News Bot - Tentatively Named - BubbaBot[?]

iheartskins

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From the Department of Suggestions That I Cannot Implement...

At work, we've used ChatGPT and similar functions to automate lots of tasks.

Wondering whether there's someone in the BGO-verse that has the technical chops to program a bot to do a (copyright sensitive) news collection of all (relevant) WFT news stories to replicate in some way the incredible work that bubba9497 used to do at ES?

The final product could be (1) a thread for each article in the way it once was, (2) a "digest" or similar that would post the pre-pay-wall lines of the article [maybe the first 4-5 sentences], (3) an enhanced version of (2) being a ChatGPT summary of the article maybe, or (4) something else.

May need to finance a subscription/username & password for the bot to do the scraping job on e.g., USA Today/ESPN/WaPo/WaTimes/Athletic/etc. I'm happy to discuss financing that side of it.

LMK what you think. I found that service invaluable once upon a time to get everything in one place.
 
So based on John's feedback, perhaps the only viable runner would be (3) - i.e., an enhanced digest via Chat GPT to summarize the articles to make the overwhelming a bit more consumable.
 
I wouldn't know where to start as far as using AI to scrape for relevant articles. The only use of AI we currently have is an add-on a guy in the Middle East created for use as an 'answer forum' (that's what we have installed in our 'BGO Oracle' forum). We still have all of our 'Newsstand' forums built, those are the ones we had RSS feeds set up for to pull Commanders news, blogs, and other sports articles. Two issues lead to me hiding those forums.... First of all, RSS is an outdated approach and although there are still working feeds out there, they are getting less and less commonly used by news outlets. Secondly, no one read those articles. I mean, NO ONE. We would have that entire Commanders News forum with 10 or 20 articles pulled daily (or snippets of articles) and they sat there unopened. I am very skeptical even if threads were being created by an AI bot, that folks would open them.

When we started to get ES refugees, they immediately wanted us to do a 'Bubba' like breaking news forum. I did build it, just as a place for folks to put breaking news stuff. But I just don't know that it needs it's own forum. Traditionally, we have simply had folks start a thread in the 'Sons of Washington' forum where all of the other Washington football discussion occurs. The consensus from staff was that that approach works well and there's no need for a separate forum, so that 'Breaking Commanders News' subforum is currently hidden.

I appreciate the suggestion (our first since adding the Suggestion Box)! I'm not opposed to trying to build something for news articles, I just don't think there's an available solution currently available for Xenforo sites (I've looked quite a bit) that isn't RSS feed based, and I think going down that road again is probably wasted time.
 
Totally fair feedback and sincerely appreciate the reply. Sounds like a RSS/thread per news story is definitely out given the value proposition/fundamental lack of use.

The vision I'd had was something that would e.g., scrape/copy news stories and then post say three/four sentence summaries. We had something similar at my firm - and it was a great "round-up" of news stories in an "executive" consumption style - i.e., key messages/bullets that leverages the GPT/OpenAI modeling so that you can in say 5-10 minutes (or fewer) get a full distillation of all relevant breaking/other news stories including any longer-form/non-breaking news stories that were more analytical in nature in one stop.

I think the tech for that isn't terrible but I'm a total luddite when it comes to this kind of thing but I'll see if I can ask around a bit to see if there are tools that make this easy. Vision for it would be a thread per day say that would do something like:

News Story 1 - Headline 1 - Byline 1
-Key Message 1 of News Story 1
-Key Message 2 of News Story 1

News Story 2 - Headline 2 - Byline 2
-Key Message 1 of News Story 2
-Key Message 2 of News Story 2

and so on

What I'm trying to confront is probably idiosyncratic to my situation but think could apply to more casual forum visitors. How do I have a meaningful opinion on what's happening and/or have anything to add if I've not been super close to what's been going on with the team. Many of the members here are neck deep in everything WFT, as they should be, but that's a significant barrier to contribution/engagement with many people who might want to contribute but are reluctant because they are just not nearly as informed. Also has the added benefit for those who are already well aware of what's happening to stay abreast if there's anything important taking place.

Just thinking about the nearer term and growth of the member base and how to (1) make it super easy for everyone to be informed and (2) enable new members/casual members to feel like they can contribute and not sound out of touch/stupid/ill-informed/etc. etc. Hopefully a real problem (as much as that exists at all!) if the team really starts being succesful.

Let me see if there's anything easy out there...
 
There are also a ton of modification creators out there for Xenforo. We hired a guy to code our rotating image banner and he has done some other stuff for us. I could put you in touch with him. Very talented guy.

I guess the question is, would we try to set this up as a separate forum, or would it be better (if it CAN be done) to have a single 'Today's Commanders News' thread that gets updated say daily or a couple times a day with a single post that shows those news article links/snippets?

One of the reasons I think the previous news 'forums' were an epic fail is that people spend their time in the Sons of Washington forum. If we could create what you are envisioning there it might be a much more successful and useful tool.
 
Very happy to speak to a tech contact just to have a sense of what's possible.

I was thinking this would auto create a thread at say 8 AM ET each morning and post it in Sons of Washington from the identified sources leveraging key words that the Staff could define and ideally fiddle with from time to time (e.g., to address new stories of a potential trade/free agent signing and/or opponent for that week or whatever). I don't know what a good deadline for timing each day for inclusion is but whatever cut-off would be adjusted so that any of the non-breaking news stories that were posted that day would get added to the thread. I would have thought that any truly to-the-minute news would likely be posted separately and/or in an existing thread.

Base key words might be something like "Washington Redskins", "Washington Commanders," "Washington Football Team" and an identified sub-set of players (as e.g., we wouldn't want players with very generic names to create an overflow of news stories). But the key word flexibility might be useful so that it could be a fluid news posting depending on what was interesting/relevant day-to-day or week-to-week. All ideally with only basic non-techie required tweaks/updates and not requiring the tech person to adjust from time to time to keep cost/admin down.

Some degree of moderation would likely be required the broader the key words would be to ensure nothing too irrelevant was included. But this is generally built into AI modeling where it improves based on feedback so this would hopefully reduce over time.
 
Our mod developer says that yes, it can be done and he will be in touch once he finishes a couple of projects.
 
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