An update on the “technical” state of the subreddit

I’d like to provide a quick update on the “technical” state of the subreddt, since it’s been neglected for a while and it’s my fault.

First of, what do I consider the technical state? It’s anything to do with

– CSS (the subreddit’s style)
– Sidebar automation
– User flairs

etc.

As to why I consider it my fault these have been neglected; I’m the only one in the mod team with any knowledge about CSS and programming (or at least I hope I have that knowledge as web development is my job). The last year or two though I’ve been increasingly busy with work, life, and other projects to the point I kept forgetting about this subreddit and my responsibilities regarding it. The other mods have tried their best bringing in new people to do my job for me, but despite their best efforts none of these worked out, all for different reasons.

On to the actual update.

### The sub’s style

As you’ll have noticed, we’ve gone through a few header images (of various quality) these last weeks, and we’ve settled for this one made by /u/der_vierte. I hope none of the players shown get traded so we can keep the header the same for the foreseeable future 😅

Additionally I’ve fixed some annoyances of mine in the header and sidebar areas. Gone is the ugly blue menu bar I never liked, and it’s been replaced by simple white menu. The search bar had some issues when you clicked on the search input so I fixed those as well. I thought about changing the button colours to orange to better match the header, but I think the current dark blue contrasts the orange nicely.

For now I think the sub looks fine, however if you see anything odd or have suggestions, don’t hesitate to let me (or us) know.

### Sidebar automation

Some of you may remember a time the sidebar actually showed relevant and updated information. This was done using nba.com’s data API through a bot I wrote myself years ago. Two things have impacted the automated sidebar updating;

1. nba.com’s API has seemingly been discontinued, and I’m not quite sure when this happened
2. Reddit’s recent changes to API access

The first problem seems to be fixable with [this](https://github.com/swar/nba_api) package I found, and although I haven’t looked into the details of the recent API changes, we should be good as it essentially takes one request per hour to update the sidebar.

I plan on diving into fixing the problem this week and hopefully I can get it working before our first game of the season.

### User flairs

I don’t know when I last updated our flairs, but the fact we’ve still got one for Kyle Singler who’s been out of the league since 2018 should tell you enough. I’ll be honest, I hate doing user flairs for multiple reasons which is exactly why I’ve put off doing them for so long. I can’t guarantee I’ll get to it this week, but I hope I can update, or completely refresh, them soon enough.

—

That’s it for now, if you’ve got any suggestions or notice any other issues regarding these subjects, please let me know.