![[UK National Lottery Logo]](/Lottery.gif){kind=small}
I have some future plans for these pages, of course!
Since I scrape those three CSVs to get the drawn order, I contacted the official site to complain about the switch to ascending order for recent draws, only to be fobbed off with a "thank you for your input" response and nothing to indicate they'd fix the issue. I don't want to have to watch every live draw YouTube video for the main Lotto, Thunderball and Set For Life draws just to get the draw order of the balls (since that's now the only official place you can get the draw order for future draws), so I put my thinking cap on how to automate it...
It didn't take long to realise that each YouTube live draw video had automatically generated subtitles, so a bit of ChatGPT'ing revealed that on Linux, yt-dlp is now the preferred command line utility to grab YouTube content. It had options to just grab the automated subtitles and convert them to .srt format - that format is pretty simple (5 lines per numbered subtitle set, lines 1-2 are metadata and lines 3-5 are the subtitle text).
Needless to say, it wasn't quite as simple as that once I got parsing code in place. The quirks included spelling out (sometimes capitalised, sometimes not) single digit numbers sometimes as a word and sometimes as a digit, random extra commas, sometimes putting the drawn number at the end of a subtitle line or mostly sometimes on a line of its own and - by far the worst of all - missing numbers! My theory is that the very loud background music during the draw confuses the automated subtitles and it either displays "[Music]" or nothing at all, either of which is disastrous (unless it's for the bonus ball, which I can get from the official site and use that as a fallback).
It impacted the main Lotto where there were two draws since early August that it dropped a number on, so I ended up watching those two videos and getting the draw order myself. I will e-mail such failures to me to do it manually in the future if it happens again. Strangely, there were more Thunderball draws to deal since last August of course with but my code didn't detect any subtitle issues with them at all. I'll cron the code up to run somewhere around 22:00 each day (except Sunday) - I need the ascending order numbers from the official site first before I can check the video subtitles for the draw because I need a sanity check that the subtitles aren't puking out bad numbers.
That separate draw appears to be a computer-generated random draw - presumably they just number the entries uniquely and 15 random numbers from the entire list are picked (along with 30 reserves in case people fail to claim the prize) and win £100,000 each.
So far, so good, but I'm confused as to why you have to claim the prize when all the purchases are online and they have your debit card or bank account details already - why can't they just pay it straight into your card/bank account? I'm wondering if they simply haven't coded anything up w.r.t. to the website or their back-end systems to do this.
They might not even publish much about this second draw's results on the official website - like what random numbers/entries were picked, how many were claimed by the original entry, how many were claimed by reserves (and how many reserves there had to be for each prize award) and how many prizes were completely unclaimed.
It gets worse because they say they'll contact you by phone or e-mail by 25th September - not sure how it takes 7-12 days to contact 15 people (especially since e-mailing could be automated and they could even automate a text to someone's phone too), but whatever. The sting in the tail is that as soon as they contact each winner, that person only has a ridiculously short 14 days to claim the prize (i.e. by 9th October 2025 at the latest).
I can see a few winners missing out because of that incredibly short 2-week claim deadline (it's 26 weeks for the main Lotto!) and this is where the 30 reserve winners come in - a minimum of 2 reserves per unclaimed prize will be contacted and if those reserves fail to claim, there's no prize awarded at all (doesn't go to charity or anything)!
It's also interesting that it looks like you need to provide proof of your age and your UK residency to claim that separate draw's prize. No idea what docs you'd need for that - would a birth certificate do? I'm also not sure if that's a requirement for £100,000-sized prizes in the main Lotto too.
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I've had a rash of recent draw videos (the last 4 in fact as of now) that have been failing with yt-dlp, so I'm wondering if this is the issue and I may have to wait for an updated yt-dlp package (I'd expect Fedora 42 that I'm running it on to update its repos fairly quickly).
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