Post-Match Thread Creator now supports Overwatch!

Last week I posted about how PMTC had now become a web application that could be used to create post-match threads for both League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. In that post I mentioned that one of the features I wanted to add to the web application was Overwatch support. Funnily enough a few days after posting this we had about five new people join our Slack who wanted to create post-match threads for Overwatch, so it was a great opportunity to ask what they needed and where I could actually scrape the information. They pointed me towards a website called https://www.over.gg/, and so the programming started...

New features

I added Overwatch support to the web application, which is hosted on Heroku and can be found here https://pmtc.herokuapp.com/overwatch. If you want to use it, then make sure that the game you want to create a thread for actually has stats (this one doesn't for example and will give an internal server error, while this one does and will work fine).

I implemented the form validation and execution of the Python script to generate the thread using WTForms and Flask. The loading spinner is simple CSS that shows when the Create button is clicked (with valid input) using jQuery. The copy to clipboard button was created using Clipboard.js, with the rest of the page made pretty using Bootstrap. Finally, the actual Python script that scrapes the given URL (pmtc_overwatch.py) was implemented using BeautifulSoup and requests. I did this by creating a Match class that includes information about each map played in a series (not sure what this is all called in Overwatch, since I don't actually play it myself). This allows for an easy way to keep track of the map's winner, the scores etc. and to actually print the scoreboard.

Technology stack

• Python using Flask, Flask-WTF, requests, BeautifulSoup, and gunicorn.
• jQuery
• Clipboard.js

Roadmap

Next features are planned to be

• Output the entire thread and not just the scoreboard
• Button to directly post thread to Reddit instead of copy and pasting

When this has been implemented I will probably focus on making the web application more visually appealing.

How to contribute?

If you want to contribute to this project you can fork my repository and create a pull request! Anything you can add to the project is valuable to me, be it bug reports, features, graphics or whatever, please don't hesitate!

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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