Final Fantasy XIV News Functionality
The Bot's FFXIV news functionality allows the bot to monitor the FFXIV Lodestone Website for new news updates and generate and embed announcing the news item. News items are posted in whichever channel !setTarget was used in.
Within the bot a timer is set that ticks every 15 minutes. Whenever it ticks, it triggers a "refresh" function within the bot. During a refresh, the bot checks each of the categories of the lodestone's news pages for update items. To do so it checks each news items ID against the ID it has stored for its "latest item". Whenever it finds an ID that doesn't match, it posts and embed announcing the news item. Whenever it finds an ID that matches, it stops and moves on to the next category. After it has checked all categories, it updates the "Latest item" IDs it has stored with the new IDs it has obtained.
With Maintenance news items, the bot performs another function. Whenever the bot detects that the maintenance news item contains a specific set of words, it stores the dates and times of the maintenance. For Lodestone maintenance, it uses this information to disable the refresh feature for the duration of the maintenance. This is due to the XPATH of the lodestone changing drastically during maintenance as well as the lodestone being outright unavailable during certain maintenance periods. For "Exodus" or "All Worlds" maintenance, the bot stores this information for use by the !maint command. This command allows users to view the amount of time remaining until the maintenance starts as well as how much time remains until maintenance ends.
