Fantasy football, week by week

Discord reports, slash commands, and a live dashboard

What this is

A bot that watches your ESPN fantasy league.

It talks in Discord. It also keeps a website of the season.

You do not start it on game day. It is already running.

The container stays up all season. League members only need Discord and a browser. No one has to remember a schedule or log into ESPN to see the same numbers.

Three things you get

Channel

Scheduled posts

Scoreboards, matchups, standings, and trophies land in Discord on their own.

Anytime

Slash commands

Type a command in the server when you want the current week, not the last post.

The season

Web dashboard

Charts, records, and season awards from every week the bot has saved.

These are the only three surfaces. Scheduled posts use a webhook. Slash commands need the bot invited to the server. The dashboard is a web page, local or on a public URL.

What shows up in Discord

Each post is one report. Typical reports:

• Current scores and projections
• Close games
• Final scores and weekly trophies
• Power rankings and standings
• Thursday matchups
• Waiver moves
• Sunday injury watch

The tone matches ESPN’s own reports: names, scores, ranks. Private leagues need ESPN cookies before waiver moves appear. Public leagues skip that report.

A week in the league channel

Mon

morning

Scores

evening

Close games

Tue

morning

Finals, trophies

evening

Power rankings

Wed

morning

Standings

morning

Waivers

Thu

evening

This week’s matchups

Fri

morning

Scores

Sun

morning

Injuries

afternoon / night

Live scores

Tuesday morning also saves the finished week to the dashboard database. That is why the website trails live Discord by a day: it waits until Monday night football is over.

Ask the bot yourself

Type / in Discord. Pick a command:

• /matchups this week’s games
• /scoreboard live scores
• /standings the table
• /power-rankings who is hot
• /monitor injuries
• /trophies this week’s awards
• /waiver-report adds and drops
• /dashboard link to the site

Commands read ESPN live. The dashboard reads the saved season. If they disagree on year, the dashboard is behind until the next Tuesday snapshot, or until someone backfills a prior season.

The dashboard

A dark page of the whole season, opening on what just happened.

• Lands on This week: results, movers, and everyone against their own average
• Scope League and Records: regular season, playoffs, or the full season
• Pick a season if more than one is saved
• Click a team anywhere. You land on its own page, every chart scoped to it

The page refreshes itself about every 30 seconds.

Empty dashboard means no snapshot has run yet. A completed past season can be loaded with the backfill script. League members never need that command; it is a maintainer step.

Four destinations

This week

Scores, movers, and week bests. The front page, no configuring required.

League

A readable standings board, plus the one chart with ten lines: the race.

Teams

One page per team: game log, range vs the league, and every head-to-head.

Records

The record book. Every row is a click into the team it belongs to.

Five tabs became four. Trend’s rank view moved into League as “the race.” Spread and head to head moved into Teams, scoped to one team instead of ten at once. Trophies became Records, a ledger instead of a card grid.

The record book

Twelve awards, not a single champion graphic.

Highest score. Closest game. Biggest blowout. Luckiest win.

Click a row. You land on that team’s page, ready to dig further.

This is the feature people remember. The old version showed the award and stopped. Now every row is a way into a team’s own page.

Before and after: the trend chart

Before

After

Ten lines fighting for the same axis versus a page that opens on the one thing everyone actually wants Sunday night: what just happened.

Before and after: every pairing at once

Before

After

The 10x10 heatmap asked the reader to hold two axes of team names in their head, and broke under about 900px. One team’s page carries the same information as a nine-row strip.

Before and after: standings and trophies

Before

After

Standings becomes a board with a sparkline per row and a real playoff cutoff, plus “the race” underneath – the one chart out of five that survived, because it’s the one where ten lines earn their keep.

Before and after: the card grid

Before

After

A card grid said “here are twelve facts.” A ledger with the value large and right-aligned lets the column of numbers be scanned, and the arrow promises the click.

Where it started

The first working version of this dashboard: light theme, a sidebar, four stat boxes, four tabs. Same underlying data as every version since. Worth keeping around as a reminder of how far a Shiny Express app can travel without ever touching the numbers underneath it.

What you do

Nothing on Sunday morning.

Open Discord for the latest post, or type a slash command.

Open the dashboard when you want the season, not the week.

If someone asks how to log in: they don’t. Discord is the league server they already belong to. The dashboard is https://fantasy.ethandbard.com/, or localhost:8000 on the host machine.

Where to read more

The longer write-up is the same site at two URLs:

• https://fantasy-docs.ethandbard.com/ — the URL to share
• https://ethandbard.github.io/fantasy-football/ — GitHub Pages

The dashboard is separate. That lives at https://fantasy.ethandbard.com/.

The custom hostname is the one to send people. GitHub Pages is the origin copy. The live league dashboard is a different host: the Shiny app behind Cloudflare Tunnel, not these static files.

How that write-up updates

Push to main. A GitHub Action renders docs/ onto the gh-pages branch.

GitHub Pages serves one URL from that branch.

A Cloudflare Worker fetches that copy for the custom hostname.

A content change needs a push. Redeploy the Worker only if proxy-worker.js changes.

The Action is .github/workflows/quarto-publish.yml. Wrangler deploy from docs/ is only for the Worker script. The two docs URLs stay in sync because the Worker does not store its own HTML.

Credits

Built on gamedaybot by Dean Carlson.

Source: ethandbard/fantasy-football

Overview: fantasy-docs.ethandbard.com