Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Since last year's notifier is not running this year, I decided to make my own.

championship.evanforbes.net

It works for any phone number that can receive texts in the USA or Canada.

I made it rather quickly, so if anything goes wrong or you have any questions just let me know.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Thank you very much, I signed up and there were no bugs for my Andtoid phone.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

seems to work in Canada! :D

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Excellent, thanks for testing.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Looks good. Might want to redirect port 80 to port 3000. Simple to do with iptables.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Thanks. Port 80 is already in use by the guy who owns the server unfortunately. Is there any way around that?

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Sure, with virtual hosts this is not a problem. Is this node.js? You can run alongside nginx or apache by setting up a virtualhost that proxies to node.js. Lots of info on Stack Overflow about this depending on your exact configuration.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Yes it is node.js. Thanks for the information, I'll look into this more tomorrow if I have time.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Requiring a team number is sort of weird. My team won't be attending CMP this year (I'll be there volunteering though), so I just put in a bogus team number that will.

What usefulness is having the team number?

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

In the text message it will tell you which division that team is in. Whether or not that's useful... I don't know.

Team numbers for teams that aren't registered are still accepted and will get a generic divisions are out message.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

It turns out at my university port 80 doesn't allow outside connections for some reason.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Fun stats: There are about 280 people signed up to be notified so far from 172 different teams.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Small update:

With almost 600 people requesting notifications, I was concerned about the amount of time it will take to send all the texts. It takes 1 second per text, which would mean the last people wouldn't be notified until ~10 minutes after I received all the divisions.

I went ahead and added a second phone number so that the notifications can be sent in ~5 minutes. This means you may receive the notification from a different phone number than was used to send your verification code.


Is ~5 minutes fast enough?

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

you mean to tell me i have to wait 5 minutes? yeah i guess :rolleyes:

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

The High Roller team motto is "It's not enough"... :) But certainly appreciated!

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Consider offering email as well? With something like SendGrid, you can probably push out all the emails nearly instantly. And if you ask users to provide their carrier, you can use the email-to-SMS gateways offered by most service providers (this seems like a fairly comprehensive list, but I'm sure offering just the major US options would be fine).

I'm guessing you're using Twilio for SMS, which unfortunately does have that rate limit for non-shortcode SMS. This could serve as a fallback for users who don't provide an email and/or don't use a cell carrier with a supported email to SMS gateway.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

I'm liking the random quote generator

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

I went ahead and added a couple more phone numbers for good measure. Now we're at ~3 minutes. :D


I considered it, but decided against implementing email notifications to keep the system simple, based on the amount of time I had to make it.
I'll probably add it as an option next year.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

3 minutes until what?????

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

3 minutes from the time divisions are released to the last text notification going out.

Sorry for the alarm!

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

That is 2.973 minutes too long.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

3310 demands .25 seconds or less ;)

Thanks for this!

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Yeah team 3507 really enjoyed creating some of them. I enjoy the 50% chance your pit is in Houston!

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

I signed up pretty early... Hopefully I get my message under that time! ;)

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

I should have added some micro-transactions: "Donate $0.99 to Ubotics to put your phone number at the top of the queue"

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Monetizing your poor design choices? I dunno, I think that ventures into Worse Than Failure territory...

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Sure, it sounds bad now but next year when the design is improved the shareholders will force me add an artificial delay to encourage more donations anyway. :)

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

This is Great!

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Sounds like a job for Speed Up Loops.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Here are some post division release stats:

912 division notifications were sent to people from 349 different teams. Teams 195, 148, and 469 had the most people notified with 15, 14, and 13 respectively. The last person to sign up (from team 74) did so 3 minutes before they received their division.

Timeline (Central time):
~12:31 First divisions released
12:33 First notifications sent
12:53 Last notifications sent

Because everyone loves graphs:


The biggest limiting factor was the rate at which divisions were added to the usfirst.org website.

There was also a small bug that delayed the last 9% of notifications by about 7 minutes. Luckily I was at my computer and was able to fix it quickly.


So, to improve for the future:

• Let people choose if they want to be notified when their team gets a division, or when any team gets a division
• Add email notifications as an option
• Increase division data acquisition speed

What else could be better?

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

I got the initial notification when I signed up but (still) haven't received my "divisions are out" notification.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Interesting. If you PM me your phone number I can look it up and might be able to see what happened.

Re: Division notifier- Get a text when divisions are released
 

Sent with the verification code I got