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Reminds me of "Project Thor" from my university days. Course registrations were online, but in phases, e.g. Seniors for a week, then Juniors for a week, and so

Reminds me of "Project Thor" from my university days. Course registrations were online, but in phases, e.g. Seniors for a week, then Juniors for a week, and so down the line. However, many students would snag a spot in a course only to drop it as they shuffled courses around. There existed a "queue" for the overflow, but it appeared to work as a CRON job or otherwise involved a human in the loop as one would routinely see: Spanish 102 (Registered: (29/30), Queued:(60)) While in this state, one could simply click on the course and register, completely bypassing this poorly designed queue. So, naturally, I wrote a script to scrape the site on once a minute (hammering it, and so Project Thor) and alert me once a slot had opened up. Eventually provided this service to my friends as well.

therein 5y ago
I did something similar at UIUC very many years ago. I was called to the office of head of Department of Computer Science and kindly told while he thinks it is cool that I am applying my skills relevant to my field of study, I should stop what I am doing as even simply scraping could be construed malicious if it got the attention of the wrong people in the school.
jotm 5y ago
I've got something similar for appointments at citizens' bureaus in some European cities. The waiting time is usually around a month, which is insane imo. My script constantly looks for open/canceled spots and reserves them (some need email/phone confirmation, which makes it a bit harder). Pretty standard stuff. That's how I got my appointment in 3 days instead of a month. So, I'm thinking of making money from this, but I'm not sure about the legality of it all.
- FPGAhacker 5y ago
  What is a citizens’ bureau?
  - konha 5y ago
    Not OP, but sounds like the places in Germany where you go to get or extend your passport, register after moving to a new place etc. Notoriously hard to get a timely appointment for things that should not require an in person interaction in the first place.
  - jotm 5y ago
    As konha said, it's the government offices, providing services for registration, driver's licence, taxes, etc. It works the same way in several EU countries. Sometimes you can just show up (and wait in a queue) but most often you make an appointment beforehand. In many states/cities, the waiting times are weeks and months long (even in my home city everything's booked a month ahead and you can see the big queues if you go in person). People can indeed just refresh the page themselves and hope a spot opens up, but that's pretty annoying.
viceroyalbean 5y ago
My university had a queuing system used for presenting assignments. You could always access the page, but the queue wasn't open unless the TAs were there ready to take assignments. When the queue opened it would send a websocket message, so I made a browser extension that connected and waited for the queue open message and then immediately entered the queue. The effect wasn't huge (even in larger classes you would only have to wait 20-30 minutes even if you entered late) but it was nice to be able to sit back and not worry about getting a good spot.
remram 5y ago
My university actually had a bidding system. You would start the year with 10,000 points, and you could bid any number on electives. So you could spend a lot of points on one particular popular elective, and be guaranteed to get it, but then you would not be able to bid as high on other electives for the rest of the year. The system was pretty smart, except for the part that you could bid negative amount of points on an elective that wasn't particularly popular and increase your total. That was a pretty major flaw. [edit: I should say that I didn't use my extra points for anything. I wasn't particularly interested in the popular electives anyway. I did make sure to end the year with 10,001 points, hoping they would fix the bug, but I don't think they did.]

therein 5y ago

I did something similar at UIUC very many years ago. I was called to the office of head of Department of Computer Science and kindly told while he thinks it is cool that I am applying my skills relevant to my field of study, I should stop what I am doing as even simply scraping could be construed malicious if it got the attention of the wrong people in the school.

jotm 5y ago

I've got something similar for appointments at citizens' bureaus in some European cities. The waiting time is usually around a month, which is insane imo. My script constantly looks for open/canceled spots and reserves them (some need email/phone confirmation, which makes it a bit harder). Pretty standard stuff. That's how I got my appointment in 3 days instead of a month. So, I'm thinking of making money from this, but I'm not sure about the legality of it all.

FPGAhacker 5y ago
What is a citizens’ bureau?
- konha 5y ago
  Not OP, but sounds like the places in Germany where you go to get or extend your passport, register after moving to a new place etc. Notoriously hard to get a timely appointment for things that should not require an in person interaction in the first place.
- jotm 5y ago
  As konha said, it's the government offices, providing services for registration, driver's licence, taxes, etc. It works the same way in several EU countries. Sometimes you can just show up (and wait in a queue) but most often you make an appointment beforehand. In many states/cities, the waiting times are weeks and months long (even in my home city everything's booked a month ahead and you can see the big queues if you go in person). People can indeed just refresh the page themselves and hope a spot opens up, but that's pretty annoying.

viceroyalbean 5y ago

My university had a queuing system used for presenting assignments. You could always access the page, but the queue wasn't open unless the TAs were there ready to take assignments. When the queue opened it would send a websocket message, so I made a browser extension that connected and waited for the queue open message and then immediately entered the queue. The effect wasn't huge (even in larger classes you would only have to wait 20-30 minutes even if you entered late) but it was nice to be able to sit back and not worry about getting a good spot.

remram 5y ago

My university actually had a bidding system. You would start the year with 10,000 points, and you could bid any number on electives. So you could spend a lot of points on one particular popular elective, and be guaranteed to get it, but then you would not be able to bid as high on other electives for the rest of the year. The system was pretty smart, except for the part that you could bid negative amount of points on an elective that wasn't particularly popular and increase your total. That was a pretty major flaw. [edit: I should say that I didn't use my extra points for anything. I wasn't particularly interested in the popular electives anyway. I did make sure to end the year with 10,001 points, hoping they would fix the bug, but I don't think they did.]