2026-10-19 · Fantasy sports
WojBomb! It’s WojBot!
A rumor mill in Discord-bot form, and my biggest project to date.
In 2018 I got a text from someone in one of my fantasy leagues. Another person in the league
had made a ridiculous trade offer, and he wanted to do the typical “Do you see this
shit?!?” with me. But I was intrigued, I didn’t think the player he got the offer
for was on the trade block at all. Within 2 hours they were on my team.
It was exhilarating. Because of a rumor that had floated in the league, a transaction happened. Just like in the pros. But in real leagues like the NBA and NFL, this work isn’t always done over text message. It’s also done in the press by guys like Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania. While sports journalism toddles to a shallow grave, we are living in the golden age of news breakers, people whose job isn’t just to report facts but also to be an instrument for players, agents, and teams to manipulate the media landscape around the NBA. Players and teams that ignore the “media game” aspect of professional sports are often left in the dust. When James Harden made his exit from the Houston Rockets, his lack of an agent allowed the Rockets owner Tillman Fertitta to throw hit piece after hit piece to the local and national media without much pushback. I wanted to see if this was something I could replicate for my fantasy leagues.
Introducing WojBot.
I have built a Discord bot that lets you simulate this experience for your fantasy leagues as best I can. It’s pretty simple. You can add the bot to a Discord server and connect that server to a fantasy sports league. Then you can just DM the bot and start spreading rumors about your league!
Every rumor has a source that is auditable by the league. Based on that source, be it within a front office or about a rival team, there’s a certain credibility lent to that rumor. We wouldn’t want something coming from an anonymous source to be seen in the same light as a team’s official press release, so there’s some color-coding to keep it fun.
I’ve also integrated my Elo System into the bot so you can get that and other analytics through slash commands. I’m constantly trying to add features if they’re possible, so ping me if you have any fun ideas!
This project was started in 2019, and I got the first version working around then. At that point it accepted a few basic commands like rolling dice or echoing messages. The Discord API hadn’t advanced that much yet, so I was working on a very rudimentary version of the rumor module that was much more complicated. After getting laid off last year, I spent some more time fixing the bot up, and used Claude to help me navigate the changes in the API and build out a wizard tool to set up the rumors. I put the bot on a Raspberry Pi that I keep in my closet, and it’s backed up by a Postgres database.
This project is phase 1 of what might be a grand adventure for me in the world of fantasy sports. I’m really happy that it’s finally at a point where I can make it public and share it with the world. The idea that someone else might use this for their league makes me ecstatic, so please email me if you want to get started!