Webdiplomacy Scraper

I love almost everything about the webdiplomacy.net game experience except the fact that there is no email notification or API. As a result, I've sometimes lost track of time and ended up missing a turn. To rectify that, I've built a small scraper that will scrape a handful of pages to get information about the current games you have on-going. The results are returned as a JSON formatted string, which you can then use to do what whatever you'd like with (currently, I put them in a GeekTool geeklet on my desktop).

To use, you first need to setup to environment variables:

• DIPLOMACY_USER: your webdiplomacy user name
• DIPLOMACY_PASS: your webdiplomacy password (I know, this is a bad practice. I'll improve it in a future version)

Then you can simply run: node scrape.js. If you haven't used the JSON tool jq, you should look into it as it can be nice for parsing the returned json string: node scrape.js | jq -M "." for example, will prettify the JSON string into something more readible.

###Current Scraped Data###

• For each active game:
  • Game name
  • Home country
  • Phase
  • Year
  • Unit count
  • Time remaining until next turn
  • System messages (not messages from each user) in the past 7 days

###Planned Scraped Data###

• For each active game, in addition to above:
  • Status of other countries (orders submitted, confirmed, not ready, etc)
  • Unit counts for other countries
  • Messages from other users in the current game

###Other to dos###

• Don't store password from environmental variables
• Allow arguments to be passed for supplying credentials
• Filtering of scrapped data (such that you can just scrape data for a single game, for example)
• Limiters on pace of scraping, such that the scraper doesn't overwhelm the server