Once again I am frustrated with the rediculous horse racing websites
 

Since the opening day of the Saratoga meet NYRA's website has been changed (to the worse) breaking all backwards compatibility to any kind of software that was scrapping it.

Naturally my scratches retrieval bots (that have been working unchanged for several years) are failing and this morning that I had some free time I decided to go ahead and fix the problem.

Trying bris, drf, equibase and nyra, I realized out that what was supposed to be a trivial API request is unnecessary complicated requiring an active account and in the case of Bris the starting of the WebTote!

Is is so difficult for those who are running the game to understand that we are no longer in the '80s and many of the horse players need a reliable feed to at least get the changes and the entries?

Why do they have to complicate things that are supposed to be trivial to the extreme?

Remember when Ronald Reagan said that the most frightening words in the English language were :
"I'm from the Government and I'm here to help you."
That's what runs through my mind when race tracks promise improved data.
Hpibet recently promised an improved website.
It's new edition is Gawd awful.

1. They do not care.
2. They are not technical
3. They're cheap
4. The government sucks at it too.


By Now the 4 sites you listed above would have an interactive site where one can produce a customized view for each viewer. I recall a site years ago that had an sql-driven api which allowed you to make your own queries.

However the real issue is there is no decent money to be made as a website developer in Horse racing. So many other areas with a large customer base,
to develop for.

The people doing web design most likely have no idea what sophisticated players are doing with their web sites. They should care, but they probably don't because they don't understand, not because they want to piss people off.

to compensate for the young inexperienced technically sound developers we have Architects and Business analyst to provide guidance. But that costs money, maybe not. 10 years ago I attempted write a application for a guy.
He had all these ideas in his head. his approach was "I'll know it when I see it"
not wasting my time. 40 years of racing experience but when it came to putting it on paper, NAH.


Something I myself is going thru right now. I have the technical ability and the creativity, not a problem. What I do not have is the business experience for the my endeavors(online mobile rideshare cooperative ,real estate) I'd Like to hire a Business analyst to analyze , improve my model , don't want to pay.

You nailed it. :ThmbUp:

HPI's old site was also gawd awful....and we have no choice.

Speaking of clueless, where is the batch bet upload capability on the NYRA site?

The manual entry pretty much stinks for anything but a simple win bet.

They aren't even on par with sites that have been around for YEARS.

Anyone wanting to batch bet exactas/tris/supers will be using ANOTHER PROVIDER. And these would tend to be the bigger customers.

They simply don't get it .

I would call it minor league.
WHY don't they understand their CUSTOMERS?
Because as I have said for years, tracks are run by idiots.
Fold this in with the inability to time races, place gates, report runups.....idiots.

Equibase has a free scratch free, don't they? (Which only exists because of HANA, I believe.)

http://www.equibase.com/static/latec...techanges.html

They have an RSS feed which works pretty well once you learn the way scratches are reported, modified, and corrected.

snafu

Extract from their page:

Proprietary to and © 2016 Equibase Company LLC. All Rights Reserved.
The Terms of Use for this web site prohibit the use of any robot, spider, scraper or any other automated means to access the contents of this site. The Terms of Use also expressly prohibit the republication or dissemination of the contents of this screen without the prior written consent of Equibase Company LLC.

DeltaLover,

Use the link (towards the bottom of the page) to download the scratches and changes xml doc.

The xml doc itself was created with the intention that it be parsed (by horseplayers.)

The xml is updated throughout the day with new scratches and changes - in something that approaches real time.

The advantage of parsing the xml doc versus scraping html from a web page should be obvious. The xml doc was created with the intention that it be parsed by horseplayers. Because of that - they aren't going to knowingly change the xml schema in such a way that it breaks existing parse routines. (Can't say that about scraping html from a web page.)

No. They don't want bots continually pinging it. But you CAN create an app or routine to download it (for your own use) from the url at the link.

Just stick to the same info model as a web browser - one page view per click - and you'll be fine.



GameTheory,

So true. Hard to believe that was 7 years ago already.



-jp

.

:ThmbUp:

THX!

I admit I've missed this one..