lichess-bot issues new challenges before cancelling old ones, allowing too many concurrent games, which time out

[JimViebke]

Describe the bug

lichess-bot seems to issue new challenges before cancelling old ones. This allows one opponent to accept a newer challenge, starting a game. While this game is in progress, another opponent can accept the older challenge, creating a second game that appears to be (correctly) ignored by lichess-bot. While the existing game is played, the new game eventually times out and is aborted.

Observed behavior: lichess-bot allows more games to start than it will play.
Expected behavior: lichess-bot limits open challenges to concurrency + 1.

config.yml currently has concurrency: 0 and allow_during_games: false.

(side suggestion: in future configs, change:
concurrency: 0 # Number of games to play simultaneously.
to:
concurrency: 1 # Maximum number of games to play at once. The min is 1.)

The timeline, per recent.log (attached):

• 18:53: lichess-bot challenges ai-con (game osCQjeIm).
• 18:54: lichess-bot challenges StockSquidV2 (game 5Sz1P70f). The game starts at 18:54 and completes at 19:00.
• 19:01: lichess-bot challenges The_Marcus (game CdRG6Obm).
• 19:01: Game with The_Marcus starts.
• 19:02: Game with ai-con starts.
• 19:03: Game with ai-con times out per abort_time: 30 in config.yaml ("Game aborted" on lichess.org).
• 19:06: Game with The_Marcus completes.
• 19:06: lichess-bot prepares to play the game with ai-con, and notices that it has aborted.

It may be a separate issue, but lichess-bot seems to stop receiving or accepting challenges at this point, and just idles until it is restarted.

Logs
recent.log

Desktop:

• OS: Windows 10
• Python Version: Python 3.12.4
• Terminal: PowerShell (using venv\Scripts\activate, py lichess-bot.py)

[MarkZH]

I think both issues are related to the ERROR lines in your logs. Due to a change in the response format from Lichess to challenges, the game ID of the matchmaking challenge is not being extracted correctly. This has two effects:

1. The challenge cannot be cancelled because there's no record of the game id--hence why the game with ai-con started nine minutes after the challenge was sent.
2. Every bot that gets challenged gets put on a block list because challenging them resulted in an error. So lichess-bot eventually stops challenging any bots since they are all on a block list.

I've filed an issue with the Lichess developers. Let's see if fixing that fixes this.

[MarkZH]

I've created a PR (#992) to address this issue. Please try it and let me know if it fixes the problem.

[MarkZH]

Please reopen if this issue persists.