The sad thing is that with a little bit of effort on the part of University IT, something like this could be built to put a lot less load on the system. Using

The sad thing is that with a little bit of effort on the part of University IT, something like this could be built to put a lot less load on the system. Using this example, couldn't someone (University IT) write an SQL script to dump out the current seat count/capacity for every "current" class and throw it on a web server somewhere? Assuming that the underlying database schema isn't completely insane, that would probably be about a half-day of effort. The student writing the scraper could then point it at the output of this script. With a half-day of effort, you've reduced the load on the application, you've provided a service that the students probably want, and best of all you've got someone else to do most of the hard work.