A couple of gremlins on the weekend

We experienced a few gremlins over the weekend. There is nothing unusual about this – with a site as complex as ours we often run into bookmakers blocking scrapers and tools doing unusual things. However these were exacerbated this weekend due to an unlucky mixture of (1) half term (planned) holidays and (2) emergency personal leave required by some of the team. With a small team like we have at bookiebashing we didn’t have the necessary capacity to get everything back up and running in as timely manner as we would have wanted. Issues included:

  • Stale odds on both horse racing tackers at some books
  • Missing books on the horse racing trackers (due to scrapers getting blocked)
  • Slightly different EV on basic vs pro due to a difference in the speed with which BFx odds were able to be calculated
  • Betfair prices not coming through to the Player xG tool
  • Betfred and William hill daily boosts going up late on the bet tracker
  • Fewer than usual bets put on to the bet tracker
  • Some bets going missing on private bet trackers
  • Clock changes resulting in unusual things happening (such as races disappearing, virtual racing times being out etc.)
  • Combobets missing at William Hill and Skybet

Priority issues were addressed as quickly as they could be and a few issues remain for our attention. 

This isn’t the quality of service we intend on providing. We were caught out by a perfect storm of resourcing and technical issues. We are undertaking a lessons learnt exercise to ensure mitigation can be in place in case the same set of issues arise in the future. A very large project is currently ongoing to build a “safety net” system that allows us to have more control over the latency and availability of odds on the horse racing pro tracker.

One thing we ask of members is to notify us through support of any issues. We pick up every ticket immediately and will investigate as soon as possible. Often if an issue is communicated to us on twitter / email / Discord we do not see it for a period of time due to attention being elsewhere when these issues arise.