4 ms·

Ask YC: My school wants to shut down my app. How should I respond?

• earl 18y ago
  I think you should take it down then ask for the course schedule via FOIA. They're a public school, no?
  • zaidf 18y ago
    I am already using the data under the premise of FOIA. Even if I request it explicitly, they will need to provide it electronically and will have the same supposed problems with traffic overload.
    • shib71 18y ago
      Except that they would only have to deal with 1 hit/min instead of 130, and possibly on a static file instead of a one generated on the fly.
      • jerf 18y ago
        Where did that 1hit/min come from? Does the FOIA have guidelines about that? (I ask for information, not as criticism.)
        • zaidf 18y ago
          I think what he means is if they make a custom page, they can provide ALL classes data for ALL depts on one page...where as right now I am having to query 130 different pages to get class data from 130 departments.
          • cflee 18y ago
            In which case wouldn't the traffic overload issue be resolved? 1 request/min seems a far cry from ~130 requests/min, and quite a reasonable compromise.
• nose 18y ago
  Maybe switch to appengine?
  • zaidf 18y ago
    Can you explain how that'll help? Thanks!
    • natrius 18y ago
      New IP address.
      • zaidf 18y ago
        LOL. Yeah that's the worst case option. But I'd rather not get in a cat-and-mouse game with 'em where I've to find a new IP every hr because they blocked the current one.
• chaosmachine 18y ago
  At first, I was querying every minute, so ~130 requests/minute. Wow, that's not nice.
  • harpastum 18y ago
    It's not the nicest thing in the world, but his university (UNC, as far as I can tell) has 30,000 students. 130 requests/min is the equivalent of having 0.4% of the students on at one time. It obviously creates a visible imprint, but it shouldn't be a show-stopper for the school.
    • zaidf 18y ago
      Yeah and like I said, it didn't cause a problem for over 3 weeks. And I am still not convinced it was the culprit in the last few days. From what I've experienced and from friends who went here five years ago, their system goes down/has issues every year during end of semester. This year they seem to have a scapegoat to blame it all on...except it doesn't help to admit that they are still having issues even after blocking me.
      • jerf 18y ago
        Devil's advocate: Without knowing the details, I would observe that the load generated by searches can be very different. Searching for all 100-level Physics classes may be an optimized code path (or DB query) that occurs in a fraction of a second, where as "Give me all classes in a department starting with P" might be slow, or "Give me all courses taught by Prof. Bill" might go down an unindexed code path. They might never have noticed if normal users only fired it only once per hour, but if you happen to be using more of those queries than a normal student because it's more convenient for you, then you might actually be hammering their system without meaning to. Or, put another way, "queries per second" is a terrible metric for "how much load I'm subjecting their system to". :) I can give you one bound you might want to instrument up to check their contention about load: How quickly they answer. If they answer in 1ms (minus ping time), then there's a sharp bound on how much of their resources you can be taking up. (I'm going to assume bandwidth isn't much of a concern here, based on the numbers.) If you see some queries taking longer, perhaps even into the seconds, then they may have a point. It could just be general load, or it could be your thing specifically.
• seiji 18y ago
  I attempted to automated my course registration process a few years ago. The registration software had a fixed limit of the number of pages you request before you get locked out. When you are locked out, a vague message appears about "attempts exceeded." Not knowing what to do next, I went to the registration office. They quickly realized what had happened and threatened me with disciplinary action because automatically accessing the registration system violated their vague interpretation of the school conduct guidelines (I also received a free lecture about how 'spiders' are border line illegal). After being further threatened with a "last day, last hour" registration timeslot until the sun burns out, I put on my best "I'm sorry" face and handed over a letter of apology and the 30 lines of code as they requested. They even had the courtesy to make snarky remarks about spending more time doing homework and less time trying to break their systems. WWW::Mechanize -- so easy it's dangerous.
• jfarmer 18y ago
  Make a deal with them. It doesn't sound like they object to ClassHunt per se, rather they don't like the additional load that ClassHunt causes. So, what do they want? 1. Reduced load and a more stable class registration system What do you want? 1. For ClassHunt to be used across campus (and not get banned!) What can you do to satisfy both these goals? One idea would be to pitch ClassHunt as a load-reducing service. By acting as a proxy to the class registration system you can smooth out the load. Have them actively promote ClassHunt on the class registration page and explain to them how more people using ClassHunt will result is less load for them, not more. It will also make the situation more flexible because they only have to deal with one person (you) rather than relying on the collective behavior of the whole of campus. Anyhow, just a thought.
  • zaidf 18y ago
    Great ideas! We'll see how receptive they are. From the legalese letter I received today it doesn't seem to encouraging. At the same time, the contacts I spoke with at the IT dept. few days ago could not stop praising the website.
    • icey 18y ago
      Well, you already know what the worst case scenario is (you get cut off). Anything you can negotiate will be better than that.
    • TomOfTTB 18y ago
      One other piece of advice. If the IT dept seems to love your site try pitching a compromise to them and let them pitch it to their boss. The pitch will be worth more coming from an emplooyee anyway and giving the IT dept a chance to play hero makes it worthwhile for them (which in turn makes them advocate even harder for you)
      • jfarmer 18y ago
        Yes, getting an internal champion when you're trying to pitch an organization is very, very important. Sometimes it's very difficult, but in this case it appears that most of the staff actually like the product!
• TomOfTTB 18y ago
  Are they at all open to compromise? Where I work we have a school for special needs kids and I had a problem with getting data from the individual school districts. So what I did was to write a short program myself that did what I needed and asked them if they'd agree to run it on their servers. There was some initial hesitation but after I bought them lunch and used the opportunity to walk them through the code line by line they were willing to install it. I'd imagine a similar system could work for you. It's a public database so you could write something that ran on a client machine (so it doesn't compromise their security) and since it's internal it wouldn't eat into their bandwidth (which is the only realistic problem I could see your program causing, one query every 15 minutes is not going to take that much processor power). Have it send you short text messages when there's a change and you're set.
• jjs 18y ago
  How often does this info change? Is there any reason why you must poll it so frequently?
  • zaidf 18y ago
    Yes, what I am doing is monitoring EVERY class on campus for its availability, which changes by the minute. I can get all the classes by department, there are ~130 depts so ~130 page requests.
    • silentOpen 18y ago
      Convince them to implement push then work in cooperation to publicize your service?
• pj 18y ago
  Sell them a license to run the software on their servers and query the database directly to reduce load.
• paul7986 18y ago
  Sell your product to them or set a deal up where you integrate into their system. It sounds as their is a demand for your service! Take advantage of it and either be the business man yourself or find someone you know who can sell!
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• gills 18y ago
  Wow. Schools pay load-based licensing costs for registration systems? There's a niche just waiting to be demolished by some startup... I think you have a useful idea here, and you should try to find a way to make it work. It sounds like your university's IT department thinks so too, but they have real limitations and good reason to ask you to cease operation because, unlike your service, theirs is required to be available. It sounds like without the cooperation of that IT department, your app (at least at UNC) is going to be a big nothingburger. Do whatever you can to make them your partners in implementing this service rather than your adversaries. This could mean collecting data that explains how your service improves their service; helping them measure and upgrade their current system so the load is a non issue; integrating your code at a lower level (direct to DB); beta testing a parallel registration system that will eventually save them lots of money on licensing. You have a difficult task with any solution. University policy may prohibit certain things, such as allowing a student or a student's software to directly access the real course registration data; or the timeline to have your app approved to run inside the security perimeter may be too long for you to bother trying. You may also want to check your school's invention rights policy before pursuing any tighter integration with their systems. If this hiccup is not a showstopper for you, just keep building your product. You can work on displacing whatever is causing the problems at this IT department, but if that is too far afield from your core (proposed) business, maybe just move on and try deploying the app against other universities' registration systems.
• dmillar 18y ago
  I had this same exact app a few years ago. (dropmessenger.com) It only worked for the University of Utah, and they did eventually contact me about polling the server. But, they were pretty cool about it, and even asked if I was looking for work. :) The reality is, they can't really make you take it down, but they can take steps to make your life miserable. Without any reliable API it will be difficult to scale such an app. Good work though.
• lleger 18y ago
  I work in the IT department of a major university and this is crazy. I'm also one of their students. You got a really cool service that solves a major problems for any large institution. Towards that end, this decision was probably made by a manager, who doesn't know much. All of the real knowledge is with the analysts. I'm sure that having an open dialog with them would get this changed. I doubt they'd keep you out with a little discussion.
• cmars232 18y ago
  My recommendation: apologize and drop the issue with IT in a vague and forgettable manner, use proxies (TOR, open proxies, a cheap VPS), set a normal browser or web-crawler user-agent -- and please, whatever you do, go easy on their infrastructure. Realize that schools sometimes (though not always) have substandard, under-funded IT depts. Your best bet is to stay under the radar and let your app build momentum with your users. Don't fight IT, and don't beg permission.
  • phugoid 18y ago
    That's what I was going to suggest as well. From your posts, it seems that the University's IT people like your app, and there's really no technical problem anymore. So randomize your IP number, and if anyone wants an explanation you can tell them that you have optimized your system so that instead of directly requesting all their data, your application now behaves exactly like a real student accessing their site in a conventional way.
• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• codeodor 18y ago
  How often do courses change? Couldn't you just do this once or twice a semester?