Hello everyone,
We had a big drop today from CJ, and notifications went mostly fine, albeit with a 4-minute delay (that’s why there was no tweet about Chaos Wigs; they sold out in under 5 minutes). I’ll try to reduce that delay before the next big drop happens.
The really good news is that this time, we got official announcements and heads-up from the @SmartDollLand account. If my updates are no longer needed for most new releases and restocks, that’s an even better deal for those who just want to be notified.
Since the last dev update a week ago, there have been numerous attempts to confuse the bot. Only a few were marginally successful. At the peak, fake updates and products were pushed to the Smart Doll store every 5 minutes, and the bot was able to deal with that flood of nonsense almost flawlessly. I think it actually confused real people more.
Even if something slips, there are measures in place that allow the bot to throttle the notifications as necessary, so you generally don’t get spammed with them.
I’ve also added “sold out” notifications that follow up on restock updates. They are a nice touch, but I wonder if that is helpful. Sure, knowing how quickly something sold out may be useful, but it’s optional. It can also be easily faked because there is no good way to say if something sold out or if the CJ team pretends it did, just to “restock” again 15 minutes later.
I’ll probably stop tweeting when something is sold out. Maybe I’ll build a page where all recent restocks and releases are listed, and this info could be included there instead (for example, if you want to see how long, on average, item X stays available after it drops; is it days, hours, or minutes?)