Hello everyone,
I have recently finished my new project called VatNotif.
To put it simply, VatNotif is a service that will notify you when a specified controller comes online.
Even though the data used for this service is publicly available, you can still opt out of being “tracked” by toggling a switch in the dashboard, when you do that your CID will be ignored until you opt in again.
Please keep in mind that this website is still in beta - there will be bugs. If you have encountered an issue or want to provide feedback, don’t hesitate to contact me
I’ve posted a very similar idea about half a decade ago over on the old vatsim forums.
My idea was a firefox extension, that gives you a notification whenever a controller for your airport comes online.
Glad someone who’s got the know-how took the challenge!
Thank you for putting in effort and time to delecop this awesome tool!
We have started implementation in our division on a test basis and would like to share following feedback:
It got a lot of demand as up until now the members would typically check (reactive) and now we have a proactive way to get notifications.
The setup and config is super simple and user friendly.
I also have some constructive feedback where it wpuld be great to get your view:
The API is offline, not sure if the issue is on your end our ours, therefore we are not getting notifications. Is there a way for us to host the service on our own server?
When setting up the bot the naming of the bot is reflected in the messages whenever I send a test. However, when a “live” notification is received the Bot is named VatNotif, depite us giving it a different name.
Hello, first thanks for the feedback, I really do appreciate it!
API status: If the api is offline it is 99% issue on my end, if you want to be sure 100%, open this url: https://vatnotif-api.kristn.co.uk/ in your browser, and if it does not return a response, the api is not running
There might’ve been some downtime today since I was doing some maintenance on the server physically but I will continue to monitor the uptime. I might set up something like uptimerobot to monitor it & give alers.
About the self-hosting, it is technically possible, all the source code is available on my github (GitHub - kristiankunc/VatNotif-api: The api server for VatNotif) but it requires access to the database with all the tracking information so it is not really viable.
Discord bot name: Yes that is intentional, the webhook author name & profile picture is set for each webhook on the server which overwrites the discord settings you put in.
To obtain the credentials, you need to set up the vatsim oauth, docs for which can be found here: Connect · vatsimnetwork/developer-info Wiki · GitHub. But to use it in production you need approval from vatsim to grant you the access. Or alternatively you can implement a different OAauth flow (eg. Google, Twitter, Discord, …) which may be faster to get started but will require pretty big code changes.
