Cue

The idea

Cue exists because of one bug in someone else's bot.

I used to use a Discord bot that announced new anime episodes. When you added a show it looked up the airing schedule once, saved it, and set a timer for each episode. Then it never checked again. Anime schedules move constantly: an episode slips a week, a season gets extended, a show goes on break. None of that reached the bot, so it kept announcing against a schedule that had quietly stopped being true. Nobody maintains it any more, so I rebuilt that part of it.

Keep checking

Cue re-reads the schedule in the background and corrects what it already saved. An episode that moved gets fixed, a newly announced one gets added, one that was pulled gets removed.

How often it looks depends on how close the episode is:

The last two hours before air are when a delay is both most likely and most annoying to get wrong, so that is where the effort goes.

Announcements that survive a bad night

If Discord refuses a message, Cue tries again. If the channel has been deleted, it stops trying and tells whoever set it up why, instead of failing quietly forever. One broken channel never blocks anyone else's.

And if Cue itself was down when an episode aired, it does not come back and dump a backlog into your channel. Anything more than two hours late is written off.

When a source goes down

Air times and show details come from different providers. If one stops answering, Cue switches to another rather than failing, and if they all go down it keeps serving what it already knows for six hours instead of showing an error page.

There is a public status page, and outages get posted to a status channel in plain English rather than left for people to work out on their own.