it?

I also would love to have the bracket to use basketball conference championships and NCAA champ.

Will you continue to develop and support this?  With the price, I'm a little nervous after reading the history, TBH.

Thanks.

I basically finished the bracket part, except 2 issues were 1. a bug in the type of form/setup I was using and nobody would ever answer me about it on the various dev forums and 2. I couldn't ever get the bracket to look like a bracket because I'm not good at design. We have a long time before the next ncaa tournament, though. As far as conference tournaments, I'm not sure because of how they are all so different, with different numbers of teams having byes, etc... I have this one where play in games can be used so technically the code is there to allow for byes, but I guess I'd have to just get it working with different numbers of teams.

In a past sports app I made, I basically had to just specifically put in different playoff types, such as nhl playoffs, nba playoffs, etc... because of the different rules. In nhl and nfl they reorder teams after the first round, so some of these are too tricky to have it work automatically, without just hardcoding in different examples.

As far as the history, for a long time nobody was seeming to need it updated and I was wanting to test it live, but was on shared hosting since I haven't really done as much programming for a while. So didn't have php 8 and also had more health issues. Usually, my apps have barely anything needing to change to work on the latest ip.suite versions, though. What slowed this up back for 4.5/4.6 was me trying to get the brackets in. I should have just released it first without them for those versions. I'm mainly just wanting to get them done far ahead of the next ncaa tournament.

The app definitely functions very well and has a lot of stats (some stored ones I don't use at this point).

Edited June 30, 2023 by Midnight Modding

[BradTBP]

Thanks for the prompt response.  I'll likely buy it and start working with it for upcoming football season.  If you do make changes, I think someone earlier mentioned incorporating with Member's Shop (Adriano Faria).  That would bring in a lot of extra value for those using that app. 

Thanks.

[Midnight Modding]

On 6/30/2023 at 3:42 PM, BradTBP said:

Thanks for the prompt response.  I'll likely buy it and start working with it for upcoming football season.  If you do make changes, I think someone earlier mentioned incorporating with Member's Shop (Adriano Faria).  That would bring in a lot of extra value for those using that app. 

Thanks.

yeah, if he can give me some info on it, I could probably eventually do that. In the past when I made apps I had my own standalone point system and then there was something similar to member shop back then where I had a setting to use that point system. But for ip.suite 4.x I only did this one app and I did update my tournaments app, but only a custom copy of it. Then someone else released a tournaments one here. But anyway, I am always liking to integrate point systems when I can.

Actually, one of the first apps I ever made was for sports betting and also had brackets. It had them for ncaa, mlb, nfl, nhl, nba. It's been a bigger pain doing brackets for this one, though, because I was using the ip.suite wizard form and it's buggy. As long as the user makes a pick for ALL games of the given round, it works  fine. But if I accidentally left a game unpicked, it was somehow not giving an error and it was moving right to the next round of the tournament and letting them pick that round with no teams in one of the games! And you couldn't even make the wizard go back and I asked on here and nobody responded.

A shame because it definitely works. I did my own bracket for fun for the ncaa tournament a couple years ago and tested it and it properly did everything. Even the "undo" feature worked great in case I accidentally set the wrong winner, I changed it and it moved the correct one into the correct place on the bracket. I just need to figure out some way around that wizard bug and also I have never found a good way of showing the bracket on the screen.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Midnight Modding

[BradTBP]

Adriano acquired the Sports Betting App, Members Shop and Tournaments from a guy named The Jackal that did great work and then vanished.

The Sports Betting app is not user-friendly at all.  I have had it for about three years.  I think Adriano is going to stop supporting, not enough users.

Members Shop Points are integrated into a number of apps, Adriano integrated his self-built apps into it prior to The Jackal retiring.  

I bought the Tournaments app in simple hope of being able to do brackets, it was far more than that and not suitable for a simple bracket.

There is a lot of growth in that space if go in that direction.  I would love a great sports betting app and a way to do random brackets.

I obviously run a sports-oriented site - anything in that genre is going to excite me!!

 

[Midnight Modding]

13 hours ago, BradTBP said:

Adriano acquired the Sports Betting App, Members Shop and Tournaments from a guy named The Jackal that did great work and then vanished.

The Sports Betting app is not user-friendly at all.  I have had it for about three years.  I think Adriano is going to stop supporting, not enough users.

Members Shop Points are integrated into a number of apps, Adriano integrated his self-built apps into it prior to The Jackal retiring.  

I bought the Tournaments app in simple hope of being able to do brackets, it was far more than that and not suitable for a simple bracket.

There is a lot of growth in that space if go in that direction.  I would love a great sports betting app and a way to do random brackets.

I obviously run a sports-oriented site - anything in that genre is going to excite me!!

 

yeah, back when I did a sports betting app for 3.x, it did decently ok, but not a huge number of customers. Also, I had never personally bet on anything, so I had it really simple where it didn't even have moneylines, exactly. It sort of had spreads or just flat out picks where all were the same. Of course, SINCE then I did do sports betting for real and I won a lot and then I lost a huge chunk back on stupid bets where I was betting thousands I finally had to try to quit where I don't lose all my profits back! It's been so rough quitting too and I keep being tempted to bet. So I WOULD update my own old sports betting app, but it may then tempt me to do real bets again. lol.

And this app really hasn't sold much, but I am still glad I made it because I would like using it myself. I am hoping long term I can get better at design, get brackets finished (they ARE finished as far as functionality, just the buggy form and never got a good looking bracket to display them), and maybe someone will think of some other cool ideas for features that won't clutter the app too much. I like how this app allows to break it down into weeks, days, groups, whatever, or just have them all as one set of picks without being broken up. Also fixing accidental mistakes and using tie breakers are pretty nifty. I like making apps that have some sort of fun to them. I made a tournaments app, sports betting app, reviews app, point system, and then this one is the only one for 4.x, though.

Also, yeah I talked to thejackal privately in the past. I was also annoyed that he made those apps since I had made 3.x versions! But people were wanting them for 4.x and I was too slow getting to them because of annoying health issues. He told me why he was leaving, but I forget now. He didn't like something related to marketplace or some policy or something, but I forget exactly.

Well, I updated my own tournaments app privately fore someone. If it happens to be more how you want it, I could update the public version. I just figured nobody would want it, given that a tournaments app is already out. It had a brackets feature, but I don't know if it would be what you want or not. That bracket feature is more member vs member foe video games, whereas the one I am finishing up in this app is more for PREDICTINFG real life bracket results.

I wish I could ever get a forum site active myself because I badly want to use some cool apps myself, but it's just me there anymore. lol.

Also, I was GOING TO make a fantasy sports app, but it would probably not be ideal to release one because you pretty much would have to either pay a stats provider to send out stats updates or you'd have to manually be entering hundreds of players' stats each day. lol. Plus I'd have to figure out how to do a fancy draft, ie learn new programming languages. I mays till make one, though, because I've done fantasy sports for 20+ years and would love to make my own site of it.

Anyway, if you have any ideas for other apps it's possible I'd want to make some other apps. I don't know if you were around a long time ago for 2.x, but back then this guy mike made a casino app and it was so fun! It had a slot machine similar to the wheel of fortune ones and it had keno and a lot of fun games to play and then see which members did the best on them. I begged him over and over to update it and it never got updated even for 3x, let alone 4.x.

[BradTBP]

Hi @Midnight Modding, 

I installed and was running a test pool when I began having problems with my sitemap.  I reported the sitemap issue to Invision and they suggested it was related to Pickems.  I disabled Pickems and my sitemap generation completed per usual.  Here is the email I received:

 

The issue is being caused by the 3rd party Pickems' application. It doesn't seem to fully support sitemaps being generated. I have removed the sitemap rebuild tasks for this but you'll need to contact the author and ask them to implement a fix.

You can send them this error log:

BadMethodCallException::0

#0 /var/www/html/107695/applications/core/extensions/core/Sitemap/Content.php(241): IPS\Node\_Model->url()

#1 /var/www/html/107695/system/Sitemap/Sitemap.php(121): IPS\core\extensions\core\Sitemap\_Content->generateSitemap('sitemap_content...', Object(IPS\Sitemap))

#2 /var/www/html/107695/applications/core/tasks/sitemapgenerator.php(39): IPS\_Sitemap->buildNextSitemap()

#3 /var/www/html/107695/system/Task/Task.php(375): IPS\core\tasks\_sitemapgenerator->IPS\core\tasks\{closure}()

#4 /var/www/html/107695/applications/core/tasks/sitemapgenerator.php(47): IPS\_Task->runUntilTimeout(Object(Closure))

#5 /var/www/html/107695/system/Task/Task.php(274): IPS\core\tasks\_sitemapgenerator->execute()

#6 /var/www/html/107695/system/Task/Task.php(237): IPS\_Task->run()

#7 /var/www/html/107695/system/Dispatcher/Standard.php(334): IPS\_Task->runAndLog()

#8 [internal function]: IPS\Dispatcher\_Standard->__destruct()

#9 {main}

 

 

Does this make sense to you and is this a fix we can count on in the near future?  Pickems is a nice app, but is currently disabled.  Thank you.

 

Brad

[GazzaGarratt]

Does this stop your whole site working @BradTBP? I was planning to buy today and start using July to get ready ahead of the game for our future pools use.

[BradTBP]

It didn't stop the site, it just inhibited the sitemap generator.

I actually ran it through a test pool with about a dozen people - it worked just fine.

 

[Midnight Modding]

I will look into it, but I remember intentionally trying to have that disabled, so not sure why it's even trying to add it.

[Midnight Modding]

I see what it is... Basically it's trying to get the url to a category page listing all pickems in a specific category. But I never even made such a feature for this app.

I asked about it in the dev forum, but most likely I will just add in such a page per category, but it's really pointless for this app because most sites will have 1 or maybe 2 pickems going on at a time, so what's the point of then having a separate category page listing pickems for that one category?

Also, when a pickem is over, there is a button in the acp you can press to make it disappear off of the main page of the app. But I really should probably make some way of getting to those old pickems also.

Hopefully I can get something done within a few days, but wasn't expecting too have to basically ad a new feature in. Somehow nobody noticed that issue before.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Midnight Modding

[Midnight Modding]

edit

Edited July 9, 2023 by Midnight Modding

[Midnight Modding]

On 7/6/2023 at 2:06 PM, BradTBP said:

Hi @Midnight Modding, 

I installed and was running a test pool when I began having problems with my sitemap.  I reported the sitemap issue to Invision and they suggested it was related to Pickems.  I disabled Pickems and my sitemap generation completed per usual.  Here is the email I received:

 

The issue is being caused by the 3rd party Pickems' application. It doesn't seem to fully support sitemaps being generated. I have removed the sitemap rebuild tasks for this but you'll need to contact the author and ask them to implement a fix.

You can send them this error log:

BadMethodCallException::0

#0 /var/www/html/107695/applications/core/extensions/core/Sitemap/Content.php(241): IPS\Node\_Model->url()

#1 /var/www/html/107695/system/Sitemap/Sitemap.php(121): IPS\core\extensions\core\Sitemap\_Content->generateSitemap('sitemap_content...', Object(IPS\Sitemap))

#2 /var/www/html/107695/applications/core/tasks/sitemapgenerator.php(39): IPS\_Sitemap->buildNextSitemap()

#3 /var/www/html/107695/system/Task/Task.php(375): IPS\core\tasks\_sitemapgenerator->IPS\core\tasks\{closure}()

#4 /var/www/html/107695/applications/core/tasks/sitemapgenerator.php(47): IPS\_Task->runUntilTimeout(Object(Closure))

#5 /var/www/html/107695/system/Task/Task.php(274): IPS\core\tasks\_sitemapgenerator->execute()

#6 /var/www/html/107695/system/Task/Task.php(237): IPS\_Task->run()

#7 /var/www/html/107695/system/Dispatcher/Standard.php(334): IPS\_Task->runAndLog()

#8 [internal function]: IPS\Dispatcher\_Standard->__destruct()

#9 {main}

 

 

Does this make sense to you and is this a fix we can count on in the near future?  Pickems is a nice app, but is currently disabled.  Thank you.

 

Brad

What were you doing when seeing an issue? I keep running the sitemapgenerator in tasks on 2 sites and it keeps saying run successfully. Although, when it tells the result it is a blank line. If I disable guests from accessing the app it says sitemap submitted to google. So maybe it's having an issue on mine and just not telling it. Wondering how you knew there was an issue on yours.

edit: ok when I updated the url properties, now when running the task it says successfully submitted to google, whereas before it had a blank line. So i can either upload the fix now, but in the sitemap the category links will go to some not found page, but otherwise the sitemap should be fixed, or you can wait and maybe I could make a page listing the pickems for a given category. I could maybe go ahead and do that.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Midnight Modding

[Midnight Modding]

I went ahead and updated a new version where it has pools listed by category to have the sitemap issue hopefully fixed. In the app itself there is no link to those pages, but I guess for search engines it will have them and at some point I will add in some link to them in the app and add the link to the navigation bar.

edit: nice. actually the ip.suite system itself automatically put in the links in the navbar if you go to a pool's landing page.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Midnight Modding

[Midnight Modding]

I "think" I at least got the issue itself solved, but for some reason it's not adding all categories or pickems to the sitemap. I spent a long time trying to figure out why it's only showing some, but I am reaching a dead end. hopefully the issue itself isn't happening and I can figure this out at some point.

[Midnight Modding]

Had to pull the new version because I realized it then started creating acp links in the sitemap. lol. I fixed that and I think everything is finally working now, so uploaded the new version, which is up for approval. Such a seemingly small thing took me so much time to fix...

Remember you must have your category set to let your guest group view categories AND view pools for them to show up in the sitemap. I accidentally had one category with no permissions for guests and so the sitemap had nothing from that category. When I changed it, eventually the sitemap updated after I ran the task multiple times.

[BradTBP]

Thanks for working on this.  As soon as the update is available, I will try again!  

[Midnight Modding]

On 7/7/2023 at 5:36 AM, GazzaGarratt said:

Does this stop your whole site working @BradTBP? I was planning to buy today and start using July to get ready ahead of the game for our future pools use.

Hey, I noticed you purchased. 1.1.4 is the version with the fix, but I think if you start using it before they approve 1.1.4 it would just maybe have that sitemap issue and then when using 1.1.4 it will eventually get the sitemaps all corrected. This is the first time anyone has noticed a sitemap issue, though, so I assume it hasn't been noticeable on most sites over the years.

[Midnight Modding]

Weird. When I uploaded 1.1.3, it was approved within a few hours and it was an upgrade from 4.4 to 4.7, so a big leap. but now this time just one bug fix and it's been a couple business days. I guess it varies how quickly they can get to it.

[GazzaGarratt]

Hi @Midnight Modding, is there any way of getting the team image on the Week summary and/or View picks pages at all? I'm just starting to play around with it and found the team image only shows up on the 'Make Picks' page.

Also, when do we use the Rule Sets section? This is just to help my basic understanding more than anything else. Cheers!

[Midnight Modding]

17 hours ago, GazzaGarratt said:

Hi @Midnight Modding, is there any way of getting the team image on the Week summary and/or View picks pages at all? I'm just starting to play around with it and found the team image only shows up on the 'Make Picks' page.

Also, when do we use the Rule Sets section? This is just to help my basic understanding more than anything else. Cheers!

It doesn't look like I added that in. Originally, someone had me make this app and I guess he only mentioned having them on the pick form. I could maybe try to add it in. Sometimes I've had issues getting logos to line up properly (especially if it shows both the name and logo_, but can try it.

The rule set was for a custom feature someone had me do and I just left that all in, just in case someone else would care about it. It's basically if you want to allow members to predict an exact score then on the form for addihg a game/match you enter the rule set and the rule set tells how many popints they get for an exact score prediction being correct vs if they get the winner right, but not the score.

So if they predicted team B would win 2-1, but really team B wins 1-0 they'd still get the correct points from the sued rule set for picking the proper winner, but not the points for the exact score being correct. So it's basically a way to give bonus points in the contest for exact score prediction.

[Midnight Modding]

ok they approved 1.1.4 now, for those who didn't notice. When I was testing I kept manually running the sitemapgenerator task and the  sitemap kept still not having the correct links, but it eventually did, so I guess it did it with a queue. Like I said, you have to have your guest group with permission to view the category and pool for it to get into the sitemap.