Subscriber Contest - Ways To Hack Around For Live Scoring? (1 Viewer)

[Joe Bryant]

Offshoot of the main thread.

I know folks would love live scoring but the cost to do that legitimately with our real stat provider is thousands of dollars. For a free contest like this, it's simply not possible for us financially.

But it seems like there should be a reasonable hack around to use one of the free league platforms to at least track your team with live scoring. Right?

Has anyone done this?

I envision creating a best ball league on Sleeper or somewhere and you enter your players once the contest locks. I don't know how big they'll allow leagues to be but you could even ask friends who have contest teams to join.

Then on Sundays, you could see how your team was doing live. You of course couldn't see how everyone else in the contest was doing. But at least you'd know for your team.

Does that make sense?

Anyone done anything like that?

I'd like to be able to have a super clear set of instructions for people to guide them on how to do this.

What do you think?

 

[SeniorVBDStudent]

Paging Steeler and Iggy....

 

[Joe Bryant]

Paging Steeler and Iggy....

Thanks. Can you use the actual @ screename so we make sure to get the right people looking? Thanks.

 

[apalmer]

Last year, MFL allowed you to create a free bestball league a few weeks after the season started. A lot of us created one-team leagues to track our own team's live scoring. Don't know if they'll allow that again or not.

 

[Joe Bryant]

Last year, MFL allowed you to create a free bestball league a few weeks after the season started. A lot of us created one-team leagues to track our own team's live scoring. Don't know if they'll allow that again or not.

Thanks. Can you elaborate on that? How you joined? Did someone set up scoring? How many teams? Anything else?

 

[TheWinz]

I am completely computer illiterate, but @kyter1 is trying to teach me. I'm just doing what he tells me to do. So far, I have created a league on MFL, and added all 348 possible roster spots to team #1. He also had me download this program called Spyder, but I don't know what that's for yet. I invited him to my fake league as a co-commissioner, and he is doing something on his end right now. I will gladly do all the grunt work, and if I can duplicate what @kyter1 did last year, we have a winner. It's not like the Calcomatic of year's past, because people will be waiting on me to provide updates, as far as I know. I'll keep you posted

 

[apalmer]

Last year, MFL allowed you to create a free bestball league a few weeks after the season started. A lot of us created one-team leagues to track our own team's live scoring. Don't know if they'll allow that again or not.

Thanks. Can you elaborate on that? How you joined? Did someone set up scoring? How many teams? Anything else?

Used this link: http://home.myfantasyleague.com/free-draft-only-league/ (Looks like it should work this year, too)

Set up the scoring to match that of the contest and manually set the roster for your team. As I recall, it was tricky setting up kicker scoring, but eventually worked it out. Every time I logged in, it warned that the league setup wasn't complete because only one team had players, but that was easy to ignore. I didn't bother exploring to see if the software would allow the same player on more than one team, so I don't know if a group could put their teams on or if everyone needs to set up their own one team league. At least you have automatic calculation of your team's score.

 

[Joe Bryant]

I am completely computer illiterate, but @kyter1 is trying to teach me. I'm just doing what he tells me to do. So far, I have created a league on MFL, and added all 348 possible roster spots to team #1. He also had me download this program called Spyder, but I don't know what that's for yet. I invited him to my fake league as a co-commissioner, and he is doing something on his end right now. I will gladly do all the grunt work, and if I can duplicate what @kyter1 did last year, we have a winner. It's not like the Calcomatic of year's past, because people will be waiting on me to provide updates, as far as I know. I'll keep you posted

Cool. Keep us posted. Mainly, I'd love to figure out an easy way to tell someone how to do this and not make them do all the legwork.

 

[TheWinz]

Knowing your own score is fine, but it's pretty useless unless you know where you stand among others.

 

[Joe Bryant]

Knowing your own score is fine, but it's pretty useless unless you know where you stand among others.

OK. I was trying to figure a way to add fun to this and it seemed like quickly being able to look during Sunday and see how your team is doing might be fun. If that capabilty is useless, I definitely don't need to spend time trying to figure out how to do it.

 

[TheWinz]

Knowing your own score is fine, but it's pretty useless unless you know where you stand among others.

OK. I was trying to figure a way to add fun to this and it seemed like quickly being able to look during Sunday and see how your team is doing might be fun. If that capabilty is useless, I definitely don't need to spend time trying to figure out how to do it.

Knowing your own score is OK, but without knowing where you stand, what good is it? The whole point of live scoring is to see how close you are to the current cutoff at any given point.

 

[Joe Bryant]

Knowing your own score is OK, but without knowing where you stand, what good is it? The whole point of live scoring is to see how close you are to the current cutoff at any given point.

Thanks. You saved me some effort and money on trying to come up with something here. I thought people might like an easy way to see how their players were doing each week but that's good to know that would be useless. Thanks.

 

[BassNBrew]

Knowing your own score is OK, but without knowing where you stand, what good is it? The whole point of live scoring is to see how close you are to the current cutoff at any given point.

Thanks. You saved me some effort and money on trying to come up with something here. I thought people might like an easy way to see how their players were doing each week but that's good to know that would be useless. Thanks.

Most of the hardcore people will be able to eyeball their score. The best part of this contest is sweating Monday night relative to the cutline. To do that, you have to know the cutline. There are some smart dudes here so someone will come up with something. Once they do, you should be able to direct people to that.

 

[kyter1]

I am completely computer illiterate, but @kyter1 is trying to teach me. I'm just doing what he tells me to do. So far, I have created a league on MFL, and added all 348 possible roster spots to team #1. He also had me download this program called Spyder, but I don't know what that's for yet. I invited him to my fake league as a co-commissioner, and he is doing something on his end right now. I will gladly do all the grunt work, and if I can duplicate what @kyter1 did last year, we have a winner. It's not like the Calcomatic of year's past, because people will be waiting on me to provide updates, as far as I know. I'll keep you posted

I think we will be able to get this working. It might be into week 2 before it's good, but we are trying.

 

[Ignoratio Elenchi]

Paging Steeler and Iggy....

Thanks. Can you use the actual @ screename so we make sure to get the right people looking? Thanks.

I ran a full-featured live scoring website for years, following the original example set by OrganizedChaos, and later Steeler took over that honor from me... I think what we all learned is that it was a fun way to give back to the community but just isn't worth all the effort after a while when we weren't getting compensated (I was extremely grateful for the generous donations from fellow posters but it was always a net loss, financially speaking).

Agree with the others that (a) live scoring massively improves the experience of this contest, and (b) just knowing your own score isn't sufficient, it's really having live scoring of all the entries that makes it worth while.

The problem you face is that paying for live stats would be prohibitively expensive, and paying someone to scrape the stats live from some other website is probably too far into a gray area for your tastes. But the contest just isn't the same without it. Your best bet is to hope some enterprising poster(s) takes it upon themselves to build a live scoring app out of the goodness of their hearts, like several of us did in the past.

 

[Deamon]

Knowing your own score is OK, but without knowing where you stand, what good is it? The whole point of live scoring is to see how close you are to the current cutoff at any given point.

Thanks. You saved me some effort and money on trying to come up with something here. I thought people might like an easy way to see how their players were doing each week but that's good to know that would be useless. Thanks.

Ya I think it was a cool idea but respectively, I don't think that would really be useful.


Just get @TheWinz on the Payroll already and let him run this contest!! Haha, not even kidding.


The amount of time he puts into it and knowledge he has on it, and now he's learning an entire system so he can bring us awesome live scoring/cut lines/etc each week is pretty remarkable. Would be aesome.

 

[Dacomish]

I am completely computer illiterate, but @kyter1 is trying to teach me. I'm just doing what he tells me to do. So far, I have created a league on MFL, and added all 348 possible roster spots to team #1. He also had me download this program called Spyder, but I don't know what that's for yet. I invited him to my fake league as a co-commissioner, and he is doing something on his end right now. I will gladly do all the grunt work, and if I can duplicate what @kyter1 did last year, we have a winner. It's not like the Calcomatic of year's past, because people will be waiting on me to provide updates, as far as I know. I'll keep you posted

I think we will be able to get this working. It might be into week 2 before it's good, but we are trying.

This is super encouraging!! @TheWinz and @kyter1 if you need some donations to get it set up or keep it going let us know, I for sure will drop $10 your way!!

 

[TheWinz]

Sorry Folks

@kyter1 was trying to teach me how to run the scoring like he did last year, but not only am I too old, but my electronics are as well. I will still gladly do umpteen hours of grunt work if I can help out in any way, but to be the one who has to run it is not something I can do. I wish it was. Sorry again to all for teasing you.

 

[Joe Bryant]

Ya I think it was a cool idea but respectively, I don't think that would really be useful.

No worries and I totally get it. This idea is shelved of trying to get live scoring.

 

[Deamon]

Ya I think it was a cool idea but respectively, I don't think that would really be useful.

No worries and I totally get it. This idea is shelved of trying to get live scoring.

Sorry Folks

@kyter1 was trying to teach me how to run the scoring like he did last year, but not only am I too old, but my electronics are as well. I will still gladly do umpteen hours of grunt work if I can help out in any way, but to be the one who has to run it is not something I can do. I wish it was. Sorry again to all for teasing you.

Damn, thanks for trying @TheWinz . Seems there HAS to be some solution here, right? It makes the contest 100x more fun for everyone, there's obviously a demand for it, the logistics is the only hold up. Maybe the FBG team can think of something here (I know they have way bigger things going on and the month is probably non stop for them though).

 

[Ignoratio Elenchi]

Can @TheWinz or someone remind me was done for live scoring last year, and/or what exactly you were trying to get set up for this year? Was it like "huge MFL roster with all 350 players periodically copy/pasted into a Google Sheet" or something?

 

[kajaet]

Offshoot of the main thread.

I know folks would love live scoring but the cost to do that legitimately with our real stat provider is thousands of dollars. For a free contest like this, it's simply not possible for us financially.

But it seems like there should be a reasonable hack around to use one of the free league platforms to at least track your team with live scoring. Right?

Has anyone done this?

I envision creating a best ball league on Sleeper or somewhere and you enter your players once the contest locks. I don't know how big they'll allow leagues to be but you could even ask friends who have contest teams to join.

Then on Sundays, you could see how your team was doing live. You of course couldn't see how everyone else in the contest was doing. But at least you'd know for your team.

Does that make sense?

Anyone done anything like that?

I'd like to be able to have a super clear set of instructions for people to guide them on how to do this.

What do you think?

Can the main subscriber contest thread at least be pinned to the top?

 

[kyter1]

Can @TheWinz or someone remind me was done for live scoring last year, and/or what exactly you were trying to get set up for this year? Was it like "huge MFL roster with all 350 players periodically copy/pasted into a Google Sheet" or something?

Don't give up on @TheWinz yet, we still have a little life. Maybe @Ignoratio Elenchi you or someone can maybe help. I believe @TheWinz and I have everything set up and ready til the point we need to get the contest rosters. @Joe Bryant we need to get a file of all the entries and their full rosters with the contest ID of each player (it is there).

Then there is some additional work to get those rosters loaded and mapped to the files that are already connected to a make shift live scoring system. We will then need someone to run an excel file with a data connection that will refresh all the rosters with the live scoring (manual now as I couldn't get my window scheduler to run it last year). Once that is done there will need to be some testing as week 1 happens (did I map the Contest IDs and Live scoring IDs to the correct players in each) at the same time that someone could continue to built out the final files by running a Python script that will take the excel file and run a process to identify the top scorers in each position that will spit out an output file with a flag of players by entry scores to sum. Then I connected a 2nd excel file with a connection to that out put file that could just be refreshed with the Pivot Table that I uploaded to Google sheets and shared with everyone.

Once that is all done and the file is audited you should be good to take each step one at a time and provide the updated scores. Someone smarter than me can get their windows scheduler to run and the google sheets automated process to run they could set a schedule to refresh this whole process and not have to worry about anything. I think there is a limitation you'd only be able to run every 15 or 30 minutes.

Then between each week they need to identify the entries that didn't make the cut and either delete them from the master rosters file or create a flag to identify them and segment them so they don't count towards the weekly standing. Also, you need to flag or remove the staff entries so they don't mess up the ranking so you have the cut line exactly on.

I'm sure I missed some steps and details, but if someone understand the above they'd be able to complete this process. For me, I just don't have time to do all the work. I have Softball, Baseball, 1 rec soccer league and 1 traveling club soccer league that I have to get kids to on the weeknights and the club league puts me on the road or not available for updates most Sundays til the end of the year.

 

[rustycolts]

If I remember correctly I set up a league manually on my fbg page. I could at least get the scores right after each set of games. Helped figuring out your score without a calculator.

 

[Ignoratio Elenchi]

Can @TheWinz or someone remind me was done for live scoring last year, and/or what exactly you were trying to get set up for this year? Was it like "huge MFL roster with all 350 players periodically copy/pasted into a Google Sheet" or something?

Don't give up on @TheWinz yet, we still have a little life. Maybe @Ignoratio Elenchi you or someone can maybe help. I believe @TheWinz and I have everything set up and ready til the point we need to get the contest rosters. @Joe Bryant we need to get a file of all the entries and their full rosters with the contest ID of each player (it is there).

Then there is some additional work to get those rosters loaded and mapped to the files that are already connected to a make shift live scoring system. We will then need someone to run an excel file with a data connection that will refresh all the rosters with the live scoring (manual now as I couldn't get my window scheduler to run it last year). Once that is done there will need to be some testing as week 1 happens (did I map the Contest IDs and Live scoring IDs to the correct players in each) at the same time that someone could continue to built out the final files by running a Python script that will take the excel file and run a process to identify the top scorers in each position that will spit out an output file with a flag of players by entry scores to sum. Then I connected a 2nd excel file with a connection to that out put file that could just be refreshed with the Pivot Table that I uploaded to Google sheets and shared with everyone.

Once that is all done and the file is audited you should be good to take each step one at a time and provide the updated scores. Someone smarter than me can get their windows scheduler to run and the google sheets automated process to run they could set a schedule to refresh this whole process and not have to worry about anything. I think there is a limitation you'd only be able to run every 15 or 30 minutes.

Then between each week they need to identify the entries that didn't make the cut and either delete them from the master rosters file or create a flag to identify them and segment them so they don't count towards the weekly standing. Also, you need to flag or remove the staff entries so they don't mess up the ranking so you have the cut line exactly on.

I'm sure I missed some steps and details, but if someone understand the above they'd be able to complete this process. For me, I just don't have time to do all the work. I have Softball, Baseball, 1 rec soccer league and 1 traveling club soccer league that I have to get kids to on the weeknights and the club league puts me on the road or not available for updates most Sundays til the end of the year.

The hardest and most critical step is getting the live stats to calculate the scores, but it sounds like that part is not the roadblock? Is the issue just the subsequent process of tabulating and publishing the entry scores? If you have a working scraper that collects and parses the live game stats into a format that can be translated into fantasy scores, there are better ways to do the rest than moving data in and out of Excel files, maybe we can help build a smoother process for that.

 

[Spin]

@Ignoratio Elenchi had a beautiful site for a few years. I honestly stopped bothering with the subscription/contest when he stopped.

 

[Ignoratio Elenchi]

@Ignoratio Elenchi had a beautiful site for a few years. I honestly stopped bothering with the subscription/contest when he stopped.

That makes me happy and sad haha. I appreciate the compliment and wish I could've kept it going, but for a variety of reasons I had to move on from it. I don't really have the time to rebuild something like that again but I'd love to help figure out a way to get something up and running for the season, because the contest isn't the same without it. Depending on what Winz and kyter already have in place, it sounds like it might be feasible to spin something up, and I'm happy to help if I can, even though I can't commit to actually building or running it myself.

Edit: Nostalgia, courtesy of the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20151224171616/http://o.ffense.com/fbg35k/final250.php I'd even forgotten some of the stuff that was there. The "similar teams" was one of my favorites.

 

[Dacomish]

Last year, MFL allowed you to create a free bestball league a few weeks after the season started. A lot of us created one-team leagues to track our own team's live scoring. Don't know if they'll allow that again or not.

Thanks. Can you elaborate on that? How you joined? Did someone set up scoring? How many teams? Anything else?

Used this link: http://home.myfantasyleague.com/free-draft-only-league/ (Looks like it should work this year, too)

Set up the scoring to match that of the contest and manually set the roster for your team. As I recall, it was tricky setting up kicker scoring, but eventually worked it out. Every time I logged in, it warned that the league setup wasn't complete because only one team had players, but that was easy to ignore. I didn't bother exploring to see if the software would allow the same player on more than one team, so I don't know if a group could put their teams on or if everyone needs to set up their own one team league. At least you have automatic calculation of your team's score.

If we can't get a spreadsheet live scoring like last year, this is a great fallback option for you to see at least how your team is doing without having to calculate things yourself. I set my FBG Contest entry team up in about an hour yesterday as I already committed to the $100 Bonus deadline.

I had no issues but just a note though - don't forget to set up decimal scoring in the main scoring settings page otherwise when you test your scoring settings it will be kinda screwy!

 

[Puppies]

I never knew anyone set up a mechanism set up for live scoring in past years. I would love to see anything that resembles that, even if it means only your own score, and not the scores of other teams.

Every year I use a scoring spreadsheet that has my roster and all the formulas for all the scoring, so that when I enter in player's stats, the points are tabulated automatically. It's all manual entry, But the advantage is I just copy the same spreadsheet every year and enter current year's roster. It just takes a little while to do the data entry, and the main headache is finding box scores from each game and looking up and entering the stats of your individual players. A live scoring system, even if not polished, would still be a great time saver.

 

[Deamon]

I never knew anyone set up a mechanism set up for live scoring in past years. I would love to see anything that resembles that, even if it means only your own score, and not the scores of other teams.

I'm sure there's sites out there that you can plug in players and have it spit out their fantasy score. But this is pretty useless in this contest to only know your own score. So you're at 250 points.... who cares, you could still be below the cut line!

 

[Puppies]

I never knew anyone set up a mechanism set up for live scoring in past years. I would love to see anything that resembles that, even if it means only your own score, and not the scores of other teams.

I'm sure there's sites out there that you can plug in players and have it spit out their fantasy score. But this is pretty useless in this contest to only know your own score. So you're at 250 points.... who cares, you could still be below the cut line!

I fully realize that. But my point is live scoring would eliminate the effort I have to expend every week looking up stats of all my players.
Even if I can't get the baked potato until tomorrow, no reason not to eat the steak today...

 

[Deamon]

I fully realize that. But my point is live scoring would eliminate the effort I have to expend every week looking up stats of all my players.
Even if I can't get the baked potato until tomorrow, no reason not to eat the steak today...

Ya I guess that's fair... hopefully something comes soon that that shows everyone's scores! Last few years have been great.

 

[BassNBrew]

I never knew anyone set up a mechanism set up for live scoring in past years. I would love to see anything that resembles that, even if it means only your own score, and not the scores of other teams.

I'm sure there's sites out there that you can plug in players and have it spit out their fantasy score. But this is pretty useless in this contest to only know your own score. So you're at 250 points.... who cares, you could still be below the cut line!

I fully realize that. But my point is live scoring would eliminate the effort I have to expend every week looking up stats of all my players.
Even if I can't get the baked potato until tomorrow, no reason not to eat the steak today...

Except it's kind of like getting the baked potato today and waiting two days for the steak to arrive.

 

[Deamon]

Even if I can't get the baked potato until tomorrow, no reason not to eat the steak today...

Except it's kind of like getting the baked potato today and waiting two days for the steak to arrive.

This should lead us to a nice bump in this thread

 

[QuizGuy66]

Alas the Quizomatic only has capacity to handle 1 entry. Always intend to getting around to cloning myself but I end up running out of time.

Hope the genuine efforts of those on the board are able to work something out and appreciate the encouragement from @Joe Bryant for folks to give it a shot to see what's possible if anything. Fun to track live but I am old school and remember waiting for The Turk to arrive in the night each late Monday like Christmas in reverse

-QG

 

[Puppies]

Well, in the meantime, I dressed up my scoring spreadsheet a little, so now it automatically does a 2-step process to save me a little time tabulating results. First it grabs my highest 2 scores for RB and WR, and the highest score for TE, then dumps all the remaining scores from those three positions into a separte "flex" bucket, and finally grabs the two highest scores in the bucket and plugs them in as my FLEX scores for the week, I might have spent as much time setting it up as I will save from doing it, but it will be more fun.

Of course, if someone comes up with some sort of live scoring, the time I just spent is wasted.

 

[Stray Doug]

Sorry if I'm underthinking this or repeating what others have said, but it seems like there's a pretty straightforward code-free way for the community to do "almost-live" standings ourselves... I'm going to spell out all the steps here, but it really doesn't seem like that much work:

1. Rosters info: Add roster data for all entries on a Google Sheet. This was missing link last year, sounds like FBG providing it this year (trivial to copy their CSV to GDocs).
2. Create Live Data Source: Create free league on MFL, Sleeper, or whatever where you can create teams that cover the universe of contest options and where you can look at real-time scores. Sounds like @TheWinz and/or @kyter1 have done this. I looked into this last year as well, but didn't pursue as I didn't have the data from step 1.
3. Tabular-Format Link to Live Data Source: Link an Excel file to pull in the live scoring data from the Data Source. May need to update the link each week depending on source site URL structure. I don't know how to do this in GDocs and not sure I want to spend time to write a scraper in python, etc. but Excel should be able to do this pretty much pain-free. If we could pull it directly into GDocs that would eliminate a step, but that's just gravy and not a necessary problem to solve.
4. Periodically manually export/publish live scoring data to GDoc: In Excel doc, hit the refresh button to get latest results (just don't go crazy with it so that you're hitting some sort of rate limiter, etc.). Take the updated scores and copy/paste into the "live results" tab of Google Sheet. We can protect that sheet that only a few select members have access to view/edit that data, but which allows several of us to edit so that one person isn't solely responsible for doing all the manual updates of live scoring. But it's literally just click refresh in Excel, and then copy/paste from Excel over the existing values in Google Sheet. We could train a monkey to it if we want to chip in for it, maybe livestream his efforts and turn a profit. But I digress.
5. Generate live standings: Create a publicly-viewable tab that displays live scores / turk line. This work is a fairly modest one-time effort to set up. The challenge is really getting the two data sources set up in steps 1-4 above. And depending on the live source data available, we may be able to include things like player minutes remaining or projected scores as well. The live standings would essentially be "as of the last time someone executed step 4" due to the need for that manual step, so maybe "almost-live" standings is a more accuate term, but between several of this we could easily update this multiple times during the course of games.

Edit: I just read @kyter1's post above in more detail again and it sounds pretty similar, except that in my approach once the scores are scraped into Excel, I'm proposing just copy/pasting raw live scores to GDocs and doing my roster calculations there (rather than doing more of the roster calculation work in Excel)... and I'm not sure but this seems like it would maybe more easily facilitate multiple people collaborating to be able to post the live scoring updates and be less likely to break (if someone accidentally borks their local spreadsheet, etc.)? I don't have a strong opinion on it, could do it either way. The other question is whether we run into any performance issues using one solution vs. the other, but I don't think we're dealing with such large datasets that this should hopefully be a concern either way.

And yes, there would also be a small amount of weekly work to ensure the next week's results tab is limited to remaining entries. I could handle that.

I likewise have less time than in the olden days (one reason I've shifted my fantasy focus to best ball formats, it's just draft season but then I'm mostly done) due to career and kids (I'm team admin for son's rec soccer league, coach for daughter's baseball team, and they have mutliple other activities, BD parties, family outings, etc.)... so I'm not much available for the manual "live posting of scores during games" (step 4), but could otherwise help get things up and running for others to just execute that one manual step, and then be on-call to troubleshoot as needed.

 

[kyter1]

Sorry if I'm underthinking this or repeating what others have said, but it seems like there's a pretty straightforward code-free way for the community to do "almost-live" standings ourselves... I'm going to spell out all the steps here, but it really doesn't seem like that much work:

1. Rosters info: Add roster data for all entries on a Google Sheet. This was missing link last year, sounds like FBG providing it this year (trivial to copy their CSV to GDocs).
2. Create Live Data Source: Create free league on MFL, Sleeper, or whatever where you can create teams that cover the universe of contest options and where you can look at real-time scores. Sounds like @TheWinz and/or @kyter1 have done this. I looked into this last year as well, but didn't pursue as I didn't have the data from step 1.
3. Tabular-Format Link to Live Data Source: Link an Excel file to pull in the live scoring data from the Data Source. May need to update the link each week depending on source site URL structure. I don't know how to do this in GDocs and not sure I want to spend time to write a scraper in python, etc. but Excel should be able to do this pretty much pain-free. If we could pull it directly into GDocs that would eliminate a step, but that's just gravy and not a necessary problem to solve.
4. Periodically manually export/publish live scoring data to GDoc: In Excel doc, hit the refresh button to get latest results (just don't go crazy with it so that you're hitting some sort of rate limiter, etc.). Take the updated scores and copy/paste into the "live results" tab of Google Sheet. We can protect that sheet that only a few select members have access to view/edit that data, but which allows several of us to edit so that one person isn't solely responsible for doing all the manual updates of live scoring. But it's literally just click refresh in Excel, and then copy/paste from Excel over the existing values in Google Sheet. We could train a monkey to it if we want to chip in for it, maybe livestream his efforts and turn a profit. But I digress.
5. Generate live standings: Create a publicly-viewable tab that displays live scores / turk line. This work is a fairly modest one-time effort to set up. The challenge is really getting the two data sources set up in steps 1-4 above. And depending on the live source data available, we may be able to include things like player minutes remaining or projected scores as well. The live standings would essentially be "as of the last time someone executed step 4" due to the need for that manual step, so maybe "almost-live" standings is a more accuate term, but between several of this we could easily update this multiple times during the course of games.

Edit: I just read @kyter1's post above in more detail again and it sounds pretty similar, except that in my approach once the scores are scraped into Excel, I'm just copy/pasting to GDocs rather than doing more of the calculation work in Excel... and I'm not sure but this seems like it would maybe more easily facilitate multiple people collaborating to be able to post the live scoring updates?

And yes, there would also be a small amount of weekly work to ensure the next week's results tab is limited to remaining entries. I could handle that.

I likewise have less time than in the olden days (one reason I've shifted my fantasy focus to best ball formats, it's just draft season but then I'm mostly done) due to career and kids (I'm team admin for son's rec soccer league, coach for daughter's baseball team, and they have mutliple other activities, BD parties, family outings, etc.)... so I'm not much available for the manual "live posting of scores during games" (step 4), but could otherwise help get things up and running for others to just execute that one manual step, and then be on-call to troubleshoot as needed.

I'm going to try to get my last years sheet up and running once I can get all the entry rosters (I tried the querier and couldn't initially get what I needed). I just won't be available throughout the day every Sunday to update, but hoping I can at least do it at the end of the night.

I think the one very difficult piece to your proposal , at least for me when I initially started it last year, was not getting the scoring attached to the players and teams (What you mentioned is exactly what I do), but creating the process to identify the starters for each team. The total points for an entry is not helpful because there are 11K plus entries and for excel to identify the starters you'd need a machine that can handle that processing (if excel could even do it), as you're looping through 10K+ teams and 200K+ players with some kind of 'sum product' formula.

 

[Stray Doug]

Sorry if I'm underthinking this or repeating what others have said, but it seems like there's a pretty straightforward code-free way for the community to do "almost-live" standings ourselves... I'm going to spell out all the steps here, but it really doesn't seem like that much work:

1. Rosters info: Add roster data for all entries on a Google Sheet. This was missing link last year, sounds like FBG providing it this year (trivial to copy their CSV to GDocs).
2. Create Live Data Source: Create free league on MFL, Sleeper, or whatever where you can create teams that cover the universe of contest options and where you can look at real-time scores. Sounds like @TheWinz and/or @kyter1 have done this. I looked into this last year as well, but didn't pursue as I didn't have the data from step 1.
3. Tabular-Format Link to Live Data Source: Link an Excel file to pull in the live scoring data from the Data Source. May need to update the link each week depending on source site URL structure. I don't know how to do this in GDocs and not sure I want to spend time to write a scraper in python, etc. but Excel should be able to do this pretty much pain-free. If we could pull it directly into GDocs that would eliminate a step, but that's just gravy and not a necessary problem to solve.
4. Periodically manually export/publish live scoring data to GDoc: In Excel doc, hit the refresh button to get latest results (just don't go crazy with it so that you're hitting some sort of rate limiter, etc.). Take the updated scores and copy/paste into the "live results" tab of Google Sheet. We can protect that sheet that only a few select members have access to view/edit that data, but which allows several of us to edit so that one person isn't solely responsible for doing all the manual updates of live scoring. But it's literally just click refresh in Excel, and then copy/paste from Excel over the existing values in Google Sheet. We could train a monkey to it if we want to chip in for it, maybe livestream his efforts and turn a profit. But I digress.
5. Generate live standings: Create a publicly-viewable tab that displays live scores / turk line. This work is a fairly modest one-time effort to set up. The challenge is really getting the two data sources set up in steps 1-4 above. And depending on the live source data available, we may be able to include things like player minutes remaining or projected scores as well. The live standings would essentially be "as of the last time someone executed step 4" due to the need for that manual step, so maybe "almost-live" standings is a more accuate term, but between several of this we could easily update this multiple times during the course of games.

Edit: I just read @kyter1's post above in more detail again and it sounds pretty similar, except that in my approach once the scores are scraped into Excel, I'm just copy/pasting to GDocs rather than doing more of the calculation work in Excel... and I'm not sure but this seems like it would maybe more easily facilitate multiple people collaborating to be able to post the live scoring updates?

And yes, there would also be a small amount of weekly work to ensure the next week's results tab is limited to remaining entries. I could handle that.

I likewise have less time than in the olden days (one reason I've shifted my fantasy focus to best ball formats, it's just draft season but then I'm mostly done) due to career and kids (I'm team admin for son's rec soccer league, coach for daughter's baseball team, and they have mutliple other activities, BD parties, family outings, etc.)... so I'm not much available for the manual "live posting of scores during games" (step 4), but could otherwise help get things up and running for others to just execute that one manual step, and then be on-call to troubleshoot as needed.

I'm going to try to get my last years sheet up and running once I can get all the entry rosters (I tried the querier and couldn't initially get what I needed). I just won't be available throughout the day every Sunday to update, but hoping I can at least do it at the end of the night.

I think the one very difficult piece to your proposal , at least for me when I initially started it last year, was not getting the scoring attached to the players and teams (What you mentioned is exactly what I do), but creating the process to identify the starters for each team. The total points for an entry is not helpful because there are 11K plus entries and for excel to identify the starters you'd need a machine that can handle that processing (if excel could even do it), as you're looping through 10K+ teams and 200K+ players with some kind of 'sum product' formula.

I think I can generate the rosters with scores pretty easily with index/match (much more performant than VLOOKUP), and then use the LARGE function to peel off each roster's top scorers at each position and flex to calculate their score... rather than some kind of sum product or array formula. Not sure about performace though... maybe I'll throw something together using dummy data and see how it goes.

 

[kyter1]

I have a file ready to test and I mean TEST the 'Scoring Sheet', but I won't be back online until later tonight. Probably about 9pm CST.

 

[kyter1]

I have added the link to the scoring sheet to the pinned contest thread.

 

[Joe Bryant]

What do you folks think of what we were able to come up with?

 

[TheWinz]

What do you folks think of what we were able to come up with?

100% acceptable! If we can see the cutline after each set of games, that is all we need. I assume it's free?

 

[Ignoratio Elenchi]

What do you folks think of what we were able to come up with?

Good enough for me. Knowing the cut line going into MNF is like 95% of the value of live scoring.

 

[Joe Bryant]

I assume it's free?

I wish. It's part of the stat package we pay about $8,000 per year for.

 

[TheWinz]

I assume it's free?

I wish. It's part of the stat package we pay about $8,000 per year for.

8K per year? With 12,254 entrants, I would gladly pay a few extra bucks, which would fully cover the $8K, and more. Raise your minimum subscription to $50!

 

[Joe Bryant]

8K per year? With 12,254 entrants, I would gladly pay a few extra bucks, which would fully cover the $8K, and more. Raise your minimum subscription to $50!

All good. No worries, GB.

 

[Deamon]

I assume it's free?

I wish. It's part of the stat package we pay about $8,000 per year for.

Hopefully part of your current stat package you already would have paid for regardless.

 

[TheWinz]

8K per year? With 12,254 entrants, I would gladly pay a few extra bucks, which would fully cover the $8K, and more. Raise your minimum subscription to $50!

All good. No worries, GB.

What? I paid $47.88 as the minimum to play in the yearly contest. No one, and I mean no one, that would pay $47.88, would not pay $50 to play in your awesome contest. 12254 x $2.12 = nearly $26K. Do you realize your contest is the most fun some oldtimer's still have? I realize you are adding tons of content, and I appreciate it, but for $50, all I want is your contest and the forums to chat.

 

[joey]

8K per year? With 12,254 entrants, I would gladly pay a few extra bucks, which would fully cover the $8K, and more. Raise your minimum subscription to $50!

All good. No worries, GB.

What? I paid $47.88 as the minimum to play in the yearly contest. No one, and I mean no one, that would pay $47.88, would not pay $50 to play in your awesome contest. 12254 x $2.12 = nearly $26K. Do you realize your contest is the most fun some oldtimer's still have? I realize you are adding tons of content, and I appreciate it, but for $50, all I want is your contest and the forums to chat.

Check the FBGs Plans thread before you start suggesting even the smallest increase in fbg rates.
it ain’t me who complained. I happily paid for the Elite plan since I use the draft dominator, 5 second primer, rankings, etc etc. but others don’t all agree with me.