Pick'em

ernestdefoe · 2026-05-30T23:48:59+00:00

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 if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } Then enable Picks in the admin panel under Extensions. Setup Open the Picks page in the admin panel. Paste your CFBD API key and set the season year (and optionally a conference filter). Sync Teams, then Sync Schedule to pull the season's games. Open the week(s) you want members to pick. 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 if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } 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 if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } 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: ernestdefoe/picksissues License MIT

ernestdefoe

picks 2.13.0

Every channel a game is on, and its highlights

New

Where each game is shown. Pick'em now stores every listing ESPN gives for a game: TV, streaming and radio, national and local, plus ESPN's own watch link when it sends one. It comes from the scoreboard Pick'em already fetches, so there are no extra calls. Game Day uses this for its "Where to watch" chips.
Highlight clips for finished games. Up to six clips are fetched from ESPN's game summary for games that have a thread, within 30 hours of kickoff and at most every 45 minutes per game. Game Day shows them under the scoreboard.

composer require ernestdefoe/picks:^2.13
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

ernestdefoe

picks 2.13.1

Lighter scoring

Part of a performance pass across all my Flarum extensions: nothing should cost more work as a page gets busier.

Fixed

Scoring a finished game reads its season once, not once per member who picked it. On a game with 200 pickers that's about 200 fewer queries.

composer require ernestdefoe/picks:^2.13
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

ernestdefoe

picks 2.13.2

Much lighter Pick'em pages

Team crests used to download as ESPN's full 500-pixel originals, even where they're drawn at a few dozen pixels. They now download at twice their display size, so they stay sharp on high-resolution screens, and look identical.

Fixed

The picks page downloads about 0.3 MB of crests instead of 8 MB on first load. Crests further down load as you scroll, and only the light or dark version you're actually seeing is downloaded.

composer require ernestdefoe/picks:^2.13
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

ernestdefoe

picks 2.13.3

Pick'em pages load only when opened

Fixed

The pick'em board and the picks history page now load only when someone opens them, instead of in the script every visitor downloads on every page of the forum. forum.js went from 13.5 to 3.0 KB compressed. Every board tab, the history page and the admin tabs work as before.
Some unused code was removed along the way.

composer require ernestdefoe/picks:^2.13
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

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