I thought some people here might be interested in this, I've been using it for a few days and it's helped me a lot. As anyone who plays on Stars knows, they don't have a buddy list, which can make tracking fish a pain. I wrote a very simple ahk script that will go through a list of players line by line and search for that player. If it finds any of them online, it writes their name to a textfile. So, if you have a file of players names like so:

in c:\buddies.txt (you can change the script to reflect whatever file you want to use), the script will search for all their names on stars. If, for example, it finds Player2 is online, it will write their name to another text file (c:\onlinebuddies by default, but again, change it to whatever you want). It takes me about 3 minutes to search through about 200 names, then I just pop open the text file and I have an up to date list of who's online.

I'm sure one of the AHK gurus here could have done a much better job, and this script is pretty primitive. But I thought I'd share it here in case anyone could use it. As usual, It works for me, I can't guarantee it will work for you.

it would be cool if it said which limit/table. i know hardcore geeks can program this.

Yes, I agree. I couldn't figure it out. If anyone wants to improve this script it would be awesome.

bump

I am so inept that I really need the instructions to start with...

(1) Turn on computer
(2) Open file
(3) replace/copy whatever

Is anyone patient enough to translate the script for ssomeone like me? Or am I better off not even trying?

this looks very useful, but i am struggling to make it work. i am a total ahk noob, so you have to speak in small words. i have downloaded ahk and created a script with the text you wrote above, and i put a text file with buddies in the same place that you have it. i double-click the script and nothing seems to happen. no onlinebuddies.txt file is created, and the focus never even goes to the poker stars lobby.

any help would be appreciated, cause this thing looks great.

edit: alright, figured it out. have to compile, then run...

If you saved the file as a .ahk, it should run just by double clicking the script. Maybe you saved it as a txt file, ie the file name was buddy.ahk.txt

This issue with finding the limit is that Stars only gives the table name and game type. So some one would have to do some work with searching thru the lobby text to find where the table is.

Hey, I was in AC for the weekend so I didn't see there was a little renewed interest in this. If anyone needs any more help with this, hit me up. I'd love to see some more work done on this, but honestly I'm probably not the one to do it, as I pretty much suck at AHK. Someone better than me probably could find limits buddies are playing, but it would involve searching through the table list, which I'm not sure how to do. But, I've been using it nearly every day since the day I posted it, and basically it works pretty well for narrowing down a list of say, 200 fish into a list of 20 online players.

I may try to put some more work into it today, because I can at least tell if the players are playing sngs, tournies or cash games, which is helpful.

For Wynton:

1. Turn on computer.
2. Go to http://www.autohotkey.com
3. Download and install autohotkey software
4. Open a new text file on your desktop - name it buddies.ahk
5. Paste the text in my first post into it, save and close.
6. Open a new text file at c:\ - call it buddies.txt
7. Write a list of players you want to search for, one per line, into this file, save and close.
8. Double click buddies.ahk - wait until your computer stops going crazy (could be a while if it's a long list)
9. This created a new file at c:\onlinebuddies.txt
10. Open onlinebuddies.txt, this is a sublist of your big list containing the names of the people who are online.

Thanks, wildzer. Very helpful.

How do I save as a .ahk file? I keep getting .ahk.txt every time.

Can someone get the tables/limits on here?

You're all welcome to try it out, AHK documentation is avalable at www.autohotkey.com. It's not too difficult and I'm sure someone with a little more time on their hands than I have at the moment could get something like this up pretty quick.

When you are at the save menu, Make sure "Save as type:" is set to "All Files". The default is "Text Documents" and will tack on the .txt if the name you enter does not already end with one.

this is an awesome program, but i've started having some problems. sometimes the "find a tournament" choice gets picked instead of "find a player." sometimes it doesn't cause any problems, but sometimes every player after the incident gets written to the onlinebuddies.txt file. i have ~100 players in my buddy list. thanks!

bump. thanks!

I've been playing a little bit with stuff like this, getting better incident handling in the script - because I've had pretty simliar problems. Right now the only advice I can offer is to monitor and click out of any unexpected windows asap. This weekend, I have a long plane ride, so I'll mess with the script some more and try to make some improvements. I guess there's a pretty awesome full tilt buddy list right now, so I'll try to steal some ideas from it

ran stars, ran the script, compiled the buddylist correctly, but could not find : "c:\onlinebuddies.txt" and searched for "onlinebuddies" but comp came up with nothing

help is appreciated

Hey, didn't see your post for a few days, Reef. I'm a little confused - did you run the script before you made your buddy list? 2 possible explanations are that the script didn't find any buddies online (would happen if your buddies.txt file was empty when you ran the script or none of them were on and result in the file not being written) or your c:\ drive is named something different? You can edit the script to put the file anywhere you would like, so check the path and make sure it's ok.

made the buddy list with about 100 names. Ran the script afterwards. I'll try it again and check the path. thx

I was just messing around with my PT database this morning and came up with this query to generate a buddy list automatically. Here it is if anyone wants to use it - works on postgres. You can change the values in the HAVING clause - the first line is number of hands, then, VP%IP, then WTSD

How do u run a query on PT database?

http://www.pokertracker.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=11

God, it would be amazing if this were slightly more sophisticated... i.e., showed which tables the fish were at, maybe even gave you a screen to open them.

It would be, but unfortunately there is no way to read the "found player" box in autohotkey as far as I know. So I believe we're stuck with this pretty much the way it is.

I have no idea what I'm talking about.. but what if it just read the table name off of the lobby and looked for the player's name in that little window to the right?