Working through the open list

Issue #2

Issue #1 closed with six open items. Five of them shipped this week, most on the day that issue went out, and the sixth is filling on its own timetable. After those, the requests that arrived during the week and what shipped for each. As before, anything half-done says so.

The full-day card by 10am Sydney

Asked by a tipping service that publishes its Saturday selections mid-morning and needs Sportsbet and Betr win and place across the whole day.

• Every direct-poll bookmaker connector now lists its full day card. Races inside six hours of the jump are priced every cycle as before; races beyond that are re-priced about every 15 minutes, so the wider window costs the bookmakers' rate limits almost nothing. The API's own forward window went from 6 hours to 24, and /v1/racing/best-odds accepts num_races up to 150, so one call returns the Australian day card.
• New refresh_tier on every race and on every bookmaker entry: live inside six hours keeps the 120-second staleness rule, card beyond it allows 30 minutes. age_seconds is the true age in both. If you apply your own freshness rule, branch on the tier rather than guessing.
• Sportsbet was the holdout: its next-events feed returns at most 40 races per code, so at 10am its afternoon card did not exist. Since 6 September the feed walks the day's meetings directly.
• Measured Monday 7 September at 10:00 Sydney: 22 thoroughbred races across 4 meetings, every one priced, Sportsbet and Betr win and place on all 22, nine bookmakers reaching the last race of the day and Unibet within half an hour of it. A Monday card is small. The first full-size reading is Saturday 12 September, and the measurement now runs every morning at 10:00 Sydney.
• Palmerbet joined the day card on 7 September. It had only ever priced the last ten minutes before each jump, because the feed that carries it was built for that; it now walks the whole AU/NZ card and re-prices races beyond the near-jump window about every 20 minutes, with place prices, and every quote carries the time it was actually read. One limit worth knowing: Unibet can list only about 60 races through its card feed.

Results: starting prices, abandoned meetings, and the meetings we were missing

Asked by two customers maintaining historical runner databases, and one backtesting a model against the archive.

• sp is now on every runner and placing in /v1/racing/results: Racing Australia's official starting price for thoroughbreds, the Topaz feed's for greyhounds. That closes the sparse-SP item from last issue.
• Abandoned and postponed meetings now come back as status: abandoned with a status_note carrying Racing Australia's own word: abandoned, postponed, or transferred to another venue. It is read hourly from the official notice board. A live race that is abandoned is marked on /v1/racing/events and shows up in /v1/racing/changes the same way a scratching does. A meeting with real placings is never touched.
• Full-field thoroughbred results were missing whole meetings whose Racing Australia name carries a sponsor or a surface, such as Sportsbet Sandown Hillside or Devonport Tapeta Synthetic: three meetings and 26 races on the day it was measured. Fixed 3 September; the join now finds them.
• Greyhound full fields still come from the Topaz feed. Our own greyhound collection runs hourly beside it in report-only mode and switches over only once it has shown clean parity. Still open, as it was.

Scratchings with a time, and the going with a history

Asked by the greyhound analysis app and the thoroughbred model app from last issue, who both wanted timestamped race-state changes.

• Scratchings on /next-to-go, /events and /changes now carry scratched_at where the source publishes one (Ladbrokes, Neds and the BetMakers-platform books do), late: true for late scratchings and emergency: true for emergencies. Racing Australia's official scratching sheet fills in whatever a bookmaker left unstamped, every two hours. No source anywhere publishes a stewards' reason, so there is no reason field, and the docs say so rather than inventing one.
• New /v1/racing/track-conditions (1 credit): per meeting, the current official going, weather and rail position, plus the day's change log, each row with the previous value, the time we saw it move, and which feed saw it. The log started on 6 September and fills from here.
• track_condition_changed_at on /next-to-go, /events and /changes: the instant of the latest logged change for that race's meeting, null until something moves.
• market_closed_at now populates. It shipped last issue and then read null on every race, because the exchange feed stops returning a market about two minutes before the jump and no poll ever saw the close. PointsBet is now a second source: the connector follows each race across its jump and stamps the close, usually inside 90 seconds of the advertised start. market_state_source names the feed that stamped it. inplay_at is exchange-only and is not published.

Top 2, Top 3 and Top 4

Asked by the thoroughbred model app, which wanted a market to compare its place probabilities against.

• Each bookmaker entry on /v1/racing/next-to-go that quotes them carries top2_price, top3_price and top4_price beside win and place. Ladbrokes, Neds and PointsBet carry all three; Sportsbet where its card offers the same-race-multi markets. A book that does not quote a leg simply omits the key. No new requests: three feeds already carried these in payloads the connectors were fetching and discarding.
• best_top2, best_top3 and best_top4 on /v1/racing/best-odds, in the same shape as best_place, and the current values on /v1/racing/changes runner rows.
• Every published chain is ordered: win, then Top 2, Top 3 and Top 4, each price at or below the one before it and above 1.0. A leg that breaks the order at the source is dropped, never published. One thing that looks odd until you see why: on a race paying three places the Top 3 equals the place price, because it is the same bet.

The archive: stable runner IDs and Parquet

Asked by a customer backtesting a model against the closing-lines archive, and another keeping historical prices for a personal model.

• runner_ref is now the last column of /v1/racing/closing-lines and /v1/racing/price-paths. CSV column order is otherwise unchanged; JSON is by name. It is filled from Racing Australia acceptances for thoroughbreds and from the results archive once a result lands, for every code. A one-off backfill stamped about 23% of the archive; rows from before late August predate the source and stay null.
• /v1/racing/price-paths?format=parquet: typed columns (UTC timestamps, dates, floats), same 20-credit cost and 200,000-row cap as the CSV.
• BSP and traded volume are still behind a Betfair data licence. Unchanged.

Horse form: bulk backfill, cheaper repeat reads, and billing only on success

Asked by a ratings modeller who wanted form for 20,000 horses, and the thoroughbred model app.

• /v1/racing/horses/form reads Racing Australia one page per horse, and a client-side backfill of thousands of horses trips their bot protection and takes the endpoint down for everyone. New POST /v1/racing/horses/backfill queues the batch on our side and drips it at about 72 reads an hour; status, results and cancel endpoints let you collect rows as they land. Plus plans and above, deliberately above Standard, because it spends a shared upstream budget that no plan enlarges. 3 credits per horse delivered, never at submit; a horse Racing Australia has no page for costs nothing. 20,000 horses takes about 12 days.
• A stored form page is now served from our copy for up to seven days and re-read from Racing Australia only if the horse has raced since. Before this, every read more than six hours after collection went back to the source.
• Form and premiership calls are billed only on a 200. A 404, 502 or 503 no longer costs credits; in the 24 hours before the fix, 112 failed form calls had been charged 3 credits each. A 15-minute circuit breaker keeps customer calls off Racing Australia while it is challenging us, and stored horses keep serving in the meantime.
• Premiership tables: the national jockey and trainer tables answer now, so the 503 from last issue is gone. State tables land one state per nightly run, because Racing Australia's bot protection cuts each run short; New South Wales is in and the rest follow over the coming nights.

Deep links that go one tap further

Asked by the tipping service, which rejects any quote that does not link to the bookmaker.

• betslip_win_url and betslip_place_url on each bookmaker entry, and betslip_url on best_win and best_place: a link that opens the bookmaker with the runner already in the betslip. Unibet and TAB work in a browser, and a canary checks both every morning at 9:00 Sydney. Ladbrokes and Neds carry betslip_app_only: true: their links open the native app and cannot be browser-checked, so they ship on the vendor's documentation and a phone tap-test.
• TABtouch source_url was empty on nearly every runner row, a lost meeting id in the connector. Fixed 3 September; every row now carries one.
• BetDeluxe race-page links on all three codes, built by the connector from the race stub it already reads.
• BoostBet and BetGold answered a Cloudflare 403 to every request from the server from 4 September, and for three days showed as degraded on /v1/health/connectors, with any_degraded at the top, instead of the OK-with-zero-records the endpoint used to report. Since 7 September both reach the platform through a second outbound connection of our own and are back on the full card: 29 of 29 races on the 8 September 10:00 reading, win and place. No fingerprint spoofing; the fix is a route, not a disguise.

Billing and plumbing

• Paying under a different email address from the one your key was registered with used to mint a second key and leave the one your code uses on the free allowance. It happened three times in a month. Checkout now resolves your key by Stripe customer first and then by the canonical form of the email, Gmail dots and plus-tags ignored, and an in-place upgrade sends exactly one notice.
• The API now sits behind a systemd socket, so a restart queues incoming requests for a few seconds instead of refusing them. A deploy during racing no longer drops calls.
• GET /v1/webhooks/{id}/deliveries now reports delivered or failed with the attempt count. Every row used to read pending forever.
• FastAPI and Starlette updated for two published CVEs. No behaviour change.
• puntersedge.online/api/console shows a key's usage, burn rate and calls by endpoint, no login: paste the key and it stays in your browser. It went live on 1 September and did not get a mention last issue.
• The sports coverage page now counts the Australian books quoting right now and names the offshore and paused ones, instead of a fixed number.

Reply with anything you want on the list. Requests from the last two weeks drove nearly everything above, and the open list is where the next issue starts. Write to hamish@punters-edge.com or use the feature request form.