ILOX is back!

Hello there, long time no see!

After many months of hard work I'm happy to announce that ILOX is finally back online! Next to an entire technical overhaul (read below for details), I'm very proud to introduce the brand new, real-time and internationalized website that allows for browser pings and a centralized point of information (which products are tracked, FAQs, etc.). Of course, existing features like Discord and Telegram pings are also back. Everything's completely for free, like always.

I hope you like the update. Feel free to let me know your feedback!

How to get started

Head over to the monitors, choose a monitor you want to get alerts for and either enable alerts on the website or join the Discord and/or Telegram server for that monitor (links are at the top of every monitor).

If you have any questions left, check the FAQ or join our Discord.

Storytime

If you're interested in why ILOX has been offline for so long:

When I started ILOX in 2020 I hacked together a little bot called ilovertx3000 on a single Sundary that was meant for me only. But very quickly I realized: I wasn't the only one having problems in buying a RTX 3000 GPU. Without thinking too much of it, I made it a Twitter bot and posted it to Reddit. Within the next weeks the project attracted thousands of new users and with every day passing my little script had to be altered in every possible way to fulfill the needs of the community.

More shops, more notification channels, Discord utilities and more evolved throughout the years - all built on top of the same code. Code that wasn't meant to be get this big. And the biggest problem: I never found any time to refactor it to make my own life a lot easier. I refactored some bits of it, yes, like switching the database 2 times - which was pretty stupid in hindsight - but I never managed to really catch up technical debt. And it wasn't just the code; many technical aspects, like deployment, were never meant to scale at all.

To give you an idea: the initial bot was a single process that took care of gathering availability, process it, post it to all channels, saved everything to the database, did some (very vague) reporting on how the bot was doing and had to be started and stopped manually. Some of you might remember the times when certain drops where announced countless times within seconds; one time this happened because the bot died when sending notifications to Bluesky. Why? Because in order to be as fast as possible the actual availability was saved after notifications were sent. If notifications caused a crash, the bot never persisted availability, restarted instantly and would try to announce the same drop again - only to crash again.

All of that, scattered across multiple repositories that all had their own quirks, deployment workflows, etc..

It worked, for years - but it certainly wasn't fun to work on.

But I always had an idea in my head of what I wanted it to be: a mature software project that's fun to work on and that I'd be proud of. And after 6 years and not just a relaunch but more of an entire re-invention I dare to say: we're a lot closer to that vision than ever before!

All project code is now in a single repository, basically the entire code base has been either heavily refactored or rewritten completely, deployment has been fully automated, I can spawn or change bots within seconds without ever having to open an editor or terminal. In other words: it's fun to work on again. There's still work to do - like supporting more shops, better alert controls, and alike - and I think we now have a decent foundation to build upon.

Thank you

Last but not least I'd like to thank everyone who has supported me and ILOX over the years. My little Sunday project grew into something I could never imagine, and it certainly would not have turned that way without its amazing community

• six years later that still amazes me. Thank you for sticking around - and welcome back.