Picklebot Release Dashboard

Fri 10/2/2026 69 commits

📊 SMAD DUPR 2.0 ratings
Ratings now start from each player's sheet DUPR, and recent matches count more than old ones. Win chances allow for a 6-point miss, so they are less overconfident: in a backtest, favourites won about 69% of the time, against 55% for the old model. Match and suggestion lines show the win chance after the spread, like +3 69%. The dashboard is titled SMAD DUPR 2.0 and has a summary of the model, a brighter match graph with dots sized by matches played, a colour key, and top-5 lists (winningest partnerships, biggest rivalries, win streaks, giant killers, clutch players, hot right now, and more). Players under 10 matches are left out of the lists. The 1.0 page is kept for comparison.

➕ Add a game mid-week
/pb add game 10/1/26 7:30pm south @Rich Vic adds a game outside the weekly poll. It gets Last Call, the Game Plan, and the lights job just like a poll game, and registers the players you name. Names separated by spaces now read as whole names ("Gene Thanh John Wang 2" is three players), and @-mentions no longer swallow the next name. The reply ends with the command to join the game: /pb register 10/1/26 7:30pm.

⚡ Much faster commands
/pb match now answers in about 0.7 to 1.2 seconds in the bot, down from 4 to 8. /pb game plan, /pb post game, /pb games and /pb balances also make far fewer sheet reads, and /pb games went from 1.46 s to 0.32 s. Match replies end on a ⏱️ line showing the time. Keepalive pings should also stop the slow first match after a quiet spell (it took 18.7 s once).

🎾 Match and Game Plan fixes
Suggestion numbers are now stable all night: a number is never reused for a different match, and undo restores the list exactly. Match lines end on the ratings' spread (+3 favoured, -2 an upset), and the Game Plan shows "+1, 66% to win". Impossible scores like /pb match 61 15-3 are refused. /pb undo -1 is refused, and undoing the only match still lists what to play next. Courts are saved once per game, so replies stay quick.

📅 Dates without a time
/pb cancel game 10/3/26 used to say "Invalid date or time". Now /pb cancel game, /pb register, /pb left and /pb unregister take a bare date and use the first game that day. The reply says which time it assumed.

📝 Post-game story
Catchphrases now appear in full, woven into the story's own sentences rather than as quotes or tacked on after a dash. There are new Chick Hearn lines and a "Hodl to your dreams. To the moon!" for rising stocks and underdog wins. Post-game reports end on the winners' spread, and the analysis gains a 🎯 Spread check on how the predicted spreads did against the night's scores.

💸 Payments and court fixes
Paying twice in one Venmo sync now thanks you with the right balance each time. Zelle emails ending in a period ("$8.00.") are booked, and Venmo and Zelle times are no longer 7 hours off. /pb record payment John 20 is refused when two Johns exist. /pb court cancel without a court no longer cancels both courts. Names like Mary-Nell are no longer mistaken for dry-run flags. /pb stats my now shows the SMAD DUPR as of each row's date.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Test coverage rose to 99.2%, which turned up many small bugs, all fixed. Deploys are faster and skip unchanged functions. We moved to Python 3.14, and the Release Dashboard got new charts. Release notes are now written daily by Claude Sonnet 5.5.

Thu 10/1/2026 8 commits

🎾 The Game Plan never suggests the same matchup twice
A four-player plan was listing round 1's match again as match 3, because the balancing step threw out the one unplayed pairing for being an 81% court. Now an unplayed pairing always beats a repeat, and balance only chooses among the unplayed ones. A matchup already listed, or still on court, is left out, so four players see their three pairings and the list stops. Once nothing new is left, a repeat can follow.

⚡ /pb match answers faster, and the numbers stay in order
A reply that took 11.2 s now skips the Game Day weather call (5.3 s of it) that a match reply throws away — that header is built only for the Game Plan report. The planner reuses the game the match was recorded against and the roster already read, instead of re-reading the poll and roster, and admin lookups are cached for 30 minutes instead of 5 (another 1.35 s). Match numbers now continue from the highest recorded or listed, so a typed match no longer jumps from 18 to 28.

📝 The post-game story reads straight through
Every line about a match now names its players and gives its score, so no line leans on the one before it — "That 12-10 needed extra time, and the booth needed oxygen" won't happen again. The stock-down 📉 line must follow the stock-up 📈 line as the template has them, "extra time" is now "overtime", and stories that invent time spans like "for years" or "all season" are rejected. Any story that breaks these rules is dropped in favour of the template.

🔁 /pb post game force rewrites the night's analysis
For a night whose matches were corrected after the story was written, admins can now re-run the night and have the analysis rewritten over the kept story. The report is saved and the dashboard redrawn so it picks up the new story, and the reply tells you whether the new story stood. If the rewrite fails its checks, the kept story stays — never the template.

📊 /pb survey results counts only current players
20 of 67 survey responses came from archived players, so the counts, best times and heatmap now use the 47 who still play. Anyone the roster can't match is still counted.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The error sweep now measures its window from the newest previous run rather than whichever GitHub lists first (a 15-day-old run had stretched the window to 366.7 h and re-filed two stale 9/25 errors), only asks for runs created in the last 26 hours, and retries when it gets an empty or stale answer.

Wed 9/30/2026 37 commits

🏓 Game Plan reads cleaner and the numbers hold still
Suggested matches are now just a number and the two sides — no 🏓, no "balanced:" / "learn:" / "playing:" tags — with the match still on court listed first, and the sums line (6.33v5.62) sits at the margin so WhatsApp stops wrapping it. A suggestion keeps its number until it's recorded, so on a night like 9/29 court 2 can record match 2 first and match 1 is still match 1; an undone match comes back under its own number. The Game Plan lists whole rounds — 6 suggestions on two courts, 4 on one — and /pb game plan 2 (or 1) forces the court count. Round 3 is now titled "ratings learn most from".

📝 Match lines fit a phone
Every /pb match, undo and ✅ reply plus the /pb post game list now use one short form: "1 751 Thanh/Vic 11-6 Gene/Rich" — number, recorded time, first names joined by "/", score where "beat" used to be. Post-game match lines lead with the time they were recorded (07:51pm). /pb match 14 5 now tells you which match 14 is and how to write its score, and the "* under 10 matches / Move" footnote is gone from the report (the dashboard legend still explains it).

🙋 Guests are rated, not counted
The 9/29 clinic coach subbed for a late Roger and was recorded as Roger in matches 2 and 4; both rows now read Guest (3.80), and Roger's night is 3-3. A guest is held at his known rating so his partners and opponents are rated fairly, but he's left out of tonight's records, the standings, the match graph and the recap — the match lines still name him.

🕢 A 7:30 game is a 7:30 game
Games logged at 7:30 kept being labelled "7pm"; they now keep the minutes (match ids like 20260929-730pm-3) and the 17 rows from 9/29 were relabelled. Kept post-game stories were silently saved under a blank key and never shown again — they're found now, and the 11 existing ones are labelled. Everywhere a player reads it, "game night" is just "game", since games can be at noon or Saturday morning.

👋 New members get their row and welcome DM again
A broken insert meant three members joining between 9/22 and 9/29 got no row and no welcome DM; that's fixed and the sync now checks the sheet against the group after every run. New members are named from Google Contacts first, so "cunningham dan" is welcomed as Dan Cunningham. A member who leaves now gets a note that their stats are archived and how to come back.

🎙️ More booth calls, and Gene can add his own
The post-game story can now call "Boom shakalaka!", "To beat the champ, you've got to knock 'em out!" and "The mustard is off the hot dog!". All 33 catchphrases moved to a Catch Phrases tab — a new line Gene adds is live within ten minutes.

📊 SMAD DUPR dashboard hides archived players
Archived players are off the Ratings table, the History chart and the suggested-match advice, on the page and in /pb smad dupr graph. They stay in the match graph, drawn faded, since their matches still rate everyone they played.

🛠️ Behind the scenes Watchdog alerts now go out by issue, email and WhatsApp independently so one outage can't silence the rest, member sync retries a connection blip before failing, and the Release Dashboard gained lead-time and detection tiles plus a shared post-mortem page.

Mon 9/28/2026 8 commits

🏓 Logging matches before the game starts
Once the Game Plan is posted, /pb match and /pb match undo <n> belong to that upcoming game for the hour before it starts — no more scores landing on last week's session. So /pb match undo 3 before the start removes the match you logged off suggestion 3. If no plan has been posted and no game has started, the reply now tells you that posting a Game Plan opens the game.

📵 A 4-minute gap in messages on 9/27
A scheduled security change to our WhatsApp connection went wrong and Picklebot sent nothing from 10:40 to 10:43 PT. Sends were restored and we wrote up what happened so it doesn't repeat.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The token rotation script now handles the real-world delay before a new token goes live (retrying for up to 3 minutes), keeps the token safely saved as it goes, and can resume a failed run; an incident record and post-mortem were filed with a shareable page linked from the Release Dashboard. Our secret-scanning sweep now reports the actual file and commit for each alert and says whether that file still exists in the current code.

Sun 9/27/2026 22 commits

🎾 SMAD DUPR starts everyone from the middle
Your rating no longer begins at your declared DUPR — every player now starts from 3.25, the group's mean, and only match results move you from there. Ratings pull in toward the middle: on today's log the top came in from 4.72 to about 4.36 and the bottom moved up. Your sheet DUPR is still shown beside your rating and still sets the scale, so a 1.0 gap means what it means in DUPR. The model also re-measures itself at every refit instead of being pinned, and the dashboard's older nights are re-fitted the same way so the trend line has no step at the switch.

📝 The post-game story is now written for the night
The analysis in your post-game report is written from that night's facts — the matches, every rating, move and record — instead of fixed template lines. Every number in it is checked against the facts, and anything that doesn't match falls back to the old template. It quotes catchphrases on their own, with no announcer name and no quotation marks, and once a night's story is written it's kept for good: refits, remodels and dashboard refreshes never rewrite it.

📈 Dashboard: every game night's report, and a history chart you can hover
The dashboard now rebuilds a post-game report for every game night from the Win Loss Log with the current model, so old reports match how ratings work today. "Over time" is now SMAD DUPR History and starts at 8/25, the first night with enough matches, with one point per game night. Hover or tap a line to see the player's name and current SMAD DUPR, with the rest faded — handy when twenty lines overlap. The explainer text is much shorter: the formula, the 3.25 start, and what ± means.

🔁 /pb post game is safe to re-run
Move is now measured against the previous game night from the match log alone, so running /pb post game twice posts the same report instead of a different one, and it won't save a duplicate report row. The reply's footnote now reads "Move = since the previous game night".

🧪 /pb post game remodel
New command for changing the model without generating a new game report: it saves the refit and redraws the dashboard, but leaves the dashboard's latest post-game report as the last game night's.

🚫 Cancelling a game cleans up properly
When a game is cancelled, the Game Plan post, the eve Last Call and (for night games) the lights reminder are all deleted together. Previously a cancelled game's Game Plan still fired — the cancelled Sat 9/26 9am game posted at 8:00 AM PT.

🔔 Less noise in Admin Dinkers
The per-payment "Payment Received" posts and the survey, payment, vote, DUPR and game reminder summaries no longer go to the admin group. Your thank-you DM, email and Payment Log row are unchanged. The one alert left is "Game Reminder SKIPPED", for a reminder that couldn't go out.

🛠️ Behind the scenes — Tokens and keys are now scrubbed from every log, email and issue, the message sender retries connection timeouts and pages once for a genuinely lost message, token-rotation scripts were added, and GitGuardian alerts now file issues automatically. 65 test suites, 2241 checks, 0 failed.

Sat 9/26/2026 11 commits

🏆 /pb post game is now the whole night in one report
Run /pb post game and it refits the SMAD DUPR ratings and replies with "Post-Game Report for 9/25/26": the numbered matches, the night's SDPR / Move / W-L table, and the post-game analysis. /pb compute smad dupr still works as another way in. Only an admin's run saves the results and redraws the dashboard — anyone else gets the same report, just not saved. On the dashboard it appears under "Latest Post Game Report", and the masthead now reads the refit date, like "SMAD Pickleball · 09/25/2026 · refit 5", instead of "Win Loss Log".

🎾 Suggested matches follow the night you actually played
The Game Plan now builds from the matches really recorded, so a late start or an off-plan match no longer throws the numbers off. Matchups already played tonight aren't offered again unless every alternative repeats one — replayed over the 9/25 night, the new list had zero repeats against four in the old one. The next three suggestions print under the Match Recorded, undo and register replies, numbered on from the last recorded match. /pb match <n> <score> now also understands "11 to 7" and "11 7", and refuses a number already recorded by naming the next one.

↩️ /pb match undo 2 removes a specific match
You can now undo any recorded match of tonight's game by its number — /pb match undo 2 or /pb match undo #2 — no matter who recorded it, and the number matches the one in the Match Recorded reply. Plain /pb match undo still removes your own last match. The reply, headed "Undo Match 2", shows the night's last three matches and the next suggested matches, and a suggestion freed up by the removal is listed again under its number. Out-of-range numbers and empty games are refused with nothing deleted.

📊 Top 20 board: ten or more matches
The Top 20 board on Game Day Group Stats and the daily Hall of Shame and Fame now only lists players with at least ten logged matches, and the header says so: "🏆 Top 20: SMAD DUPR > W-L > Hrs (10+ matches)". Exactly ten qualifies; nine doesn't, even at 9-0 with the best rating. If nobody qualifies, the board is left out rather than shown empty.

💡 Lights reminder times itself around the game
The reminder email to the desk is now scheduled one hour after the game starts (8pm game → 9pm) instead of a fixed 8pm, and it asks for the lights to stay on for 3 hours after the start — an 8pm game runs to 11:00pm. Tonight's 8pm game keeps its original 2.5 hours, so its email still says 10:30pm.

🎙️ Post-game analysis calls it like LA's booth
The analysis now drops famous commentary catchphrases on every line: "It's time for Dodger baseball!" and "Pull up a chair!", "This game's in the refrigerator!" and "Slam dunk!", "I don't believe what I just saw!", "Showtime!", plus "Booyah!" and "Show me the money!" on stock up. Stock down stays upbeat — "Tomorrow's another ballgame.", "Every slump ends. Think Blue!", "No harm, no foul." — never a jab. A new Thriller line calls out the night's longest extra-time game, where the winning score went past 11.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The board, the undo numbering and the reply block are each written once now instead of in duplicate copies, and the test suite finished at 61 suites and 2115 checks with 0 failures.

Fri 9/25/2026 5 commits

🎾 Game Plan now shows five suggested matches
/pb game plan prints the first five suggestions instead of the first two rounds (four matches on our two courts), so you can see a bit further ahead. The numbering is unchanged — matches 1 to 5 in the report, with the match replies picking up from 6 — so /pb match <n> <score> and the "suggested matches left" block still point at the same games. The same list shows up in the reminder that goes out 1h before.

📋 Match Recorded keeps the last three matches
After you record a score, the reply now lists just the last three matches of the night, including the one you just entered, each under its own number. The count line still counts the whole night, and /pb post game and the undo reply still show the full list.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The developer's release dashboard trends now cover the last 30 days instead of 90, with incidents counted inside that same window and the test-time tile labelled accordingly. A test that assumed a fixed date now pins its clock so it passes on any day; 60 suites, 2057 checks, 0 failed.

Thu 9/24/2026 4 commits

🎯 Record a match by its number
You can now log a result with just the suggestion number and the score: /pb match 14 9-11. The score is read in the order the two sides are listed, so 9-11 means the right-hand side won. Numbers are fixed when the Game Plan is made and never shift, so recording out of order just leaves gaps — no confusion about which match is which.

🔢 Suggested matches are numbered, continuing from what's been played
The Game Plan now numbers the courts of rounds 1 and 2 as 1. to 4., and suggested matches pick up from there: with 13 matches recorded, the next suggestion is 14. One running list all night, so the number you type is always the number you see.

🙋 /pb unregister for no-shows and early leavers
If someone doesn't turn up, /pb unregister @player takes them off the night and off the night's charge (and tells you if the cell held game-day hours). If someone plays and then heads home early, /pb unregister @player left drops them from the Game Plan but keeps their charge. Either way the plan rebuilds on the spot, and the next two rounds appear right under the reply. Every /pb match reply after that follows the new roster.

✅ Cleaner Match Recorded replies
Names now read the same short way they do in the players list — "Gene C", "John W2" — everywhere in the reply, with no rating tacked on after each name. Wins read as "beat" instead of "def.", and the suggested matches that follow are numbered.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
60 test suites and 2049 checks pass, with the README and command help updated for the new /pb unregister and numbered /pb match.

Wed 9/23/2026 18 commits

🎾 The Game Plan arrives — An hour before each game, Picklebot now posts "Picklebot Suggested Matches for Balance and Algo Training": the night's date, weather, courts, who's in with their SMAD DUPR, and suggested teams and matches built from the ratings and who has played whom. It replaces the second Last Call, and you can ask for it anytime with /pb game plan. It ends with Fun Picklebot Graph Stats — things like "Gene C and Ryan H have faced each other 14 times, the most of anyone here" — plus a link to the SMAD DUPR dashboard.

📋 The plan follows you down the night — The posted report now shows only the first 2 rounds, and every /pb match confirmation lists the next 2 unplayed rounds ("28 of 32 left; next 2 rounds"), so you don't scroll back up to find the plan. A court clears once that same pairing is logged, either side winning, in any name order. The plan also keeps going as long as the night does instead of running out after round 5, it's frozen at game time so later rounds no longer replay round 1's courts, and a dry run to Admin Dinkers can no longer swallow the real post to the group.

🗣️ /pb match understands more of how you type — Of 20 attempts on 9/22, 7 were refused; all seven now work. Two first names with no "and" ("ryan dom beat richard mark 8") are read as a team, "Daum" finds Dominic, and dictation slips in the score position are caught (won 1, to/too 2, for/fore 4, ate 8). When it still can't tell who you mean, the reply now lists tonight's first names so you can pick.

📊 A refit reply about tonight, not the whole ladder — /pb compute smad dupr now answers with "SMAD DUPR Refit for 9/22/26", one summary line ("13 matches played between 8 players."), and a table of tonight's players with SDPR, Move and W-L. Under it is a post-game analysis drawn from the night: stock up, stock down, the rookie card, the upset. Each reply is kept and shown on the SMAD DUPR dashboard under "Latest recalc report", with older ones behind "See more", and the dashboard redraws itself after a refit.

✍️ /pb register a late arrival — If the pinned poll is hard to find, or someone turns up last minute, any member can add a player to today's roster exactly as a poll vote would, so their matches can be recorded. It takes an @-mention, a typed name or nothing at all for yourself, finds today's game (or the next one, telling you how to name it), and reports rather than overwrites an existing mark.

🛠️ Behind the scenes — The SMAD DUPR column now sits right beside DUPR on the main sheet, a new Court Finance dashboard turns the weekly consolidated report into a page, and a rerun lever lets fixes ship without the desktop being on — on 09/20 a fix sat from 10:16 AM to 5:43 PM waiting on it.

Tue 9/22/2026 6 commits

🏓 /pb players shows a self-rated DUPR when we haven't fitted one yet
If you haven't got a fitted SMAD DUPR, the game-night roster now shows the self-rated DUPR from the sheet instead of an empty cell, so newcomers aren't a mystery. A fitted rating always wins when both exist. The ranked lists — /pb players, the Top N board and the shame report — stick to fitted ratings only, so players who haven't played in months don't float above the people showing up every week; with no fitted rating the cell stays blank and the player ranks last.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Test results, CI metrics and the SMAD DUPR export now live in a reports bucket instead of the repo, with the old copies kept as a fallback until both dashboards were confirmed reading from the bucket. The release digest and dashboard also stopped counting bot-written records as releases (119 such commits now excluded instead of 59), and the alert sweep now closes an alert once every workflow has a green run after its newest failure. 55 suites, 1787 checks, 0 failed.

Mon 9/21/2026 11 commits

🗳️ The Sunday games poll is back
The 8am Sunday runner failed to start, so for ten hours there was no games poll, no Last Call, no Games This Week and no vote or payment reminders. The poll was restored by hand at 5:54 PM PT and everything downstream ran green. Nothing you voted on was lost — the week just started late.

🎾 Shyam's court handover now works closer to game time
The handover used to need your vote 48+ hours before the game; it now needs 24. The late Sunday poll put Shyam's vote 47.1 hours before Tuesday's 7 PM game, so the transfer was skipped without anyone being told. Now if a vote lands inside the window, the bot DMs you that the court transfer was not started, says why, and gives you the override: /pb shyam MM/DD/YY.

📊 The SMAD DUPR dashboard has a match graph
A new section sits between Over time and How it is calculated, with the graph drawing, a legend and a tile row showing players, matches and pairs met out of possible. If there's no graph to show the section simply doesn't appear, and names with characters like < now display correctly instead of breaking the page. The export carries only names, ratings and pair edges — never a phone number or an email.

📋 Every outage you feel now gets a written post-mortem
Any outage that affects players or money gets a public write-up: what broke, end-user impact, who did what and the full timeline. The 2026-09-20 poll outage has one, and the Release Dashboard links it right on the outage row, naming the commits by subject instead of a bare code.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The exact mistake that stopped the runner was caught once before on 2026-09-04, so there's now an automatic check that a workflow grants everything it calls, plus 15 new tests covering both shapes of the failure. Alert auto-closing moved onto the watchdog's hourly sweep after the old gate silently stopped working, and the suite stands at 53 suites, 1740 checks, 0 failed.

Sun 9/20/2026 3 commits

🎾 /pb games signs off once
The weekly games list was coming through with two Picklebot signatures and two jokes stacked at the bottom. Now /pb games shows a single footer, the way the other game listings already did.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Retired a leftover monitoring workflow that duplicated a check already running every ten minutes, and made the alert-closing job skip itself unless an alert is actually open — both were quietly eating build minutes. Test suite still fully green.

Fri 9/18/2026 7 commits

📊 Your Stats now shows hours this month with a rank
Your stats DM leads with this month's hours and where you stand, like "12 hrs this month (#1 of 20)", ranked among players who've played this month. The year milestone line stays. Your rating line now reads SDUPR (the SMAD DUPR); if the fit hasn't rated you yet, you'll see the sheet DUPR, clearly labelled.

🏓 SMAD DUPR: your W-L record, and steadier ratings
/pb compute smad dupr now shows your wins and losses instead of a bare match count, and the table still fits a phone. The k setting is now sticky — it's carried from the last refit and only re-measured every 50 matches or when you ask with /pb compute smad dupr rescale — so a night you sat out no longer nudges your number. The reply tells you whether k was carried or re-measured and why. A live dry run with k carried at 3.25 since 98 matches moved every rating +0.00.

🕸️ See the match graph behind the ratings
New /pb smad dupr graph shows what the log actually supports: which players are connected, which matches hold the picture together, pairs we can't yet compare, and a suggestion for the next match that would tell us the most. Anyone can ask — it only reads.

📈 Dashboard explains the sticky k
The SMAD DUPR dashboard (now version 9) says where k was set and when it re-measures, with a note on why a night you sat out used to move you and no longer does — Victorio's +0.08 on 9/17 was all k. The methodology section spells out that k was measured at 98 matches and re-measures at 148.

📋 Last Call is shorter
The Last Call message now sticks to attendance and balances and drops the Top 20 board. Game Day, /pb game next and the shame report still carry the board.

🙂 No joke on reminders
The game day reminder and Last Call no longer carry a joke — neither is a reply to something you typed. The signature and help hint still close every reminder, and the admin copy reads the same way.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
A failed connection check now warns first and only escalates after 15 minutes, so brief network timeouts stop paging. 50 suites, 1634 checks, 0 failed.

Thu 9/17/2026 3 commits

🛠️ Behind the scenes The hourly error sweep now runs on a schedule we control, firing at :23 past every hour instead of the old setup whose gaps stretched from 2h to 6.7h (about six runs a day) — so problems get noticed sooner, and a follow-up fix stopped the sweep from filing duplicate reports and made it tidy up stale ones on every run. Shared release-notes links now always show the latest version.

Wed 9/16/2026 12 commits

📊 SMAD DUPR dashboard, redrawn every time
/pb compute smad dupr now rebuilds the dashboard page after a real refit, and the reply's last line tells you whether the redraw was requested. The page shows the Move column (how much your rating changed since your last refit, "new" the first time), a time series of every player's SMAD DUPR across refits, and a closing "Caveats, and what would make it better" section. The reply now ends on the SMAD DUPR Dashboard link with no signature footer. The first export covers 20 players, 1 refit and 88 matches.

🏓 /pb match understands "Jon" and full scores
"Gene and Shyam beat Jon and Vic five" was refused because "jon" matched Jonathan, who wasn't playing — now a name match among the players on the court wins over a club-wide name who isn't in the session, and if two people who played both fit, you get an error naming both. /pb match also accepts a full score on the end: "11 - 8", "11 to 8", "8-11" or "eleven to eight". The winner's score is still set by the league rules, so a typed 11-10 records as 12-10, and "John Wang 2 8" still reads the 2 as part of his name.

📋 Match confirmation lists every match again
The numbered list of matches logged so far is back in the /pb match reply, after a game got recorded twice 18 minutes apart and the duplicate was invisible. You get the count line, a blank, then the full list; the W-L table stays with /pb post game.

📈 Post-game tables now show SMAD DUPR
In /pb post game, the W-L Record column is headed SDPR and shows your roster SMAD DUPR to two decimals, blank until you have one. The numbered match lines show SMAD DUPR too ("Gabe 3.11 & Vijay 2.89 def. ..."), in the match confirmation and undo as well. The signature now sits directly under the W-L table instead of a line below it.

💡 Lights reminder asks for 9:30pm
After the 8:00 PM email asking for lights until 10pm went out and the lights still went off at 8:45 PM, the reminder now reads "Reminder to turn all court lights on until 9:30pm - Thanks Gene". Same recipient, same 8pm send on night games.

🎾 No more empty cancellation threat
Inside the 12-hour window the court can't be cancelled and we pay for it either way, so Game Day and Last Call no longer say it will be. The line now reads that we need more players to fill the court and it's within 12 hours. One-court and two-court shortfalls both changed; past games, full rosters and resting pairs read the same as before.

✨ SMAD DUPR table is easier to read
There's a blank line above the table and a rule under the header, measured by what's actually visible so it lines up.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
New and rewritten test suites cover the shortfall wording, name resolution, full scores, the dashboard and the table rule — 49 suites, 1524 checks, 0 failed. Documentation and the investigator's wake routine were also repaired after it stopped firing.

Tue 9/15/2026 10 commits

🏆 The daily report is now the Hall of Shame and Fame
The daily message leads with the signature and Daily Hall of Shame and Fame for MM/DD/YY, and ends on the SMAD DUPR Dashboard link one line under the board — no more redundant signature footer or trailing blank lines. Money only shows up when someone actually owes; a creditors-only table no longer nags the group. The Top 20 board closes the message, the Not Voted list is unchanged, and /pb shame now also answers to "hall of fame" and "hall of shame" aliases.

📊 Player tables: SDPR, new ranking, shorter names
The rating column is the fitted SMAD DUPR shown as SDPR to two decimals (blank until it's fitted), and /pb players, the Game Day board and the Hall of Shame and Fame all rank the same way: SMAD DUPR, then W-L, then Hrs. You can still sort with dupr, dpr or rating — old commands keep working. First names cap at 6 letters with proper nicknames (Vic, Jon, Rich, Stan, Spen, Dom, Will), roster digits stay glued to the initial (John W2 beside John W), and Pct prints without its dot, so tables fit 32 columns again on the live roster.

💸 Game Day and Last Call only mention money when somebody owes
The Bal/Cred block in the Game Day Reminder and the Last Call summary now appears only when a player carries a balance — the same rule the daily report got earlier that day. If only creditors are listed, the block and its congrats line stay out and the board still renders.

🥒 /pickleball works as a command prefix
Typing /pickleball match undo used to get an unrecognised-slash reply. All three prefixes — /pb, /picklebot and /pickleball — now work in any case, and the unrecognised reply names all three.

📬 Picklebot Upgrades digest left the SMAD Pickleball group
The daily upgrades digest was too noisy for the main group, so it now goes to Admin Dinkers and Gene's DM only. /pb commits digest still answers whoever asks for it.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Venmo sync now reads Sheets through the shared cached accessor instead of building its own connection — the duplicate shape that OOM-killed Picklebot on 09/08. Plus a generated command registry, a no-duplicate-code ratchet test, and quieter alerting so routine restarts stop paging Gene.

Mon 9/14/2026 9 commits

🗳️ Your vote always lands, and under your real name

Two votes on Sunday morning hit a connection error before reaching the poll sheet. No votes were lost — every one went through on a fresh connection — and the webhook has been fixed so it can't get stuck on a stale connection again.

📇 Poll entries now use your full name

When someone votes who isn't in the roster yet, Picklebot now looks up the phone book contact name first and only falls back to your WhatsApp display name as a last resort. That's why one Sunday vote logged as "Dru" instead of Dru Huang — that row was corrected by hand, and new ones will come through right the first time.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Failure alerts now name the actual error in their title and close themselves on the next clean run, so stale alerts don't pile up. The alert investigator pipeline is documented end to end, and the resident instructions file was slimmed from 1,271 lines to 169 with nothing deleted — just moved.

Sun 9/13/2026 17 commits

🤐 No jokes on top of admin replies
Picklebot was still tacking a joke onto a couple of admin answers, including /pb booking list and /pb shyam, because those two commands sat outside the no-joke rule. They're inside it now, and a check scans every admin command so a new one can't slip out again.

💰 Court finances, properly kept
The club's running costs are now split into what's genuinely variable month to month — Anthropic, GitHub, GREEN-API, Twilio, plus an estimate for GCP — instead of being lumped in as fixed, and Anthropic is charged 100% to pickleball. Member credits are now booked against the month of the game they reverse, so Shyam's 9/1 credit written on 8/30 counts in September, and dues accrue for the open month: August no longer reads as a big loss next to a flattering September. The Caltech Associates donation sits deliberately outside the P&L, so it doesn't tangle with the tax deduction.

📊 A readable Court Finance sheet and email
There's now a "2026 Court Finance" tab — one per year, formatted like an actual finance sheet: bold grey header, frozen Month column, dollars with negatives in red parentheses, and a bold year-to-date line under a double rule. The notes explain each column family in plain English, including Operating = Gross − Overhead and what a negative month means, and the same notes go out with the weekly consolidated email. That email's totals row also lines up with its columns again after a formatting bug lost its alignment.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The 38 regression suites moved to tests/ and now run automatically on every change: 38 suites, 1,306 checks, 0 failed, 23.1% statement coverage, with tests and coverage tiles added to the Release Dashboard, which now defaults to dark.

Sat 9/12/2026 10 commits

🏓 SMAD DUPR: your own rating, fitted to our actual matches
Every player now has a SMAD DUPR in its own column next to DUPR, calculated from your win/loss record plus how strong your partners and opponents were. The first run wrote 20 ratings from 76 matches. Anyone with under 10 matches is marked provisional.

🔄 Refit the ladder when game night is done
Type /pb compute smad dupr (admin) once all the night's matches are entered and the ratings recalculate on the spot — no waiting for a daily job. The reply is a phone-width ladder showing each player's rating, how much they moved since the last refit, and a star for provisional players.

📈 Every refit is saved, so progress is visible
A new "SMAD DUPR Log" tab stores one row per player per refit — rating, previous, change, matches and who ran it — so your rating now has a history instead of just a current number. A refit that changed nothing isn't logged, and if the log write fails the ratings still land on the sheet and the reply tells you why.

✅ Match Recorded is now three tight lines
Recording a match replies with the header, the result, and the session count directly underneath — no blank lines, no "N matches logged" sentence, no signature. Batches still list every result first, then the session line.

🔌 /pb match no longer loses matches after a quiet stretch
When Picklebot sat idle between matches, a stale connection to the sheet made it read an empty roster and claim it couldn't find your names. Now a connection idle more than 60 seconds is refreshed before use, and if the roster genuinely can't be read you get "Nothing recorded: the roster read from the sheet failed", the actual error text, and a nudge to send the same line again — never a silent miss. The two matches lost that night were written back in at the times they were first sent.

🗣️ /baby and /bb now work
Courtside dictation keeps turning /pb into "/Baby" and "/BB", and both were being refused. They're now accepted aliases, so "/Baby Gabe and Vijay beat..." records like normal.

👥 Vacationing players are back on the Top N board
Only archived players are filtered out now, so the Top N board and /pb players list exactly the same people in the same order again, and the "#N of M" rank in your DM counts the full group. The survey availability grid is unchanged — it still marks vacationers rather than hiding them.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Picklebot's logs are now structured, so an error actually triggers the alert chain instead of vanishing — that night's failure had raised nothing. Plus new tests across the ratings, the match reply shape, the idle-connection fix and the aliases.

Fri 9/11/2026 1 commit

🚫 /pb cancel game won't cancel a game that already happened
If you point /pb cancel game at a date in the past, it now stops you right away instead of running the cancellation. Before, a past game would quietly go through the whole process and spit out six "not found" lines, with nothing useful reaching the Court Log or the players.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
A new test guards this, failing the build if a past game ever gets dispatched again.

Thu 9/10/2026 34 commits

🩹 /pb match stopped running the bot out of memory
Recording a match was building the connection to the scoresheet ten times over and could kill Picklebot mid-request at 992 MiB. It now builds it once and reuses it, so the same work peaks at 68 MiB and /pb match stays up.

🧾 Cleaner match confirmations
When you record a score, the reply is now just the line you wrote plus the running "N matches so far" count — no more W-L table. The full W-L Record for Today belongs to /pb post game, and undoing a match still shows the remaining list.

📊 Tidier W-L and standings tables
Every record in a table now pads to the same width, so a night of 3-1 and 0-1 lines up just like a Top N with a 12-4 in it. Column headers shift so the dash in the header sits right over the dash in the records, under any sort and any name length.

💸 Payments find the right player
Venmo and Zelle now match payers through the same roster matcher the survey uses, so a profile with the names swapped, a nickname, or a unique last name lands on the right person instead of being missed on one side and found on the other. Venmo also accepts a whole number of session fees — James Ji's $20 for two and a $50 monthly pre-pay now count — and a one-word Zelle name no longer gets handed to whoever happens to share that first name. Payment runs can also reach Google properly now, so thank-you DMs, the Admin Dinkers notice and the Zelle sheet read all work (and the daily joke comes from the real jokes sheet again, not the fallback).

⚡ /pb payment sync on demand
Admins can run the Venmo + Zelle sweep right away with /pb payment sync (also venmo sync, zelle sync, payment sweep), and the counts come back in the chat whatever the outcome.

🙋 /pb members and /pb players no longer collide
/pb members sync used to be read as a players list sorted by "sync" and refused with a sort error. Member services and stats are now separate: players sync and sync players belong to syncing, and bare /pb members gets the normal unknown-command reply.

🗓️ Join Date, Referrer and Join Source on the Player sheet
Every member row now carries when they joined, who referred them and how they found us, backfilled from welcome messages, first votes and the group's own join events — 142 cells filled, 59 join dates corrected from the chat archive and 3 referrers recovered. Where someone's first game predates their join date, the earlier date wins, so the three founding members read 7/10/2025.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The group's first year of chat was archived from a phone export (5,346 records) into a private bucket, and court finance gained a full reconciliation and P&L with weekly and monthly reports to Gene — including excluding golf, happy hours and non-SMAD courts from the court numbers. Court booking also stopped republishing the dashboard on nights with nothing to book.

Wed 9/9/2026 25 commits

🎾 /pb match is harder to fool and quicker to read The bot now refuses the same match logged twice in a row — two scorekeepers logged one 11-1 43 seconds apart — and naming the same person on both sides of a line ("James and James") is rejected too. If a first name is ambiguous and nobody by that name voted, you'll hear "David Lin and David Sohn are not playing tonight — did someone forget to vote?" The confirmation now shows the line you recorded, the match count and the session W-L table instead of relisting every match, so the twentieth match of the night isn't a screen-long reply.

📊 Player tables: Pct, Top 20, and smarter names Every player table gains a Pct column right after W-L (1.000 for unbeaten, blank with no matches), the Top N board is now Top 20, and /pb players sorts by W-L, then hours, then DUPR by default like the leaderboard does. Names are only shortened to "First L." when they truly don't fit — on the live roster 13 of 45 names were shortened and every 11-character name stayed whole. W-L columns are zero-padded to a fixed width so the columns line up.

💬 Commands that used to vanish now answer A /pb command sent as a reply to another message is now read — one /pb payment transfer reply was dropped entirely. /phoebe and /pv, what iOS dictation makes of "/pb", are accepted, and any other slash command gets a reply instead of silence. /pb post game now matches any spelling with report or summary (plus game summary and match summary) and is listed in /pb help.

🏖️ Admins can set vacation for someone else /pb set vacation @player <date> and /pb set vacation <name> <date> both work now, which silences that player's vote and survey. Admin DMs also work correctly from the bot's phone, so the command no longer gets refused in a member's DM.

🗓️ Cancelling a game, and actually telling people /pb cancel game 9/9/26 now works with just a date when there's only one game on it; two games ask for the time and name both. Separately, the cancellation DMs to voters had been failing silently since 08/21 — that's fixed, and the summary now names anyone who couldn't be reached instead of saying "nobody voted yes."

🏟️ /pb courts list and your DUPR on every match /pb courts list answers instantly with the courts we hold from today on, one line per slot, noting when a court is on someone else's account. Match rows now carry each player's DUPR, with 46 older rows filled in from history, and the post-game report shows the rating of the night.

🛠️ Behind the scenes Court billing with the Athenaeum is now reconciled month by month against our own Court Log, weigh-ins and all logs are stamped in Pacific time, admin-only replies drop the joke, and admins can pull the upgrades digest with /pb commits digest.

Tue 9/8/2026 9 commits

🙋 Tag any player, any command
Typing @Toby Hsieh used to work in some places and fail in others — /pb archive player @Toby Hsieh came back with 'Player "@19175282626" not found'. There is now one way names are read across the bot, so /pb archive player, remind vote, remind payment, set DUPR and record payment all understand the same @mention, @me and plain names.

🎾 Cancelling a court tells you the truth
When a handover cancellation went through but the bot couldn't confirm it, it reported "failed" — so you'd think you still had a court when you didn't. The bot now reloads the reservations page after cancelling and sends a separate "couldn't verify" message, which is different from an actual failure.

📝 The survey knows you by the name you use
If you took the survey as "Alex Laussu" but the roster says Alexandre, the bot now matches you by last name and adopts the first name you typed. It also stops flagging a DUPR as changed when "3" and "3.0" are the same number.

📣 Court reports say who asked
Cancellation notices and results used to show a raw chat id. They now show the player's name instead.

📖 "Court Booking" in the help menu
The /pb help section called "Court Handover" is now "Court Booking" — only /pb shyam was a handover, the other three commands are the booking list. The README matches.

🔕 No more Last Call Summary
The Last Call Summary sent to Admin Dinkers is gone, both after DMs and in the "everyone has voted" case.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Lifted the google-api-core version cap now that 2.36.0 handles the Firestore database id correctly, added a standing rule that every session reads times in Pacific Time from the message itself, and documented the shared player resolver in the README.

Fri 9/4/2026 11 commits

📬 The daily "What Shipped" digest
Picklebot now posts a plain-language list of every change made the day before, titled like "What Shipped on Wed Sept 2 2026", sent at 8am by Cloud Scheduler. The first version cut off at 15 items and said "and 13 more" — now the whole day's list goes out. It briefly went to the SMAD Pickleball group; that's been dropped, so the digest stays in Admin Dinkers and Gene's DM and doesn't fill up the club chat.

📶 Fewer silent outages, and no more false alarms
Picklebot's WhatsApp connection is now checked every 10 minutes from the keepalive, instead of waiting for a notification that may never arrive — so if the bot goes offline, it gets noticed and fixed sooner. The old alarm treated every state except "authorized" as broken, including the normal starting and sleepMode states that clear on their own within 5 minutes. Those no longer page anyone, while a genuinely unlinked instance still does, and an unknown state now says plainly that it doesn't know.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Deploy and metrics jobs no longer report a failure as a success, the "what changed" hook stopped attributing our own work to someone else, and scheduled jobs are moving off GitHub cron (which is UTC-only and shifts an hour twice a year) onto Cloud Scheduler for about $0.10/month by folding them into jobs that already run often enough. Also wrote up an evaluation of the official WhatsApp Business API: it's blocked for now because official groups cap at 8 participants with no way to add members, so the group chat you use would not work there.

Thu 9/3/2026 11 commits

🏓 Court booking knows when Shyam can't book
Shyam can only book a free court on his own account 48 or more hours ahead, so the bot no longer hands a booking off to him automatically when that window has already closed. It checks this before the cancel cutoff, since 48 hours is the binding limit against 12. Typing /pb shyam <date> by hand still works exactly as before, for the times you know something the bot doesn't.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
A pile of plumbing on the development side: the daily change digest now sends once a day instead of once per push (with a link and commit subjects capped at 15), the health watcher stopped alarming while everything was healthy, push access and permission prompts were untangled after an outage, and the developer's Commits per Week chart stopped drawing one bar fatter than the rest. New tests cover the court rules with 16 cases.

Wed 9/2/2026 23 commits

💸 New: /pb payment transfer, when one member pays for another
When Roger covers Alexandre at the court, one command now records it: a debit for the payer and a credit for the player, sharing one Transaction ID. Names work the same way as in /pb match, the reply is in plain members' language, and both people get a DM — the payer because they're out of pocket, the other because their balance moved. A payer's debit no longer moves their Last Paid date, since paying for someone else isn't a payment of their own dues.

📈 DUPR ratings now keep a history
A new DUPR Log tab records every rating change: when, who, old, new and status — including ratings that were set by command, ratings ratcheted up by the survey sync, and survey values that were declined. Ratings always show one decimal, so 4.0 no longer prints as "4". Players without a rating read "no score".

🏆 /pb players sorts the way you ask, and so does the Top 15
/pb players [dupr] [w-l] [hrs] takes up to 3 criteria in priority order, and the stat columns reorder to match what you sorted on, so the first column is always the one being ranked. An unknown or repeated criterion is refused with the reason instead of being quietly ignored. The Top 15 board is now ranked by W-L, then hours, then DUPR — so unrated players are no longer pushed down, and anyone at 0-0 sits below every real record.

📵 Stats rows stop turning into phone numbers
WhatsApp was linkifying runs of digits in the stats tables and making rows look like phone numbers. An invisible separator between the stat columns breaks the run, with no change to column widths or spacing.

🗂️ Archived players off the roster listing
/pb players now leaves archived members out, matching the Top N board, which has always excluded them. Players away on vacation still appear — they're members who are away. An all-archived list says so rather than showing an empty table. Archived players still get their payment reminders.

📴 WhatsApp outage on 09/01, and a watcher so it can't go unnoticed
Every /pb command and every outgoing message stopped at 18:01:10 PT when WhatsApp suspended the account; service came back at 00:05:20, an outage of 364 minutes. Nothing announced it — Gene found it by typing a command. A new check now asks the vendor every 15 minutes and raises an alert on anything other than a healthy state, including the suspension expiry time, so the wait is known instead of guessed.

📰 Release notes paused on WhatsApp, dashboard unchanged
Release notes are the leading suspect for the message volume behind the suspension: one WhatsApp message per push, with 30 runs on 08-31 and 57 on 09-01, of which 34 were notes-only commits. Sending to the group is paused behind a setting while that's sorted. The dashboard still gets every release note.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Court-booking and CI failures now actually reach someone with the relevant log tail attached instead of "check the logs", release notes go through the normal sender so messages are counted, and payment and sorting changes are covered by new mutation-tested suites.

Tue 9/1/2026 36 commits

🎾 Courts are counted, not guessed
When Shyam hands his North booking back to his own club account, the bot used to only see one court — so a 6-player game got told "We have 6 players for 1 court, excellent!" and stopped recruiting while two spots sat open. Courts are now actually counted (including "North & South"), and every "we need N more players" line comes from that same count, so the header and the shortfall can't disagree. The 8:00 PM Last Call on 08/31 that read "Court: South" for a two-court game is the exact case this fixes.

📒 A ledger of every court we hold
There's a new Court Log that records each court-hour, written the moment we book it (with the hours we actually booked) and marked cancelled the moment /pb court cancel or /pb cancel game gives one back. /pb shyam now writes its handover row before anything else, so a hiccup mid-command can never hand the same court back twice. Game reports read courts from this ledger before trusting the poll text, so a court added or dropped after the poll went up is reflected.

🏷️ You can see whose court it is
A handed-over court is now labelled, so "Courts: North + South" doesn't hide that one of them sits on Shyam's booking — one we can't cancel or move ourselves.

🔄 Court info is actually live
The court fetch was quietly dying every scheduled run because chromium was never installed, so reminders went out showing courts as of poll creation and looked perfectly healthy. That's fixed, failures now say so loudly, and court figures carry how old they are instead of a three-day-old answer passing as fresh.

🚫 No more requests the club will refuse
The Athenaeum's booking horizon and cancellation cutoff are now known to the bot: /pb shyam won't be offered past the cutoff and /pb court cancel refuses inside the window and tells you what to do instead, rather than firing off something that gets rejected. /pb cancel game still goes through, since it also DMs players.

✅ Booking reports tell the truth
Both courts for Tue 09/08 7pm were booked and confirmed, and the run still reported a loss — the north and south jobs each try both courts, so one always "loses" the other. Confirmed bookings are no longer reported as lost, and a real loss still shows.

🗓️ /pb booking list
Show, add to and remove from the weekly booking schedule. Times are normalised (7pm, 7:00 PM and 19:00 all work), duplicates and no-op removals are refused, and the list always reads Monday-first with earlier times first. Also: the Game Day report no longer has a doubled blank line after the balance table, which tidies /pb show games too.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Documentation corrections, safety guards on pushes and deploys, and a lot of work on the developer session tooling and its test suite.

Mon 8/31/2026 78 commits

🎾 Court handover with Shyam, now hands-free
When Shyam votes in the weekly poll, Picklebot now runs /pb shyam MM/DD/YY for him on every game he's voted for, and the confirmation lands in his DM. The credit is worked out from the hourly rate times the 2-hour session length instead of a fixed amount, so it stays right if the rate changes. Three separate guards make sure a vote, a re-vote or a repeat weeks later can never double up a payment.

🔔 Court bookings and cancellations are being announced again
For 4 days, court notifications were silently dropped and nobody was told — that's fixed and verified. Cancellations and bookings now go to both the person who asked and Admin Dinkers, with each send independent so one failure can't swallow the other. Cancellation replies also go back to whoever ran the command, instead of nowhere. The joke in the game cancellation reply is gone.

🙋 /pb shyam from a DM
Admins can now run /pb shyam by DM, not just Shyam himself, and a crash that made the command fail from a DM is fixed — nothing was ever charged by that bug. The command is now listed in the admin help and documented in the READMEs.

👋 A welcome message that tells new members the truth
The welcome text now comes from the WhatsApp Group Info description that all 45 members actually read, so there's one master copy instead of three that had drifted apart. The game times are gone — two of the three were wrong, and the weekly poll already carries that week's real times. The poll day is now named in one place, so it can't go stale again.

📈 DUPR ratings only go up when they should
Rating sync now moves in one direction only, so a stale read can't walk your SMAD rating backwards. Score pushes are now treated as a publish rather than a save, so a batch of results actually goes out.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Every deploy is now smoke-tested instead of trusted, failed deploys actually fail, and production logs can be pulled from CI for diagnosis. Plus a long run of timezone fixes (everything is stated in Pacific now), developer safety hooks, and test suites that catch the bugs the old ones structurally couldn't.

Sun 8/30/2026 55 commits

🔔 No more vote nagging once the week is done
The daily vote reminder now checks whether there are any games left this week. Once the last game has begun, the reminder stops and non-voters are left off the shame list — no reason to chase a vote for a game you can no longer play.

📋 The Daily Nags Shame Report
The report now reads "Daily Nags Shame Report" with the date, so it's clear what it is when it lands.

😐 /pb match gets straight to the point
Asking for a match no longer tacks a joke onto the answer. Everything else, including /pb match undo and the post-game report, still comes with a joke.

💸 Payments find their way in on their own
There's a new /pb sync-zelle command, plus a payment sweep that now runs daily before the reminder job, so Zelle and Venmo payments get picked up without anyone asking. The bot also retries when Google Sheets hiccups mid-request instead of giving up. One such hiccup happened on 08/30 — nothing was lost, and the sweep and retries are there so the next one is handled quietly.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The developer dashboard got a lot of attention: it no longer slides sideways on a phone, the commit log collapsed from 321 phone screens to 26 with a month index, and deploy timing is now measured (p90 of 108s across 324 runs) and charted instead of hardcoded. Also cleaned stray files out of the project root and tightened how commits are categorised and logged.

Sat 8/29/2026 11 commits

🎾 Scores are easier to record
You can now dictate a match and Picklebot will understand it — spelled-out scores like "eleven nine" work, and scores on plain typed lines are read the same way as lines with @-mentions. "best", "b" and "w" now count as separators alongside "beat" and "def". And when a line can't be read, you get the real reason instead of a misleading one.

📋 "Record for this session" now shows DUPR
The session table gained a DPR column pulled from the roster, so you can see ratings next to the results. It still fits at 24 columns on a phone, and if the roster can't be read you just lose the column, not the table.

↩️ /pb match undo tells you where you stand
Undo now has a proper header and lists the matches still recorded for the session, so the scorekeeper can confirm the right one was removed. An empty session says "no matches recorded for" rather than showing nothing, and a dry run is clearly marked "(DRY RUN)".

⭐ Admins can set someone else's rating
New /pb set dupr @player <rating> for admins, while setting your own rating works exactly as before. Ratings must be between 2.0 and 6.0 in 0.5 steps, and set dupr @someone with no number now tells you the rating is missing. It's listed in the admin help only.

🗳️ Clearer poll nudge
The vote reminder header now reads "Not Voted in This Week's Poll".

📱 Pocketed phones are starting group video calls
On 8/28 a pocketed phone started a WhatsApp group video call during a game, with three members joining — the same pattern as the 8/25 incident. If WhatsApp is open when you pocket your phone, close it or lock the screen first.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Timestamps you see now say "PT" instead of a hardcoded PST label that was wrong half the year, release notes no longer tack on a joke, and set-dupr is available from the command line with the same rating rules.

Fri 8/28/2026 19 commits

💵 Balances that line up
The dollar figures in the balance block are now aligned, so you can scan who owes what down a single column instead of hunting across ragged lines.

😳 A tidier shame report
Money and voting are now separate sections of the shame report. Missing a payment and missing the poll are different sins, and now they read that way.

📬 Reminder emails you can actually file
Reminder email subjects now carry the date, and duplicates are collapsed behind them. Your inbox gets one clearly dated thread instead of a pile of identical-looking nudges.

📶 Messages going out again
A missing piece in the message sender had been breaking delivery, so some Picklebot messages never reached the group. That's fixed, and deploys are now blocked if a missing dependency like that ever sneaks in again.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Every corner of the bot now reads the clock from one shared Pacific timezone setting instead of 13 files doing their own thing, and GCP errors are swept hourly so problems get caught even when nobody's watching. The developer dashboard also picked up outage tracking with mean-time-to-restore and change-failure-rate tiles, a 5-per-row layout, and a build stamp.

Thu 8/27/2026 10 commits

🔔 The bot now tells us the moment it goes offline
If Picklebot's WhatsApp connection drops, an email alert now fires right away instead of the group finding out the hard way. On 8/26 the bot was offline for six minutes and we only noticed by chance — that was the last time. The alert goes by email on purpose: when the WhatsApp session is the thing that's broken, a WhatsApp message would never arrive.

🔒 Tighter security on the bot's WhatsApp account
Two-step verification is now switched on for the number Picklebot runs on, with a recovery email registered, so nobody can re-register it. Everything kept working through the change — the bot's session stayed connected and a test message went out fine.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
We closed out the investigation into the 8/25 group changes, ruling out one possibility at a time until only one explanation remained, and logged a support request with our WhatsApp provider for their session logs. We also wrote up how to audit and restore the bot's linked devices, so the next hiccup takes minutes instead of days.

Wed 8/26/2026 23 commits

🎾 Court bookings are now verified, not assumed
Picklebot used to report a booking as done the moment it submitted the request. Now it reloads the reservations grid afterward and checks the court is actually there, and the confirmation email says SUCCESS only for a confirmed booking — otherwise SUBMITTED. Dry runs are flagged as such, and the verification step is time-bounded so it can never swallow the report.

📖 New /pb post game report
You can now pull up the post-game story on demand with /pb post game. The same renderer powers the match confirmation, so the two always tell the same tale.

✅ /pb match now shows the session's matches so far
When you record a score, the confirmation lists the running match list for that session, so you can see at a glance what's been logged and catch a mistyped score right away.

🗓️ Game day info in one place
/pb game next now mirrors the Game Day report, so you get the same details whichever you ask for. The list of who hasn't voted yet moved into the Game Day report, and /pb game remind is new for nudging them.

📋 Tidier rosters and standings
The game roster now uses the same player table as everywhere else, so columns line up consistently. The trailing period after the rank is gone, which keeps /pb players from wrapping on narrow phone screens.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Deploy and Terraform failures now open GitHub issues with the actual exception line, error reporting can be listed and resolved from CI, and the diagnose tool gained free-text and multi-term log search with configurable sweeps (25h, 48h, 7-day). Also added a roster-width check that measures the Top N leaderboard and no longer passes when it reads zero players, plus some file cleanup and docs.

Tue 8/25/2026 31 commits

🗳️ Poll and reminder nudges
If the poll goes out today, you won't also get a vote reminder for it — no more double nudges. Shame-list ties are now broken by last name, so the order is stable instead of random. Weekly poll creation now runs as part of the one daily job, so it fires on a single reliable schedule.

🤖 /pb is back to answering properly
The AI model behind /pb intent reading had been retired, and a bad library version was breaking its Firestore lookups — both are fixed, so asking /pb things works again. Every /pb command now gets written to an audit trail after your reply is sent, so logging never slows your answer down.

💸 Payment thank-yous for everyone
Thank-you emails for Venmo and Zelle payments were only going out to players who had opted into SMS. That gate is gone, so you get your confirmation either way.

📋 Cleaner Last Call report
Tightened the spacing to a single blank line before Group Stats, so the Last Call report reads cleanly in WhatsApp.

🔔 Game day reminders no longer vanish quietly
If a game day reminder gets skipped — nobody marked y/2 for the date, or a marked name doesn't match the roster — it now gets reported instead of silently doing nothing, so a missing reminder gets noticed and fixed.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Plenty of plumbing: logging that was being silently thrown away in all four functions now works, keepalive checks fail loudly instead of pretending the bot is warm, WhatsApp send failures record the full response, and usage and log diagnostics plus a scheduler audit were added. We also locked dependencies across all the Cloud Functions and CLI, cleaned out dead Twilio secrets, inventoried the rest, and fixed Terraform timeouts and plan failures hiding themselves.

Mon 8/24/2026 4 commits

📱 The Sunday poll post now reads clean on your phone

The upcoming-games report that goes out with the weekly poll is titled "Week of MM/DD/YYYY Upcoming Games" so you can see at a glance which week it covers. The per-game rosters and the "we need N more players" warning are gone from that post — right after the poll goes up the only voter is whoever created it, so those lines said nothing. "This wk" now counts the poll's week instead of the week that already finished, so the attendance number matches the games listed above it.

📊 Leaderboard and stats titles fit one line

The player leaderboard no longer wraps awkwardly on mobile, and the group stats headers were shortened to "Top 15: Hours Played Since 6/25" and "Player Bal/Cred and Nags" so each sits on a single line. The vote shame title lost its trailing colon too.

📌 A nudge to pin the poll

When the weekly poll posts, Gene now gets a DM with the poll question and its options as a reminder to pin it to the top of the group. Vote reminders, last call and the shame report all tell you the poll is pinned, so a missed pin made three messages wrong. WhatsApp offers no way for the bot to pin on its own, so the reminder arrives at the one moment it can be acted on — and if the DM fails, the poll still goes out.

🗂️ Archiving a player actually removes them from the group

Archive removals had been silently failing: the bot was asking WhatsApp to remove the player without the credentials to do it. Those are now in place, and the bot confirms removal by checking the live participant list rather than trusting a "success" reply, re-checking once after 2 seconds to allow for WhatsApp lag.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

The weekly attendance count had been copy-pasted into three files and is now one shared piece of code, and missing credentials log a clear error instead of an unhelpful failure.

Sun 8/23/2026 8 commits

🏓 Match scores are here — /pb match now takes an optional score, and you only type the losing score: the winner's number comes from league rules (to 11, win by 2 from 10-10, hard cap 15). A losing score above 14 gets rejected, since 15 is the cap. You can also use @me for yourself (WhatsApp won't let you @-mention yourself), and typed names work too, including multi-word ones like @Jerry Shen, so mentions, @me and typed names all mix on one line.

📅 Matches are logged under the game's own date — The log now stores the date and time the game was actually played, not the moment the score was typed. Match IDs are anchored to the game as well, so 20260821-8pm-1 is the first match of the 8/21 8pm game. Scores like 11-9 and times like 8pm no longer get mangled into dates and clock values.

📊 Win-loss on the player list and leaderboard — /pb players and the Group Stats leaderboard now share one layout and both show a W-L column next to hours and DUPR, with a blank record showing as 0. The balance column is gone from both, which narrows /pb players from 43 to 37 characters so it stops wrapping on phones — balances are still in /pb balances and the group stats balance block. Sorting stays on hours played, as there isn't enough match data yet to rank on win-loss.

😳 Daily shame report — New /pb shame shows who owes money and who hasn't voted in this week's poll, and it also posts to the group from the 8am daily run, right after the Venmo sync and payment reminders so balances and nag counts are same-day fresh. Nobody gets shamed on the day the poll is created, so you always have a chance to vote first — you can still pull it up on demand any day. The balance table now has Name, Bal/Cred and Pay Nags headers, and non-voters are listed by how many vote nags they've collected.

🎉 A nicer note when everyone's square — If there are credits but nobody owes, the report says so under the Player Balance/Credit header instead of reading like a shame list, and the existing all-square message still covers the case where no one has any balance at all. The balance and vote lists now sit together as one block, the header carries the report date as Daily Shame Report for MM/DD/YY in PST, and the "want to show up" typo is fixed.

🛠️ Behind the scenes — Shared renderers for the player table and balance block so the same numbers show up the same way everywhere, plus README and docs updates.

Sat 8/22/2026 37 commits

🏆 Match results are now tracked
You can log doubles matches straight in chat by @-mentioning the four players, one match per line, so a whole session goes in with a single message. Only doubles count — exactly two players a side — and everyone in a match must have voted to play that session, which keeps the log in step with payments. Your own record shows in /pb stats my and everyone else's in /pb standings; /pb record is gone, and record/records now take you to the standings.

❌ Canceling a game tells the people who were playing
/pb cancel game next cancels the earliest upcoming game from the current poll, and if there's nothing upcoming it says so plainly instead of choking. Every cancel now DMs and emails each player who voted yes, with the game time and a note that the courts were released, sent before the vote column disappears so nobody gets missed.

🔔 Reminders now tell you how many you've had
Payment reminder DMs count your nudges and suggest pre-paying $50/mo, and vote reminder DMs say how many vote reminders you've received. Your Stats block shows both Vote Reminders and Payment Reminders after your DUPR, with the pre-pay hint when you owe. The vacation example now reads /pb set vacation MM/DD/YY with your return date.

🥇 Leaderboard back to top 15
Group stats list 15 players instead of 20, with the header updated to match.

😂 Better pickleball jokes
Social links shared in the group chat are now collected daily into the jokes sheet, with duplicates of the same reel merged and @-mentions turned into first names so phone numbers are never stored. A deeper scan back through June added 14 more jokes, bringing the sheet to 150, and non-jokes like photo albums and group invites are filtered out.

⚖️ Health log reads cleanly
Entries now show as 08/21/2026: 195.4 lbs | 226h | 3.5, and a credentials fix means the log no longer comes back empty when it actually has entries.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The Release Dashboard got codebase and velocity stats, commits-per-day and time-of-day charts, and emails and phone numbers are stripped from it automatically. Deploys got faster — about 73 seconds, down from 90.

Fri 8/21/2026 15 commits

🏆 Top 20 leaderboard, now with money and attendance — /pb games grew from a top-10 list into a full report: Top 20 — Hours Played Since June 2025 with DUPR ratings, then weekly attendance, then a balances and credits section with neatly aligned columns and reminder nag counts. The report now also gets posted to the SMAD group after a poll is created and with the daily reminders, so everyone sees the same numbers.

📊 Your stats in DMs, the group's stats in the group — DMs now show your own personal stats block, including your playing streak read from your full game history, while group messages show the group picture. The pointless "Played this week!" line for a streak of 1 is gone, and every message ends with a standard signature, a hint on how to get help, and a joke.

🎾 Court numbers on your games — /pb games, your next game and every game display now show which court you're on. Court info is fetched live from Athenaeum for all courts and refreshed on demand, so you're not looking at a stale booking from an old poll.

🌤️ Humidity in the forecast — Game reports and /pb weather now include humidity %, on its own line so the forecast stays easy to read.

💸 Venmo payments match more reliably — For standard payments, we now match on a unique last name as a fallback, so fewer payments get stranded as unmatched. Thank-you messages also show the correct PST/PDT label instead of a hardcoded one.

🧹 Tidier Last Call — The "Already voted" list was dropped from the Last Call group summary, keeping it to what you actually need to see before the deadline.

🛠️ Behind the scenes — Fixed the daily welcome-back DM for returning players (missing credentials, plus it now only sends after a vacation is actually cleared), replaced hardcoded "2h before" references with the real game-time constant, and worked through some Venmo timestamp and email auth logging, docs and code cleanup.

Mon 8/17/2026 1 commit

🎾 New: /pb shyam
One command now cancels the North court and credits $10 back — no more sorting it out by hand in the chat.

Sun 8/16/2026 2 commits

🏖️ Vacation bookings land on the right day
Fixed a bug where booking a court while a player was on vacation could end up with the wrong date. Your booking now holds the day you actually picked.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added a backup scheduled trigger so the member sync keeps running even if the usual runner isn't available.

Fri 7/31/2026 1 commit

🎾 Court info straight from the source

Game-day and last-call messages now pull the court listing live from the Athenaeum, so what you see is what's actually booked.

Thu 7/30/2026 4 commits

📋 Weekly poll is simpler
The "Want to play but not these times" option is gone from the poll — it wasn't being used. One less thing to scroll past when you vote.

🏖️ Vacation mode handles your balance
When you confirm vacation, if you still owe money, Picklebot now shows your balance and a payment link right there so you can settle up before you go. The exemption message no longer mentions payment separately, since it's now handled in the confirmation.

🔔 Reminders in a smarter order
Player reminders now lead with payment reminders, so what you owe is the first thing you see instead of buried further down.

Sat 7/25/2026 2 commits

🎾 "Need more players" now says how many

When we're short for the week, the nudge is personalized to how many courts we have booked, so you know exactly how many more players we need instead of a generic call for bodies.

⏰ Last call moved to 1 hour before game time

The pre-game last call used to go out 2 hours ahead; it now lands 1 hour before we play. That keeps the final heads-up closer to the actual decision moment.

Wed 7/22/2026 1 commit

🌴 Vacation mode for the group

While Gene is away, Picklebot will sit quiet: no weekly poll, no reminders, and no court booking. Nothing to do on your end — normal service picks back up after the break.

Tue 7/21/2026 4 commits

🔔 Last call only pings people who haven't voted
If you already responded to this week's poll, last call will leave you alone — a blank game cell for a poll responder now counts as an implicit "no". Only players who haven't voted since the poll went up (or have never voted) get the nudge. Vote reminders and last call now read your voting history the same way, so the two can't disagree.

🆕 A correct free first week for new players
New members now start with their join date on record instead of next Sunday, so your first week is free no matter which day the poll was created.

🎾 Courts shown where you need them
Last call and the game-day report now show which courts are booked. Poll options and the sheet's column headers carry the court name too, so you can see where you're signing up to play — now without the clunky angle brackets around the court name.

Sun 7/19/2026 1 commit

🛠️ Behind the scenes — Switched the Claude Code plan from Max ($100/mo) to Pro ($20/mo) to keep running costs down. Nothing changes for you in the group.

Fri 7/17/2026 2 commits

🏝️ Vacation can now run as long as you need

Setting a vacation no longer caps your return date at one month out. Tell Picklebot any future date and it's used exactly as you gave it — the old "max length" warning is gone from the help and status text too.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

New players added to the roster now start with their Last Voted date set to the coming Sunday.

Thu 7/16/2026 2 commits

👤 Your name, spelled out properly
When WhatsApp only hands us your initials, Picklebot now checks Google Contacts to find your full name instead. So you should see real names on the poll, the Game Plan and the score sheets rather than mystery letters.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The member sync job now carries the SMAD hourly court rate in its own settings, so cost-related numbers stay consistent.

Wed 7/15/2026 10 commits

🔔 Vote reminders now go to the right people
A wiring problem was sending reminders based on the wrong poll date, so some of you got nudged when you'd already voted. Poll creation dates are now read correctly, including from the Poll Log Archive for older polls, and "last voted" is compared by date only so a vote earlier the same day counts. Odd entries in the Poll Log no longer throw the reminder off either.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
We added error alerts for the things that quietly break a player's day — a failed WhatsApp send, a Venmo or Zelle payment not recorded, a missing payment thank-you, or a failed poll date lookup — so we hear about them instead of you. The webhook that receives your messages also got more memory, from 256MB to 512MB.

Tue 7/14/2026 1 commit

🎾 Court names are back to normal
We briefly had the North and South courts mixed up — that's been put back the right way, so North is court 3 and South is court 4 again. Bookings and reminders will now point you to the court you actually expect.

Mon 7/13/2026 6 commits

🛠️ Behind the scenes — Picklebot's underlying libraries (Playwright, python-dotenv, pytz, the google-* packages, venmo-api, matplotlib and the webhook requirements except cloudevents) are now unpinned so they always pull the latest versions. Nothing changes in how you use the bot.

Sun 7/12/2026 3 commits

🎾 Court bookings land on the right court
North and South were swapped behind the scenes, so a booking could show up on the wrong court. The IDs are now correct — North is court 4, South is court 3 — so what you see in the booking is the court you'll play on.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Picklebot's WhatsApp messaging now runs through one shared internal piece instead of an outside library, and some stray debug files were cleaned out of the project.

Thu 7/9/2026 1 commit

💸 Zelle payments from business accounts now match up

Picklebot reads the Zelle column names a little more flexibly, so payments sent from business accounts get matched to your name instead of sitting unrecognized. If you've paid from a business account before, your dues should now land where they belong.

Wed 7/8/2026 2 commits

🌍 International numbers now work
If your WhatsApp number isn't a US one, Picklebot now handles it properly — no more mix-ups when it DMs you.

📵 No more text messages
SMS is gone. From now on you'll hear from Picklebot by WhatsApp DM and email only, so everything lands in one place instead of being split across your texts.

Fri 7/3/2026 5 commits

🎾 Court booking got smarter
Picklebot can now book the West and East Tennis Courts, so there are more slots in play each week. The backup booking job now skips single-court entries, which stops us from accidentally double-booking the same court. And when a slot is already taken or the date doesn't match, the bot closes the pop-up and carries on instead of giving up on the rest of the bookings.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Updated python-dotenv (security fix) and the browser automation tool Playwright that drives the court bookings.

Sat 6/20/2026 3 commits

💳 Venmo payments keep getting picked up
The mailbox connection that spots your Venmo payments now refreshes its access on both sides at once, so the payment checker on Cloud Run stops going quiet after a token renewal. Fewer moments where you paid and the bot hadn't noticed yet.

🎾 No pointless backup booking runs
The court booking backup job now skips itself entirely when there's no |Both entry in the booking list, so it only wakes up when there's actually a second court to chase.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Documented how the Gmail token stays in sync across both secret stores and gave CI the write access it needs to do it.

Sat 6/13/2026 1 commit

🎾 Court names Picklebot understands
You can now say "south court" or "north court" and Picklebot will know exactly which court you mean, instead of not recognizing the name.

Wed 6/10/2026 7 commits

⏰ Game day reminders reach everyone
If you voted on game day itself, the reminder could skip you. Now everyone who's in gets the reminder.

🙋 Clearer opt-out in vote reminders
The vote reminder now shows you the exact command to use — /pb set vacation — so you can mute the nudges without guessing the wording.

🔁 Fewer missed polls and bookings
The daily runner, the Sunday poll and court booking now retry automatically if something hiccups, so the weekly poll and your court are less likely to be held up.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
A new watchdog keeps an eye on all 5 automated workflows and alerts Gene by DM and email if one fails, and the monitoring and sync-members schedule are now documented.

Tue 6/9/2026 1 commit

- On Sundays, last-call was reading only the current week, so it never saw the Monday games that had just been created, and nobody got a reminder.
📣 Sunday last call fixes
The last-call reminder was only looking at the current week, so on Sundays it missed the Monday games that had just been created and nobody got a nudge. It now checks both weeks, so you'll get your reminder to sign up for the upcoming games.

Fri 6/5/2026 3 commits

👥 The roster keeps itself up to date
Picklebot now checks the WhatsApp group every morning at 8am PT and updates the player list automatically. If someone leaves the group, they're archived; if they come back, they're restored. Names are also looked up through Contacts, so new members show up properly instead of as a bare phone number.

📋 Survey answers come along for the ride
The daily member sync now also pulls in survey responses, so your preferences stay current without anyone having to re-enter them.

Wed 6/3/2026 10 commits

💰 Last Paid dates stick around again
Your Last Paid date now gets stamped straight onto the main sheet when you pay, so it no longer disappears when old payments are archived. New players get a proper date from the start, and there's a backfill that scans both the Payment Log and the Archive to repair any dates that went missing.

🫀 Early warning before the Dead Man Switch
If Gene hasn't checked in by day 9 or 10, Picklebot now sends an alive check before the Dead Man Switch fires. Both the alive check and the Dead Man Switch notification go to the Admin Dinkers group as well as Gene by DM and email, so nothing slips through quietly.

📋 Archived players no longer clutter reminders
Vote and survey reminder previews now list archived players in their own "Archived" section instead of mixing them in with players on vacation. Archived players are also left out of survey slot rankings entirely, so the Game Plan only considers people actually playing.

🔐 Sheet access handled automatically
Picklebot now grants viewer access to the sheet when a new member is synced in with an email, and revokes it when a player is archived. A one-time cleanup removed access for players who were already archived.

📇 Better contact sync
/pb members sync now pulls names and emails more reliably from Google Contacts, so emails land in the sheet on sync instead of staying blank — which is also what makes the automatic sheet access work.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The README now covers the Drive access lifecycle, the player archive system and the Dead Man Switch early warning, plus details like the MM/DD format for /pb set vacation and the Contacts fallback during member sync.

Tue 6/2/2026 2 commits

💵 Court fee is now $5/hr
The court rate used for session costs has been updated to $5/hr, and the welcome message now says $10/session. Sessions before the rate change date still use the old rate, so past balances stay correct.

🌴 Leaving the group and coming back is smoother
Players who leave are now parked with a vacation date of 12/31/2099 instead of being moved to a separate archive sheet. If you rejoin, your row is found by phone number and your vacation date is cleared, so your history comes back with you. Archived players still get payment reminders if they owe money.

Sun 5/31/2026 1 commit

🗳️ The weekly poll now lands Sunday morning — Picklebot creates the poll at 8am on Sunday instead of Saturday at 1pm, so you'll see it when the week ahead is actually on your mind.

Wed 5/20/2026 5 commits

👋 New players get a proper welcome
When WhatsApp doesn't share your name, Picklebot now checks Google Contacts to find it. If it still can't, your welcome DM just says "Hi there!" instead of the old "Hi Unknown (1926)!".

📧 Email notifications reach everyone
Heads-up emails now go to any player with an email address on file, instead of only those set up for SMS reminders. Archive notices do the same, so if you're being archived you'll actually hear about it.

✍️ Clearer wording when you're archived
The reasons now say "last month" instead of "last 3 months", and "not voted in the weekly games poll" instead of just "not voted", so it's obvious what happened and how to come back.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added a global off switch for emails, enabled the People API, and updated the Gmail setup docs for the new contacts permission.

Sun 5/17/2026 1 commit

🏖️ Vacation dates are easier to type
You can now set your time away with just the month and day — no year needed. Type /pb set vacation with a date like MM/DD and Picklebot will understand it.

Sat 4/25/2026 2 commits

🗳️ New poll option for "none of these times work"
The weekly availability poll now ends with an extra choice: "Want to play but not these times. DM Gene your openings." Pick it if you want in but none of the listed slots work, then message Gene your openings. Choosing it marks you as unavailable for all the listed times, so the poll count stays accurate.

Thu 4/23/2026 6 commits

📋 Game report player list is easier to read
The player list in the game report is back to a clean column-aligned layout, with name, DUPR and hours lining up down the page. We tried a few formats to get it rendering right in WhatsApp and settled on the one that's easiest to scan, and the spacing around the list is tidied up so there's no stray gap after it.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added a separate email blast script that reads the 2026 Senior Parents Email List and groups 220 students into 207 unique families so each household gets one personalized note.

Tue 4/21/2026 1 commit

📦 Roster cleanup now moves faster, and vacations are safe

Players who haven't played in 1 month (down from 3 months) are now flagged for archiving, so the roster stays current. If you're on vacation, your return date counts as your latest activity, so you won't be archived while you're away. Setting a vacation updates your Last Voted date to your return date, and the archive preview message now says "1 month" to match.

Sat 4/18/2026 2 commits

💸 Payment thank-yous now show when you paid

When your Venmo or Zelle payment is picked up, the thank-you message now includes the exact time of the transaction, like "on Apr 16, 2026 at 5:53 PM PST", so you can match it to your own records at a glance.

🕒 Payment Log timestamps in PST

Every payment entry is now stamped in Pacific time, and the old "Date" column is now "Transaction Date". Venmo payments keep their full transaction time instead of being trimmed to just the day, so the log reflects exactly when money moved.

🔁 No more duplicate payment entries

Payment sync now checks both the Payment Log and the Archive before recording anything, and skips transactions older than the last aggregation. That means a payment you already made won't show up twice after dues are totaled.

Fri 4/17/2026 5 commits

💸 Refunds and credits now work in /pb record payment
You can record a negative amount, so /pb record payment Derek Chang -4 venmo zeroing balance finally goes through instead of failing to parse. Handy for refunds, credits, or zeroing out a balance.

🧾 New /pb aggregate payments to tidy up the Payment Log
This rolls each invoiced player's payments into a single row and moves the individual rows to a new Payment Log Archive sheet. Your Paid and Balance numbers stay exactly the same, and running it again just updates the existing rows rather than double-counting. A dry run shows the aggregate amount per player before anything changes.

📦 Archiving inactive players got simpler
Archiving now goes by 3 criteria instead of 4: no games in 3 months, no votes in 1 month, and not on vacation. Filling out the survey no longer keeps an inactive player on the active roster. The preview, email, and DM notifications all list the new criteria.

🗳️ No more empty games summary right after the poll
The next-week games summary is no longer posted the moment the poll goes up, since it had zero votes and nothing useful to show. The poll itself still posts as usual, and last-call reminders are unchanged.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Documented /pb aggregate payments in the README and tidied up the Payment Log columns so everything lines up.

Thu 4/9/2026 1 commit

🧹 Removing someone from the group now tells the truth

When a player is removed from the WhatsApp group, Picklebot now checks whether it actually worked instead of assuming it did. Failed removals used to be reported as successes, so someone could stay in the group while the bot said otherwise. Failures are now logged with the full response, which makes the occasional hiccup much faster to track down.

Wed 4/8/2026 1 commit

📋 Survey sync now shows who's missing

When the survey syncs, the summary now lists respondents whose email or name didn't match anyone in the main sheet, plus the players who haven't taken the survey yet (skipping anyone on vacation). The Survey Reminders summary also lists the reminded players as bullets, the same way Vote Reminders does, and adds an On Vacation section sorted by return date. Less guesswork about who still needs to fill it out.

Fri 4/3/2026 1 commit

💸 Payment thank-yous show the right balance

When your Venmo or Zelle payment is recorded, the thank-you message now shows your balance after the payment is subtracted, so the number you see matches what you actually owe.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Deploys now copy the whole shared code folder, so updates can't go out half-stale.

Wed 4/1/2026 2 commits

💰 Credits now show up correctly
If you had a credit on your account, the bot was sometimes reading it as zero when Venmo or Zelle payments came in. Balances are now read the same way everywhere, so your credit is counted properly and payment notes show the right amount.

✉️ Clearer vote reminder DM
The reminder DM has been reworded and reordered: the note about opting out now comes right after the group link, and the copy mentions the Saturday 1pm poll and that you can set your own time off with /pb set vacation.

Tue 3/31/2026 1 commit

💵 Credits now read like credits

When you're ahead on payments, Picklebot says "$3.00 credit" instead of the confusing "$-3.00". Balances now look the same everywhere you see them — the game day DM, /pb balance mine, and payment reminders.

Mon 3/30/2026 1 commit

📣 Last call now finds next week's games

When you send a last call for a specific game date and time, Picklebot now checks this week's poll first and then next week's. Games sitting on next week's poll can finally be targeted instead of coming back empty. If the date still doesn't match anything, the error message lists the games available across both weeks so you can pick the right one.

Wed 3/25/2026 7 commits

🏖️ Set your own vacation — no more asking an admin
Use /pb vacation to see your current status, /pb set vacation <MM/DD/YY> to go on vacation (up to 31 days — longer dates get capped with a warning), and /pb clear vacation when you're back. Dates work as MM/DD/YY or MM/DD/YYYY, and the commands work in any chat, not just DMs. Admins get a heads-up automatically whenever you set or clear vacation, so the poll and Game Plan stay accurate.

🎾 Check and update your own DUPR
/pb dupr shows your current SMAD DUPR rating, and /pb set dupr <rating> updates it (2.0 to 6.0, in 0.5 steps). Works in DMs, the SMAD group, and Admin Dinkers. Changes are sent to the admins so ratings stay trustworthy.

📦 Archiving inactive players (admins)
/pb archive players finds players who have gone quiet on all four counts — no games in 3 months, no votes in 1 month, no survey, and not on vacation — moves them to an archive sheet, removes them from the WhatsApp group, and sends them a DM and email. /pb archive player <name> archives someone directly. If an archived player comes back, the members sync now restores their original row instead of starting them from scratch, and the archive sheet keeps its game columns in step when a poll is created or a game is cancelled. The notification DM now includes a working group link, and if one player's archive fails the rest of the batch still goes through.

😄 Joke is for everyone
/pb joke now sits in the self-service part of the help text instead of under admin Actions, because anyone can use it.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Deploy config now ships the pieces the archive command needs to remove players from the group, and the README env var table was brought up to date.

Tue 3/24/2026 2 commits

💵 Payments accept more methods and dollar signs
Recording a payment now works with any method you name — court-credit and credit included, not just Venmo, Zelle, cash or check. You can also type the amount with a dollar sign (like $8) and it will be read correctly instead of being rejected.

Sun 3/22/2026 4 commits

📧 Game day reminders reach everyone again
Your game day DM now goes out with email notifications working properly — some players were missing them before. The message also looks cleaner, with the extra blank line between the player list and your balance removed.

🗳️ The weekly poll only shows up when it should
The poll is now created only by the Saturday 1pm job, so it can no longer appear by accident during the daily 8am run. Vote reminders are also more reliable: the poll's creation date is saved the moment the poll goes out, so reminders work even before anyone has voted.

⚖️ Weight logging now shows your full stats
When you record your weight, you get the confirmation plus your complete stats report and history right away, instead of just a one-line reply.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Reminders now pull player info from a single source and one fewer spreadsheet read, and a shared Firestore setup was added across the bot's services.

Sat 3/21/2026 1 commit

🗓️ The weekly poll now drops Saturday at 1pm

Instead of waiting for Sunday morning, the poll for the week's game goes out Saturday at 1pm. You get an extra day to check your plans and lock in your spot, and we get a clearer headcount earlier for the court booking.

Fri 3/20/2026 1 commit

📋 Poll reminders now come every day

If you haven't answered the weekly poll yet, Picklebot will nudge you daily instead of only on even-numbered days. Fewer missed replies means the lineup locks in sooner.

Thu 3/19/2026 8 commits

💸 Payments record themselves again
Venmo and Zelle payments were failing to sync, so some payments weren't being recorded — that's fixed. Zelle now only looks at the last 24 hours of email, so old payments no longer get re-recorded as new ones. Zelle thank-you messages send properly again too.

📧 Emails are back on
Email had been silently switched off in production, so notifications that should have reached your inbox never did. Email is now on by default, with a single switch to turn it off if ever needed.

💰 Clearer payment reminders
Payment reminder DMs now show the date of your last game, a Venmo link, and consistent 💰💸 emojis whether they reach you on WhatsApp, SMS or email. The thank-you message after a payment got its missing 💰 back.

✍️ Picklebot signs off the same way everywhere
Venmo and Zelle messages were signing as "SMAD Pickleball" without the emojis while everything else used the proper signature. Now every message Picklebot sends uses one identical signature.

📝 Tidier messages
Vote reminders and game reports lost their stray blank lines — before "Games This Week", before "We need X more", and between the signature and the joke. Game reports now always show the detailed DUPR and hours format instead of sometimes falling back to a plain list of names.

📋 Shorter survey reminder
The survey reminder is now a simple one-time explanation of the DUPR, SMS and email opt-ins. The outdated session schedule and bar hours text is gone.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Shared formatters and config were consolidated so reminders, signatures and deploys all pull from one place, and the docs were updated to match.

Wed 3/18/2026 4 commits

💸 Zelle payments now record themselves
Pay with Zelle and Picklebot picks it up straight from the payment email — no more asking someone to mark you paid. It matches your name even if you go by a nickname (Gabriel → Gabe), and every payment is tagged with a transaction ID and a recorded-at time so nothing gets counted twice. Venmo keeps working exactly as before.

📧 Reminders now arrive by email too
Vote reminders, balance reminders and last call can now reach you by email as well as WhatsApp and SMS, all sent together so you never get one without the other. Email subjects carry an emoji so you can spot them at a glance (Vote Reminder 🗳️, Balance Reminder 💰, Last Call 🥃).

🙏 A thank-you when you pay
Record a payment and the player gets a thank-you DM on WhatsApp, SMS and email, sometimes with a joke. Messages also got a light polish: no more "Thanks," opener and the signature is now bold.

💡 Lights for night games
For games starting at 6pm or later, Picklebot emails the courts desk at 8pm to ask for the lights, so you're not playing in the dark. If the game gets cancelled, that reminder is cleaned up automatically along with the other scheduled jobs.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added the Gmail credentials to our secret setup and refreshed the docs, made the Venmo sync optional when no token is set, and fixed a scheduling bug that could pass the wrong setting when creating reminder jobs.

Tue 3/17/2026 1 commit

🗓️ Availability heatmap always shows the latest answers
The heatmap now updates when someone edits their existing poll answer, not just when a new person replies. Previously an edit could leave the old picture in place, since only the number of responses was being checked. Each heatmap link is also freshly stamped so WhatsApp can't show you an old image.

Mon 3/16/2026 4 commits

🗓️ New games show up right away
/pb games used to say "No games scheduled" until someone voted — now every game appears as soon as the poll goes up. Last call also works properly right after poll creation, and the night-before last-call nudge now goes out at 8pm instead of 7pm.

❌ Cancel a game by day name
You can now type /pb game cancel mon (or fri, etc.) instead of the full date, and Picklebot finds this week's game for you. If there's no game that day — or more than one — it'll tell you instead of guessing. Sunday cancels now look ahead to the upcoming week's poll, so a Mon 3/16 game is found correctly.

Fri 3/13/2026 4 commits

💸 No more double payment pings
Venmo syncs and their WhatsApp messages could fire twice when a message got delivered more than once. That's now locked down, so you get one payment confirmation per payment — not two.

📋 Game info looks the same everywhere
Game Day Reminder, Last Call, Vote Reminder and Next Game now use one shared layout, with the same date style — DoW MM/DD/YYYY @ time — in all of them. The full player list always shows, so no more cut-off at 8 players. Weather for the Vote Reminder is fetched in one go, so it arrives faster.

🗓️ /pb games shows the whole week
It used to list only games still ahead of you. Now you see every game this week, with past ones marked with a checkmark and no weather.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
README and architecture notes were updated for the payment dedup work and the court argument removal from game reminders.

Tue 3/10/2026 11 commits

🔔 Vote reminders every day
Vote reminders now go out daily instead of only on game days, so you get a nudge whether or not it's a game night. The reminder DM is shorter and names the poll you haven't voted in, with a link straight to the group.

📣 Last Call knows which poll
The Last Call DM now names the poll and includes the group link, so you can see what you're being called for and jump in with one tap.

😄 Jokes can carry links
The jokes sheet now supports a URL column, so a joke can come with a link attached. The meme command has been retired.

📲 Texts go out through a registered messaging service
SMS now sends over an A2P 10DLC messaging service instead of a single number, which keeps texts from the bot landing reliably.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
We removed the Sentry error-tracking setup, consolidated duplicate GitHub token secrets, and tidied the README with updated secret counts and a codebase size table.

Mon 3/9/2026 5 commits

😄 A joke with every message

Picklebot now signs off at the end of its messages instead of the top, and tacks a pickleball joke onto every WhatsApp send — including these release notes. Same info, slightly more groan.

⏰ 7pm Last Call

There's now a Last Call reminder in the evening at 7pm, so you get one more nudge before the weekly poll closes. Scheduling also correctly rolls over to next week when it should, so reminders land for the right game.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Fixed credentials handling for the jokes sheet so it works from our command line and automated runs, and smoothed out infrastructure setup by reusing the existing database instead of failing on it.

Sun 3/8/2026 1 commit

😂 A joke with every reply
Picklebot now tacks a random joke onto the end of its responses, including court bookings — the only exceptions are /pb joke and /pb meme, which are already in the joke business. Small thing, but it should make checking the poll a little more fun.

💸 Cleaner Venmo handles
If you include an @ at the front of your Venmo username, Picklebot now strips it before saving, so your handle is stored the way payments expect it.

Sat 3/7/2026 2 commits

🎾 Court booking is back to grabbing courts cleanly
The booking run no longer does its warm-up pass, which was sometimes leaving a pop-up overlay on screen and blocking the click that locks in your court. Bookings should now go through without getting stuck.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The warm-up change is written up in our profiling notes so we can keep an eye on booking speed.

Fri 3/6/2026 17 commits

🗑️ Cancel a booked game
You can now call off a court with /pb game cancel — no more asking someone to do it by hand. It's listed in the help text, and the Game section now shows a paddle icon so it's easier to spot.

⚖️ Track your weight with Picklebot
New /pb weight record lets you log your weight, and it works in every group, not just one. Each entry comes back with the date so you can see exactly when you logged it, and your weight is now stored on the main sheet alongside your DUPR.

📊 See your own stats
/pb stats my shows your current stats plus your full Health Log history, newest first, with weight, hours and DUPR on each entry. Health commands now sit in the read-only section of the help list so it's clear they only show you information.

🌐 A home page for SMAD
Picklebot now has a public landing page, complete with a header photo.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Fixed a missing module in the deploy so the health commands work reliably, corrected the Health Log column mapping, tidied the court-booking script's behavior when a cancel fails, and updated the READMEs and systems diagram.

Thu 3/5/2026 3 commits

💌 Payment confirmations keep flowing
Picklebot now renews its Gmail connection every other day instead of every 6 days. That means less chance of it going quiet and missing a Venmo or Zelle confirmation, so your payment gets marked as received on time.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The repo is now private with a security audit document added, and some internal notes were tidied up so they render properly.

Wed 3/4/2026 1 commit

🗳️ Vote reminder DMs look like the rest of the bot

When Picklebot nudges you to vote, the games in that DM now show up in the same format you see everywhere else. One consistent look for upcoming games, no more second version drifting out of sync.

Tue 3/3/2026 1 commit

🎾 Court names in your booking list look right again
When you pull up the booking list, each court now shows its proper name instead of an unresolved alias. No more guessing which court you're actually booked on.

Mon 3/2/2026 5 commits

🏝️ Vacation-aware booking suggestions
Booking suggestions and best times now know who's away, so the slots Picklebot recommends line up with who can actually play.

🔁 Repeat a command as often as you like
Sending the same /pb command twice in a row no longer gets silently swallowed — every message gets an answer now.

💪 Picklebot stops crashing mid-conversation
Picklebot was running out of memory (544 MiB against a 512MB limit) and dropping out; it now has 1024MB of room. Last call also no longer comes up empty — if this week is done, it rolls forward to next week.

🗳️ /pb survey sync
A new command that matches survey responses in two passes, so poll and survey answers line up with the right players.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Shared game, poll and formatting code now lives in one place for both the bot and the command line, so the same answer comes back wherever you ask.

Sun 3/1/2026 8 commits

🗳️ Your votes stick now
Voting on game day no longer gets quietly overwritten — a yes on the day of play is recorded as 2 hours, and an old "cannot play" rule that stripped valid future game-date votes is gone. Votes for games already in the past are now blocked, so the poll only reflects games you can actually play.

💸 No payment nudge right before you play
If you have a game today, Picklebot holds off on payment reminders until after game time. One less Venmo/Zelle ping while you're grabbing your paddle.

📅 Court bookings fetched automatically
Picklebot now pulls reservations itself instead of leaning on a manual booking list, and it merges back-to-back hours into one block. The court info you see is current and reads as one clean session instead of separate hours.

📵 No more double messages
The sender now remembers what it has already sent, so you shouldn't get the same message twice.

🔄 Sync players either way around
Both /pb players sync and /pb sync players now work, so you don't have to remember the word order.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Vote handling was consolidated into one shared helper, 120 lines of dead code were deleted, action result messages were unified, and the internal docs were updated.

Fri 2/27/2026 3 commits

🤖 The bot won't act on something you didn't ask for
Picklebot no longer lets a misread message trigger a real action like booking a court or cancelling a job — those have to come from a command you actually typed. Phrases like "court reservations" now reliably pull up your reservation list, and cancelling a job works whether you say it as job cancel or the other way around. Anything the bot doesn't recognize about courts or jobs gets handled gracefully instead of guessed at.

📬 No more double messages
The part of Picklebot that sends WhatsApp messages now runs as a single sender, so you shouldn't see the same message land in the group twice.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added a global SMS on/off switch, currently off.

Wed 2/25/2026 5 commits

🔔 No more phantom vote nudges
If you had already voted in the weekly poll, a bad poll date entry could still ping you to vote. That's fixed — the bot now reads the poll date one single way, so vote reminders only go to players who actually haven't voted yet.

📋 See who's been reminded with /pb players reminders
New view showing each player's balance, pay reminders and vote reminders, sorted so you can see at a glance where things stand. Handy for sorting out who still owes and who still needs to vote.

📣 Last Call reaches everyone
Last Call now also goes to players who haven't answered the survey, so nobody misses their shot at a spot. The summary is always posted to the SMAD group too, so the final count is right there in the chat.

⏱️ Tidier game day list
The game day player list got a small cleanup: one space between DUPR and Hr, and "Hrs" is now just "Hr". Easier to scan on a phone.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Fixed the 2026 Hours formula drifting when new poll date columns are added, so hour totals stay correct, and SMS dry-run logs now show player names instead of phone numbers.

Tue 2/24/2026 11 commits

📣 Last Call now arrives on its own, 2 hours before each game
Picklebot schedules the Last Call DMs automatically 2 hours before every game, so nobody has to kick it off by hand. The summary now includes the weather, the player list with DUPR and hours, and whether we still need people. Each DM ends with its own random joke, slightly warmer copy ("Next game is coming up soon!"), and the availability note now sits right before the vote prompt.

🎾 Court booking retries, and later slots
If the date entry hiccups during booking, the bot now retries and reloads the page instead of giving up — that matters most at midnight when courts open. Suggested booking times now run as late as 9pm instead of stopping at 7pm.

🧭 Commands are easier to find
The /pb command list has been reorganized noun-first and grouped by category, with emojis on the Read-only and Actions section headers so you can spot what you want faster. New: /pb players dupr sorts the roster by DUPR rating highest first, then by hours.

💸 Quieter payment watching
Picklebot now watches only the Venmo label in Gmail instead of the whole inbox, so payment detection stays focused on actual Venmo notifications.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Suppressed noisy SSL retry logs, added an infrastructure profiling audit and midnight booking performance notes, and updated the docs for last-call scheduling and /pb players [dupr].

Mon 2/23/2026 11 commits

📋 Cleaner player list
The DUPR and Hrs labels in the game player list lost their colons, so the lineup reads a little tidier at a glance.

🔔 Reminders that tell you more
The survey reminder now mentions your DUPR rating and the SMS opt-in, so you know what you're signing up for when you reply. Vote reminders now share one format and fall back to next week when there's no game this week, so you always get a sensible nudge. Vacation skip is still in place, so you won't be pinged while you're away.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
We unified duplicated code (one date parser, shared helpers, column mapping instead of hardcoded indices) and switched the whole project from print() to proper logging, which makes issues easier to spot and fix.

Sun 2/22/2026 17 commits

📱 Text messages, if you want them
Picklebot can now forward reminders to you as a text message through Twilio, for players who opt in. There's a new "SMS Reminder" column on the sheet (right after Mobile), and your DUPR and SMS preference stay in sync with the survey.

🥒 The weekly poll now matches the real court bookings
Poll options are built from the actual Athenaeum reservations instead of a fixed list, so you'll never vote for a slot we don't have. Options now carry emoji too: 🥒 for games and 😭 for can't play.

🔔 Reminders go to the right people only
/pb reminders payment no longer sends vote reminders by mistake, and it skips players who have a game today that hasn't happened yet. You now get a numbered list of who was reminded and how much they owe. Admin Dinkers also stopped getting the game day reminder in production.

🎾 More from /pb games
New /pb games last week shows the games just played. Game player lists now show each player's DUPR score with zero-padded hours, and when there are no games left this week Picklebot shows next week's instead. Court booking suggestions now appear right in the games view.

📋 Cleaner player and availability lists
DUPR ratings now display as X.X and line up in a neat column. The availability grid and Best Times use two-letter days (Mo/Tu/We/Th/Fr/Sa/Su), Best Times only lists slots with 4+ available players, and the Last Played column is gone from /pb list-players.

🕚 Court booking fires at 11:58 PM PST
The booking scheduler moved from 12:58 AM to 11:58 PM PST, so bookings go in just before the window opens.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Fixed double-counting of early 2026 game hours (1/3 and 1/6), merged the CLI and Picklebot games handlers into one shared path, and updated the cost table with GCP Secret Manager, GREEN-API and Claude Code.

Sat 2/21/2026 14 commits

🥃 New: Last Call
If you said you're available in the availability survey but haven't voted in the poll for an upcoming game, you'll now get a nudge DM. The DM includes the game date, the weather, and who else is in with their hours, so you can decide fast. Only people who left the poll blank get pinged — if you voted no, you're left alone.

📊 DUPR ratings now in /pb players
The players list shows your DUPR rating right between your name and your hours, with 9 ratings pulled in from the availability survey. To keep the list readable, the Last Voted, VR and PR columns are gone. There's also a new reminder for players who still need to share a DUPR rating.

👋 Smoother welcome for new members
New members added through member sync now get a welcome DM with the group info. Members are also inserted in the right alphabetical spot on the sheet, and the hours formula now points at the actual first game column. James Ji's row was repaired and moved into place.

✅ Member sync tells you when it's done
When member sync is triggered from the group, you now get a message back in the same chat when it finishes, with a summary. The "triggered" message says a completion message is on its way, so there's no guessing.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Full names in survey availability
The best times list now shows full names instead of partial ones, matched to the main sheet by email so everyone appears the same way they do everywhere else.

🔔 Clearer reminders
The poll reminder is now called the "games poll" reminder instead of the "availability poll" reminder, so it's obvious which poll needs your vote. Survey reminders work the same way as vote and payment reminders now, including the dry-run preview, and the admin summary separates vacation skips from no-phone skips.

🎾 Court booking runs at 12:58 AM PST
The nightly court booking attempt moved from 11:55 PM to 12:58 AM PST, so it fires in the right booking window.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added time limits to all automated jobs (5 minutes for infrastructure jobs) so nothing hangs silently, plus some code cleanup around reminders and column lookups.

Fri 2/20/2026 12 commits

📊 Availability heatmap image
Survey results now come with a picture. Picklebot sends a heatmap of everyone's availability right after the results text, so you can see at a glance when the group is free. If nothing has changed since the last one, the saved image is sent instantly instead of being redrawn.

🔄 Easier-to-read grid
The availability grid flipped: days run across the top and times down the side. It reads the way a calendar does.

🙋 Names in Best Times
The Best Times list now shows who is actually available at each slot, not just a count.

✏️ Edit your answers
The availability results header now includes a link straight to the survey, so you can change your times without hunting for it.

⏰ Fresher numbers before reminders
The heatmap is refreshed automatically each day before the survey reminders go out, so what you see matches the latest responses.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Heatmap generation moved to its own workflow with proper storage and auth set up, fixing the case where the image never arrived, plus the survey link now comes from config instead of being hardcoded.

Thu 2/19/2026 8 commits

📋 Availability survey, right in the chat
Type /pb survey to see who has filled out the availability survey and who still hasn't, and /pb survey results to see everyone's availability. The survey link now lives with the bot, so you can grab it any time.

⏰ Survey reminders that know when to stop
Picklebot now sends survey reminders automatically as part of the daily reminders, on even days of the month so your phone doesn't buzz every day. Players on vacation are skipped, and the message comes with a freezing emoji plus a note about Rathskeller Bar in the same paragraph.

🛎️ Admins can nudge on demand
Group admins can now run /pb survey reminder to send the survey reminder right away, without waiting for the even-day schedule. A dry run shows the current survey status first, so you can see who's missing before anything goes out. A bug that also fired game, vote and payment reminders alongside the survey has been fixed.

🔑 Admin commands work in the group
SMAD group admins can now run action commands directly in the SMAD group chat instead of having to message the bot separately.

Wed 2/18/2026 7 commits

🗓️ See next week's games
There's now a command to look up the games coming up next week, so you can plan ahead without scrolling back through the chat.

🎾 Booking and cancelling courts works properly again
Asking Picklebot to book a court or cancel a reservation now reads your details correctly, so the right court and time go through the first time. A crash that could hit certain messages before Picklebot understood them is also fixed.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Duplicate game, phone and payment code was consolidated into shared modules, and deploys were split into separate per-function workflows that run one at a time with retries to avoid GCP throttling errors.

Mon 2/16/2026 8 commits

🗓️ See next week's games
You can now ask Picklebot what's coming up — try next week games in the chat and it'll list next week's matches. The bot understands a wider range of phrasings for it now, so you don't have to get the wording exactly right.

📣 Next week's games posted automatically
After the Sunday poll goes out, Picklebot now posts next week's games straight to the group. One less thing to ask for.

🗳️ Smoother voting
Removed some leftover cleanup work that ran every time someone voted on the poll and was throwing errors behind the scenes. Voting should just work.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added Sentry error tracking across the bot so problems get spotted and fixed faster, tidied up how configuration and secrets are managed, and consolidated duplicate game logic into shared modules.

Sun 2/15/2026 3 commits

🗳️ Weekly poll shows the right week and the right time
The poll title now points at the next upcoming Monday, so "week of" matches the week you're actually signing up for. Times with minutes also show properly — a 10:30am start reads as 10:30am instead of being rounded down to 10am.

📊 Game totals count correctly
Marking a game as played now updates your Totals with a straight sum, so your played count stays accurate.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
All the automatic jobs — poll posting, reminders, and the nightly court booking — moved into managed infrastructure and were consolidated from 7 jobs down to 3, still running at $0.00/month.

Sat 2/14/2026 1 commit

💰 Payment thank-yous got a little shinier

When Picklebot confirms your payment, the thank-you message now comes with a money bag emoji. Small touch, but it makes your paid-up status easier to spot in the chat.

Fri 2/13/2026 31 commits

💰 Check your own balance, anywhere
/pb my balance is here, so you can see what you owe without asking. You can also now DM Picklebot directly with /pb commands instead of posting in the group.

🏓 Game posts now show weather and player hours
/pb next game and the games list now include the weather forecast for upcoming games, plus a tidy lineup showing each player's hours. Past games show a checkmark instead of a forecast.

🎾 Court reservations from the chat
You can now list, book and cancel reservations through Picklebot (admin only). Reservation lists include the day of the week, booking confirmations spell out date, time, duration and court, and results are sent back to whichever chat asked. Court names accept shorthand like south, north or both, and if a booking fails you now get the real reason instead of a generic message.

⚡ Quicker answers to everyday commands
Commands the keyword parser already understands skip the extra AI step, so they come back faster.

📋 A cleaner help menu
/pb help has reorganised sections, emojis at the start of each line, and a tip on using natural language. /pb next is now /pb next game.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Shared modules for GREEN-API, configuration, reminders and game formatting removed a pile of duplicated code; totals formulas now update automatically when new players are added. Also fixed a Venmo sync retry storm, trimmed cloud storage and costs, and set up automatic release notes.

Thu 2/12/2026 2 commits

💬 Fewer duplicate reminder DMs
If you already got your game day reminder today, Picklebot now skips sending you a separate payment reminder DM. One nudge a day is plenty.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Cleaned a stale schedule out of the daily reminder workflow so reminders fire on the right timetable.

Wed 2/11/2026 23 commits

🌤️ Weather in your game day reminder
Game day reminders now include the forecast for Pasadena at game time — emoji, temperature, chance of rain and wind. You can also check it yourself any time with /pb weather, which now looks ahead 7 days instead of 3.

🏓 Game Day Reminder got friendlier
The reminder is now titled "Game Day Reminder!" and shows each player's 2026 hours played in a neat aligned list. Group messages and DMs use the same layout, so everyone sees the same info.

⏰ One daily reminder run at 8am PST
Game day reminders and vote reminders now go out together from a single daily run, so timing is consistent. Payment and vote reminders can also be sent independently instead of always together.

🗳️ Vote reminder DMs show what's coming up
Vote reminder DMs now list the upcoming scheduled games with who's already in, plus a "need X more!" nudge so you know exactly how close we are to a full game.

📋 Clearer List Players
The player list is now titled "List Players" with tidier columns: Hrs 2026, Hrs 2025, Last Played and Last Voted. Dates show as MM/DD/YY with no day-of-week or time clutter, and the header spacing lines up properly.

💰 Credits now show up correctly
Balances written in accounting format were being misread, so credits didn't appear. Credits now display in game reminder DMs, the payment admin summary and in Picklebot, and payment reminder DMs got money emojis.

✨ Emojis on commands
Every /pb help entry and every Picklebot command response header now has a matching emoji, making it easier to spot what you're looking at.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Duplicate code across the bot was consolidated into shared modules (-1,060 net lines), weather, player data and display formatting now live in one place, and deploy notifications render as a clean monospace block on WhatsApp.

Tue 2/10/2026 5 commits

✅ No more confirmation links
Picklebot actions now just happen — the extra "click here to confirm" step has been removed everywhere. Fewer taps, less clutter in the chat.

🔔 Reminders go to the right people
Vote and payment reminders are previewed in detail before they're sent, and the vote check now compares your last vote against the date the poll was created. If that date can't be worked out, the reminder stops instead of pinging the wrong players.

💬 Replies always come through
A bug that silently swallowed Picklebot's reply messages during test runs is fixed, so you get an answer when you expect one.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
New admin commands to list and cancel court reservations directly, making booking cleanup quicker.

Mon 2/9/2026 2 commits

💸 Venmo payments match even if we don't have your username

If your Venmo username isn't in our spreadsheet yet, Picklebot now matches your payment by your name instead, so it gets credited instead of sitting unmatched. When that works, your Venmo username is saved automatically, so every payment after that matches instantly.

🗳️ One poll, one place

The weekly poll now only posts to the SMAD group — the duplicate post to Admin Dinkers is gone.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Deploy notifications now include full commit details, and a payments sync call was fixed to match the current function signature.

Fri 2/6/2026 14 commits

💸 Pay in one tap
Payment reminders now include a direct Venmo link, so you can settle up without hunting for the right handle. Admins also have a new /pb record payment <player> <amount> <method> [notes] command, and the Payment Log gained a Mobile column so payments match to the right player automatically.

⚡ Faster court booking
Picklebot now warms up before the booking window opens: it logs in early and does a practice run on both courts while it's waiting. That shaves about 0.7s off login and makes the second court book about 0.5s faster, with all the extra work happening during idle time instead of the moment that counts. The date field was also made more reliable so a stale page can't trip up a booking.

🔢 Cleaner lists
/pb games and /pb next now show players as a numbered list, so it's easier to count who's in at a glance.

👥 Keeping the roster in sync
New /pb sync members command lines the WhatsApp group up with the spreadsheet, so new joiners don't get missed.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added token authentication for the WhatsApp webhook and documented it, fixed a deploy that was missing shared modules, and cleaned up the admin deploy notifications to show just the commit subjects.

Thu 2/5/2026 30 commits

🏟️ Court booking is faster and books the right date
Booking now jumps straight to the court slot instead of hunting through the page, cutting slot search from about 1.1s to 0.04s, with another ~0.35s saved per booking by calling the court directly ('3' = North PB, '4' = South PB). Before anything is submitted, the bot double-checks that the date and time on screen match what we asked for, so a parallel job can no longer grab the wrong day. A matching bug where "2:00 PM" could match "12:00 PM" is fixed, so you get the slot we actually wanted.

💬 Messages get through more reliably
WhatsApp notifications — booking confirmations, Venmo thank-yous, error alerts — now go out through a new message pipeline with a backup queue, so a hiccup in one part of the system doesn't swallow your message.

🗳️ Vote counts you can trust
The weekly count now reads the main 2026 Pickleball sheet as the single source of truth, counts both a "y" and hours played for past games, and filters the week properly from Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59. There's also a new next-game command to pull up the upcoming game.

💸 Payment reminders and email
Added a workflow to nudge a single player about an outstanding payment. Email sending moved to a Gmail login that no longer depends on an app password, so reminders and receipts keep flowing.

🧯 Dead Man Switch
If Gene goes unresponsive, the bot now halts operations instead of quietly continuing. A bug that made it read only part of the sheet is fixed, so it looks at the full picture before deciding.

🔒 Your info stays private
We stopped logging full webhook payloads and sensitive error details that could contain personal info, locked down who can call the service, and switched game screenshots from public links to private links that expire after 7 days.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Column lookups now read sheet headers instead of fixed positions, booking code dropped ~240 lines of unused fallback logic, a --dry-run flag makes test bookings safer, and several deployment and import failures were fixed.

Wed 2/4/2026 7 commits

💸 Payment reminders on demand — You can now send a payment nudge to everyone with /pb reminders payment, alongside /pb reminders vote for the weekly poll. The help text now lists both so you don't have to guess the wording.

🏓 Game day reminders look and read better — The reminder now goes out titled "Game Day!" with a paddle emoji, and each message gets its own random joke instead of repeating the same one. Reminders also only count as sent once they actually go through, so nobody gets skipped.

⏰ Pending actions expire at the right time — Fixed a timezone bug that made pending actions time out at the wrong moment, so confirmations stay open as long as they should.

✅ Played games get marked properly — Marking a game as played now records it correctly, so match history and scores line up.

🔤 No more garbled characters — Pages served by the bot now use UTF-8, so names, emojis and accents show up as intended instead of as strange symbols.

Tue 2/3/2026 8 commits

⏰ Game reminders, 2 hours before you play
Picklebot now messages the group two hours before each game with the player list and a joke, and DMs each player their balance plus a payment reminder. Your attendance also gets marked in the sheet automatically when the reminder goes out. These reminders are scheduled for every game as soon as the poll is created, and they clean themselves up after they run.

😂 A joke with every nudge
Vote reminders, payment reminders and payment thank-you notes now come with a random joke pulled from the Pickleball Jokes sheet. If that sheet can't be reached, there are 3 backup jokes so you still get a laugh.

🗳️ show-votes knows who actually voted
The non-voter list now reads the Last Voted column instead of the poll log, since WhatsApp's webhook sometimes misses votes. Players on vacation are also left off the "haven't voted" list, so the nudges only go to people who still need to answer.

🎾 More reliable court booking
Booking now waits a touch longer for the court page to finish loading before hunting for slots, which stops those "nothing found" failures. A grid refresh after the date is entered fixes evening slots (like 7pm) that previously never appeared, and if a slot button slips away mid-click Picklebot retries a different way instead of giving up. When something does go wrong, it now records the available courts and slots so the issue can be chased down.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Gmail token refreshes now update their stored credential automatically without being able to break a run, and all the booking timing tests plus two already-shipped speed optimizations are now documented.

Mon 2/2/2026 15 commits

🏓 Court booking is faster and lands on the right slot
Booking now finishes both courts in 14.16 seconds total — 2.66s for North and 1.80s for South, which skips re-typing the date. We also fixed a bug where the booker could click the wrong time slot, and it now recognizes both "07:00 PM" and "7:00 PM" so 7pm courts get grabbed correctly.

💸 Payment reminders are simpler and less frequent
Zelle is no longer offered in payment reminders — Venmo only. Vote and payment reminders now go out every other day instead of daily, so the group chat stays quieter.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Spreadsheet settings moved into secure storage, the court booking jobs were renamed to north/south/sweeper, and a new profiling mode measures each booking step so we can keep trimming seconds. Temporary debug screenshots and logging were added during testing and removed before production.

Sun 2/1/2026 18 commits

⚡ Court booking just got a lot faster
Booking now fires at 12:01:00 instead of 00:01:01, and we trimmed the slow parts of the process: the first court skips a redundant page reload (about 1.7s saved) and the calendar wait dropped from 2s to 1s (about another 1s). We also stopped scanning all 139 cells and go straight to the right time row. More speed means a better shot at the courts we actually want.

⏱️ You can see how fast it was
The WhatsApp booking confirmation now shows the elapsed seconds for each court, and the email adds a "Booking Time" field. If a booking felt slow, you can see it instead of guessing.

🛡️ A second backup attempt
Added a new backup booking job at 12:00:30 AM PST, on top of the existing backup that handles the South court. If the main run stumbles, there's another chance to land the reservation.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
A lot of this window was tuning timings by trial and error — Playwright slow_mo between 100ms and 10ms, calendar waits between 0.6s and 1s, interactive delays between 0.5s and 0.75s — with several reverts when a setting was too aggressive for the schedule to render. Login and navigation were also sped up, and the date field went back to typing because the calendar control needed it.

Fri 1/30/2026 15 commits

🔔 Nudge one person, not everyone
You can now send a reminder to a single player with /pb remind payment <name> or /pb remind vote <name>. It understands @mentions, plain names, and phone numbers, so tagging someone in the group just works. Payment reminders now end with a joke after the signature — so there's a little sugar with the ask.

😂 Jokes and memes, hand-picked
Jokes now come from a curated list of 50 instead of being written by AI, so no more groan-worthy robot humor. Memes come from a sheet of 49 pickleball memes collected from Reddit, with a random one each time, sent as a proper image.

👥 /pb players shows the whole roster
New /pb players command lists every player with their stats: 2026 hours, 2025 hours and balance, sorted by 2026 hours. Hours and last-played dates from the old 2025 sheet are now included, so the bot and the CLI finally agree on your totals. Last Voted dates are formatted like every other date (M/DD/YY).

🎾 Backup court booking can go South first
The backup booking job can now reverse the court order and grab South before North, giving us another way to land a court when the usual order doesn't work out.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Group IDs, phone IDs and spreadsheet IDs moved out of the code and into secrets, and there's now a private test chat for trying commands without spamming the group.

Thu 1/29/2026 29 commits

🤖 Meet SMAD Picklebot — ask the bot things right in WhatsApp
Type /pb help to see what it can do. /pb status, /pb balance and /pb deadbeats answer questions on the spot, and the bot understands plain English, not just exact commands. It works in both the SMAD group and Admin Dinkers; action commands like booking and polls stay admin-only, so the SMAD group sees a shorter help menu.

📅 See the week's games with /pb games and /pb next
/pb games lists every game scheduled this week straight from the poll votes, and /pb next shows the next one with a countdown and who's playing. Options like "Cannot play this week" are filtered out, and if you changed your vote only your latest one counts, so nobody shows up twice.

🎾 Book courts through the bot
Admins can ask Picklebot to book a court, and anything more than 7 days out is automatically scheduled to run at 12:01 AM, 7 days before the date — exactly when reservations open. /pb jobs lists what's queued and /pb jobs cancel <job_id> drops one. Booking, polls and reminders now ask for confirmation first via a one-click link that expires after 24 hours, so nothing fires by accident.

😄 Jokes and memes
/pb joke serves up a fresh pickleball joke and /pb meme posts a captioned pickleball meme. Meme images now come from a reliable source and are checked before sending, so you get a picture instead of a broken link.

🏟️ More reliable court booking
Booking a second court no longer trips over a stale page — the booker reloads before each attempt. The summary now includes booking timings so we can see where things slow down.

🚨 We find out instantly when a booking fails
A new monitor watches the booking runs and sends a WhatsApp alert with the court, date and time whenever a slot isn't secured — even if the run otherwise looked fine. It says why: courts not released yet (with the exact time remaining), booked by someone else, or already reserved by you. Alerts include a screenshot link so the problem is obvious at a glance.

💵 Cleaner balance reports
The "Totals" row from the spreadsheet is no longer counted as a player, so /pb balance and /pb deadbeats stop double-counting.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Added an automated error monitor for our scheduled jobs, gave Picklebot more memory, and updated the project documentation and architecture diagrams.

Wed 1/28/2026 6 commits

🏖️ Vacation dates that just work
Vacation dates now understand the MM/DD/YY format, so you can type dates the way you normally would and they'll be read correctly. Players out on vacation also show up in their own section of the vote reminder summary, so nobody gets chased for a vote they can't give.

⏰ Daily reminders at 8:00 AM
Daily reminders now go out at 8:00 AM PST.

🗳️ A clean poll every week
When a new availability poll goes up, the previous week's poll log is moved into an archive sheet and the log starts fresh. That means this week's responses are never mixed in with last week's, and the old entries are still kept if we need to look back.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Some housekeeping on internal files that players won't notice.

Tue 1/27/2026 28 commits

⏰ Reminders and the poll now run on time
The weekly poll and the daily vote/payment reminders moved to Google Cloud Scheduler instead of GitHub's timer, which wasn't firing reliably. The poll goes out Sunday at 10:00 AM PST and reminders go out daily at 10:00 AM PST.

🎾 Court booking starts warming up early
Booking now kicks off at 11:55 PM PST so everything is loaded and ready, then waits and books right at 12:01 AM. This stops us from missing the booking window because the machine was still starting up.

🏝️ Vacation mode takes a return date
Instead of just marking vacation on or off, you now give a return date (MM/DD/YYYY) and you'll be skipped from vote reminders until that date passes. Payment reminders still come through while you're away, and vacation status now shows in the player list.

🗳️ Votes can be recorded by hand
New update-vote command lets a vote be entered for a player, with --list-options to see the available dates and --dry-run to preview first. It marks your chosen dates, clears your previous answer, and updates your Last Voted date. Also fixed a bug where a second vote on the same poll could get attached to the wrong poll date.

💸 Clearer payment follow-ups
Payment reminder summaries now include each player's Last Played date, so it's obvious who owes for what. When a payment comes in, a notification is sent to the Admin Dinkers group.

🙂 Emojis show up properly
Poll output no longer mangles emoji characters on Windows.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
GCP resources moved to Terraform, workflows were split and renamed (court booking, poll creation, vote/payment reminders), the booking script was renamed to court-booking.py, and the docs were reorganized around the whole project rather than just booking.

Mon 1/26/2026 11 commits

🗓️ The weekly poll now gets the dates right

The poll question now names the correct week for the dates it offers, and poll dates are calculated in PST so options line up with real Los Angeles days. Vote confirmations and other timing in the bot also run on PST now, so nothing drifts an hour off.

📣 Admin Dinkers group gets its own updates

The weekly poll is now also posted to the Admin Dinkers group (votes there are not tracked, so vote in SMAD as usual). After payment and vote reminders go out, and after court bookings run, a summary lands in the admin group too — so the organizers can see at a glance what the bot did.

✅ Only SMAD votes count

Votes are now matched to the SMAD group, so taps in any other group are ignored and the weekly poll tally stays clean.

✍️ Bot now signs off as SMAD Picklebot

Messages from the bot carry the SMAD Picklebot signature across all of its replies, so it's clear who's talking.

🛠️ Behind the scenes

Nudged the daily booking and weekly poll schedules so they fire reliably, moved the admin group setting to a plain config variable, added the timezone library to the webhook, and fixed a Windows console crash in the poll dry run.

Sun 1/25/2026 1 commit

🎾 Court booking hangs on a little longer

Booking sometimes gave up before the court system came back with an answer, so a reservation could fail for no good reason. Picklebot now waits up to 15 minutes instead of 10 before calling it quits, so more bookings go through on the first try.

Sat 1/24/2026 10 commits

💸 Venmo payments confirm themselves again
Automatic Venmo sync is back on, so your payment gets picked up without anyone chasing it. Picklebot now sends you a WhatsApp thank you the moment it records your payment, and the balance in that message is the freshly recalculated one, not a stale number. Duplicate notifications can no longer double-count a single payment.

🗳️ Vote reminders tell you how to stop them
The reminder DM about the weekly poll now includes instructions for opting out, so you can turn it off yourself if you'd rather not get the nudge.

🎾 Court booking no longer misses the midnight drop
Booking was failing when new courts opened at midnight because the page still showed the old availability. Picklebot now reloads for a fresh look, so it grabs the court when it appears.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The payment sync got a dry-run mode for safe testing, a shared module behind the CLI, and a deploy workflow entry, plus an updated architecture diagram.

Fri 1/23/2026 18 commits

💸 Venmo payments say thanks back
When your Venmo payment lands, Picklebot now sends you a WhatsApp thank you with the amount and a "Your balance is now: $X.XX" line, so you know where you stand without asking. Payments are picked up automatically from the Venmo email, synced straight into the sheet.

🗳️ Weekly poll and reminders run on their own
The weekly poll is now created automatically on Sunday mornings, and daily reminders for payments and voting go out each morning. Reminder wording now points you to "this week's poll pinned to the top of the group" instead of referring to a pin that never worked.

📅 Poll question shows the week you're voting for
The poll question now includes the Monday date of the current week, so there's no guessing which week you're signing up for. Votes can still be changed for 7 days, after which a poll is treated as expired.

🧹 Tidier poll history
Poll log entries older than 7 days are cleaned up every Sunday, and weekly totals now tally correctly as new dates are added.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The poll log moved from Firestore to Google Sheets and all the old Firestore plumbing was removed, plus a systems architecture diagram was added to the README and the automation workflows got fixes for dry-run mode and poll-date overrides.

Thu 1/22/2026 1 commit

💰 Balances and "last paid"
We reworked how your balance and your last payment date are worked out in the sheet, so what you see in /pb balance lines up with what you've actually sent over Venmo or Zelle.

Wed 1/21/2026 8 commits

🎾 Court booking right at the stroke of midnight
Booking now opens 7 days ahead of the actual target booking date, not whenever the bot happens to run — so no more missed courts around the midnight border. The booking attempt now fires at 12:01:01 AM PST, and the bot reliably picks the right 60- or 120-minute slot from the dropdown.

🗳️ A cleaner weekly poll
/pb poll now pulls its game date options straight from the booking list for the upcoming week, so the dates you vote on are the ones we're actually trying to book. The nudge to vote has been reworded to be a little friendlier and clearer.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
All Google Sheets work moved into one central place, which makes scores, payments and ratings easier to keep consistent going forward.

Tue 1/20/2026 3 commits

🎾 Court booking now fires at 12:01 AM
Picklebot now aims for 12:01 AM PST when courts open, instead of 12:00:15 AM PST. Same goal: grab our court the moment it's available.

📋 Pickle Registry in SMAD Sheets
Player info now lives in a Pickle Registry in SMAD Sheets, so the bot has one tidy place to look you up.

💬 WhatsApp connection
Picklebot is wired into WhatsApp, so everything happens right in the group chat.

Mon 1/19/2026 6 commits

🎾 Court booking lands on the right day, every time
The booking robot now always targets the exact day of the week at least 7 days after it runs, so a run that fires near midnight no longer books a day off. We also fixed a leftover case where the 7-day window was measured from the moment the job started instead of the day we're actually booking for.

⏰ Booking runs shifted later
The two scheduled booking jobs now kick off a bit later, and the bot waits for the booking page to finish loading before it starts clicking. Fewer missed slots from a page that wasn't ready yet.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Cleaned up logging so booking runs are easier to trace, plus a small text-encoding fix.

Sun 1/18/2026 3 commits

🎾 Court booking at midnight is now rock-solid
Fixed a midnight wraparound bug that could make the booking script wait 23 hours instead of seconds, so courts get grabbed the moment the window opens. The booking date is now calculated from the actual booking time (12:00:15 AM) rather than when the job kicks off (11:54 PM), so we always reserve the right day. The safety wait is capped at 10 minutes, matching the grace period.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Reorganized the bot along 12-factor app principles to keep configuration and deploys clean.

Sat 1/17/2026 13 commits

🗓️ Courts now book themselves, every week
Picklebot now holds a weekly booking list using plain day names like Monday or Saturday, and grabs your court 7 days ahead automatically. No more setting an alarm for midnight — it runs on its own at 11:50 PM PST, with a backup attempt at 12:01 AM so a slow start never costs us a court. Booking times are now configurable, and everything runs on proper PST/PDT time so dates never drift when the clocks change.

🏟️ Both courts at once
If we need the space, Picklebot can now book North and South together in one go instead of one at a time. Handy for the weeks when the group runs big.

⏱️ A 10-minute grace period
Midnight booking can get congested, so Picklebot now keeps trying for 10 minutes (up from 5) instead of giving up. Fewer nights where we end up courtless for no good reason.

📧 Email summary after each booking run
You now get a booking summary report by email with a clearer subject line, so you can see at a glance what was booked and when. Booking date and time are now shown as one combined date-time, and passing a single date-time by hand overrides the weekly list for one-off bookings.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
Scheduling moved to automated daily runs with a corrected UTC schedule, manual runs for debugging were improved, and timestamps plus the ignore list were tidied up.

Fri 1/16/2026 1 commit

🗓️ Court booking on autopilot
The daily midnight booking run and BOOKING_LIST are now working, so courts get grabbed for us automatically without anyone staying up for it.

Thu 1/15/2026 3 commits

🎾 Automatic court booking
Picklebot can now book our court on Ath by itself — the first version is live. Navigation through the booking pages was tightened up, so it moves through the flow faster and with fewer places to get stuck. Less chasing courts by hand before each week's game.

🛠️ Behind the scenes
The booking bot now runs on a scheduled GitHub Actions job instead of waiting on someone to kick it off.