lNomNom was asking about a Discord server for Cheapies
Wakrak has pointed out that OzBargin has one, but not us.
So here we are - The UN-official Cheapies Discord server
A good place for
- chats and banter
- posting things that might not warrant a deal of their own
- R18 content or other things banned on cheapies (none of this spam, marketing, and sock-puppeting though)
Feel free to join, offer suggestions and feedback, or request to be an admin or moderator and help make it a good resource
Yeah, makes it handy to have things searchable within discord. If theres discussion about a product you can search and it will show both the discussion but also some past deals (if there was one)
Theres also another bot I was recommended by lNomNoml thats on my to-do list called FreeStuffBot for pulling games into there
Yeah, I use it on my own Discord server as well, almost the same setup as you. MonitorRSS had issues a couple of months ago, where it would delay the messages into Discord, so I had some other Discord bot setup that runs on Heroku (free) as a backup. But these days, MonitorRSS is working nicely.
Unrelated, but the one thing I hate about Discord on Windows is that the notifications don't stay in the Action Center. So if you are away from your desk and you get a notification now, you won't know about it, because there's no history of it in Action Center. It's a well-known issue and lots of people complained about it.
For this, I have 2 workarounds. There's an app called Notification Logger from the MS Store, it keeps track of notifications for all your apps and I find this super useful. The other workaround is probably better, which is to use the WebCord unofficial Discord app, which you can get for free on Github. This lets you see the notifications saved in Action Center, so you can always check what you missed.
I personally have discord notifications muted as I don't want them lol. Good to know that by turning off notifications, I'm not actually missing out on anything hahaha. I tend to just log in and check stuff whenever I have time to sit down and look through it.
Any other bots or addons you can think of for the server that would benefit other cheapies?
@Tmurder91: Probably bots that check for free android/iOS apps or a free app from giveawayoftheday.com or something like that.
Maybe a bot that checks for freebies from epic games store and other steam giveaways? But to be honest, there are a lot of Discord servers that do a good job at monitoring those and I'm subscribed to them already. Might not be a good idea to have those in a Cheapies discord.
Oh and there are also bots that check for deals from Amazon, Ebay, etc. But again, there are already other discord servers that do that.
There used to be a site called PriceHistory and it was a great alternative to Pricespy. It would show you the price history of items that aren't listed on Pricespy, e.g. items sold in Briscoes or whatever. It was a great site, but it got taken down for some reason. I'm thinking of maybe creating a bot that tracks the price histories, just like those extensions for Amazon (camelcamel) and Aliexpress (Alitools or whatever it's called). But these days I'm too busy, but would be great to see someone build something that tracks the history. A user could just invoke the bot to get the price (with charts if possible), like this:
/PriceBot Samsung Galaxy S22
@NovaAlpha: Good idea, I'll look at adding the mobile apps, and giveawayoftheday.com bots
No point in the amazon ones etc as people already do a good job of curating them on here and ozbargin
I figured the bots in the discord server can sit in their own category and people can just mute if they don't need it. For those that don't have their own server or know how to add, or want the convenience it can be helpful for them.
Have a look at PriceMe as it shows the type of information you're talking about. History and information like PriceSpy, but good for Briscoes etc
Example is the Breville Infuser BES840BSS
$399 back in Feb but $699+ now
@Tmurder91: Yeah, I know about PriceMe and have used it before. Price History was a lot better than PriceMe in a lot of ways though. It had an insane amount of app catalogs that PriceMe and PriceSpy don't.
I wish the author would just release his code as open source so I could rebuild it. I'm not an app or web developer, but I'm good at reversing codes and modifying them.
@NovaAlpha: Ah cool, wasn’t sure you knew it had Briscoes on there from your earlier comments. Does a good enough job for the few things it’s actually worth buying from Briscoes lol.
Have you tried reaching out to thrm already asking?
@Tmurder91: Yeah it had Briscoes on there, not that I actually care about buying stuff from Briscoes (they're rip off most of the time). I just mentioned Briscoes as an example.
There are certain stores that aren't on PriceSpy or PriceMe. PriceSpy has a history for their prices and that's great, but the stuff on there are mostly tech based. PriceMe on the other hand has stuff that's not necessarily tech based, but they don't have a history for the prices, which makes it hard to compare whether something on sale now is actually cheap or not. Then of course, you have Cheapies and you get to see all the previous deals (and their prices), but it doesn't contain everything of course.
PriceHistory was awesome, because from memory I believe it catalogs all the prices from a bunch of websites on a daily basis. So you get the full history of everything on there. On the page somewhere at the bottom left, it shows that there's about 180,000 products checked daily. He's using some sort of web crawler bot to scrape all that stuff and cataloguing them, as well as retaining the prices in a database of some sort. I have a rough idea how to build something like that, but would rather just get his source code and modify them lol.
Some old discussions about PriceHistory found here:
https://www.cheapies.nz/node/25203
And here's a snapshot of the site back then:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190124181651/https://pricehist…
The guy also is the same developer for this site:
https://thedigitalstore.co.nz/contact-us/
Yeah good idea, I might just contact him. Never occurred to me I could just ask for source code lol.
@NovaAlpha: priceMe does track price trends but it's not as a good as PriceSpys. Or are you referring to something else?
E.g., https://www.priceme.co.nz/Bosch-WAN24121AU/p-910917907.aspx#…
https://files.cheapies.nz/upload/9216/3729/cc.png
@Wakrak: HMM…..I swear that wasn't there before the last time I used it, although admittedly the last time I used it was quite a long time ago lol. But yeah it's still not quite what I was looking for. I'm looking for something that CamelCamel or Keepa (https://keepa.com) provides. PriceHistory didn't have that level of granularity with the price charts etc, but it did have an insane number of items in its catalog and showed a lot of data for the different years & months.
I see that you're using MonitorRSS for the Cheapies feeds, nice.