I did the same thing at UCSB 10 years ago to constantly poll for seats opening up in a class. This was back when GOLD was a primitive web interface that was cle

I did the same thing at UCSB 10 years ago to constantly poll for seats opening up in a class. This was back when GOLD was a primitive web interface that was clearly screen-scraping an IBM AS/400 terminal app. I used python and twill--put values into forms (no JavaScript and the form IDs never changed), login, search for the class, and scrape.