Request: Public API

Might as well bump this while I’m here looking at it. A predictable URL to export results with would be really nice, an API would be even better. Go nerds!

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I’d love an API to show courses on a map for visitors and new to the game locals… I’m using a weather API for course conditions in my hack below, but could see lots of other useful mashups for visitors touring an area wanting to play.

https://www.canopycrypto.io/disc/

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You’ve asked for use cases…

I’m going to make a couple assumptions about your (UDiscs) business motives. Your revenue model is [primarily] based off of subscription users (big assumption, you could be selling data as well). In order to grow your user base you need disc golf to continue to grow, and that happens through visibility and course growth. It’s therefore in your best interest to help accelerate course growth because that leads to improved visibility of the sport, which leads to more people playing, which leads to more subscriptions to UDisc.

In that vein, consider the following use case…

Google offers pretty much all of their Analytics data via API, and that has driven the creation and explosion of an entire industry around it, you may have heard of it… SEO/SEM/SERP :wink:

That industry has spurred a HUGE amount of content production because unique organic content will help your site perform better. All this content actually makes it harder to sift through to find what you need without Google Search, and that means more advertising revenue and more CPC throughput.

It’s a feedback loop, Google gives away data for free that helps everyone compete with each other by creating what Google needs to serve more ads.

Providing your analytics data (which you’ve already begun to provide via ambassador pages) would allow us creative types out there to likewise create a swell of apps and web services around analyzing player data, create predictive algorithms, promoting course growth through data and stat analysis, etc. You would actually be encouraging course improvement and growth having these services available which feeds back into your subscription based revenue system just by sharing your data via API properly.

Consider also, if you try to lock this all away, all it’s going to do is encourage competition. By providing it freely and easily via api, all of the community built apps will be dependent on you. You’ll have created both security and your own feedback loop for growth.

Seriously, how this is not at the top of your list of to-do’s is mind boggling.

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Does UDisc publish their product roadmap? Many application based companies do this (gitlab, Microsoft companies, airtable, trello., etc.) and it’d be a great way to stay accountable to the community on priorities.

Also, to echo all the comments here, I just manually pulled and calculated league points for about 200 people. An API would make this much less cumbersome, and honestly would give you all a technical advantage over PDGA for almost every league-based use case. Player stats, player round ratings, event data. I could use all of it to host data driven leagues & events.

I use a selenium script to scrape this stuff together today because PDGA haven’t prioritized an API either. Please beat them to it.

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