> The typical ways that folks - especially folks who don’t program - bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial.
This reminded me of how a ski resort, Palisades Tahoe, implemented free but scarce parking reservations for weekend parking last winter. Since it's one of the most popular ski destinations from the Bay Area, you can imagine that bots were written. Every time new spots would "drop" (become available for the following weekend) I think on Tuesdays and Fridays or something like that, they'd be gone in seconds. Clearly bots! So naturally I had no choice but to write one. It just alerted me (via Pushover) when cancelations would lead to open slots, it didn't actually reserve spots on its own, but that was good enough to get the job done for me and my crew.
Several Reddit threads had non-bot-writers discussing that bots must be slurping everything up. I felt so antisocial, but really had no choice.
This reminded me of how a ski resort, Palisades Tahoe, implemented free but scarce parking reservations for weekend parking last winter. Since it's one of the most popular ski destinations from the Bay Area, you can imagine that bots were written. Every time new spots would "drop" (become available for the following weekend) I think on Tuesdays and Fridays or something like that, they'd be gone in seconds. Clearly bots! So naturally I had no choice but to write one. It just alerted me (via Pushover) when cancelations would lead to open slots, it didn't actually reserve spots on its own, but that was good enough to get the job done for me and my crew.
Several Reddit threads had non-bot-writers discussing that bots must be slurping everything up. I felt so antisocial, but really had no choice.