Picks

A Flarum 2.x extension that adds a college-football pick'em game to your forum. Members predict the winners of each week's games, earn points, and compete on a season leaderboard. Schedules and teams are synced from CollegeFootballData (CFBD), and team logos / live scores come from ESPN.

Features

• Weekly picks — members pick winners for each game in a week; picks lock at kickoff (with an optional offset).
• Live scoring — a scheduled task polls ESPN for in-progress scores and grades picks automatically as games finish.
• Leaderboard — season standings with per-week history and per-user pick history (/u/{username}/picks-history).
• Confidence mode (optional) — members rank their picks by confidence for weighted scoring, with a configurable penalty for missed high-confidence picks.
• Admin management — sync teams/schedule/scores, open/unlock weeks, enter or override results, refresh team logos, and reset data, all from the admin panel.
• Per-permission access — separate abilities for viewing, making picks, viewing history, and managing.

Requirements

• Flarum ^2.0
• A free CollegeFootballData API key — get one at https://collegefootballdata.com/key (used for team and schedule syncing).

Installation

composer require ernestdefoe/picks
php flarum cache:clear

Then enable Picks in the admin panel under Extensions.

Setup

1. Open the Picks page in the admin panel.
2. Paste your CFBD API key and set the season year (and optionally a conference filter).
3. Sync Teams, then Sync Schedule to pull the season's games.
4. Open the week(s) you want members to pick.
5. Grant the picks permissions to the appropriate groups (see below).

To keep live scores updating, make sure Flarum's scheduler is running (see Scheduler below) and enable ESPN polling in the settings.

Permissions

Set these under Admin → Permissions:

Ability	Lets a user…
picks.view	See the Picks page and leaderboard.
picks.makePicks	Submit and change their own picks.
picks.viewHistory	View pick history for users.
picks.manage	Manage the game (sync, results, weeks, settings). Admins always have this.

Settings

Configured on the admin Picks page (stored under the ernestdefoe-picks.* namespace):

• CFBD API key, season year, conference filter
• Sync regular season / postseason, auto-sync
• Picks lock offset (minutes before kickoff)
• Confidence mode + confidence penalty (none / half / full)
• Auto-unlock weeks, default week view
• ESPN polling + poll interval
• Nav label (the forum nav link text)

Scheduler

Live-score polling runs as a scheduled command (PollLiveScoresCommand, every 5 minutes). For it to fire, Flarum's scheduler must be invoked once a minute by cron:

* * * * * cd /path/to/forum && php flarum schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

You can also run syncs manually:

php flarum picks:sync-teams      # sync the FBS team list from CFBD
php flarum picks:poll-scores     # poll ESPN for live scores once

Data sources

• CollegeFootballData (CFBD) — teams and game schedules (API key required).
• ESPN — team logos and live in-game scores (public endpoints, no key).

Team names, logos, and data are the property of their respective owners and the providers above. This is an unofficial fan tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NCAA, CFBD, ESPN, or any team.

Credits

Originally created by resofire; now maintained by ernestdefoe as ernestdefoe/picks.

Support

Questions, bug reports, and feature requests:

• Support forum: https://ernestdefoe.online
• Issues: https://github.com/ernestdefoe/picks/issues

License

MIT