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Comment by ben174 | Hacker News Reader

I worked in the bot defense space for quite some time, and it’s insane how much of the bot efforts were dedicated to getting camping spots. I’m happy to see this being recognized because I had many summers ruined because I couldn’t just get my old favorite camp spot.

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In my experience many of the best camp sites I have been to have been in federal forest land on forest roads. The tougher the road the better (limits traffic). I have found some amazing places in Colorado that you could never reserve and they don’t exist as official camp sites. You find a good spot and you camp. Camp grounds with packed in sites are... good for some things. I acknowledge this is a problem for some high traffic areas, but how natural and interesting is that kind of camping. It’s a shade below glamping. This does make camping accessible and of course there are edge cases, but in general I just find it pretty uninteresting. Anyway, I acknowledge the problem, but it’s also not really a problem for me and many people I know.

I've had this experience out west too. But anecdotally at least, these spots can be harder to find on the east coast.

there's a network of national forests that sprawl the east coast where I've never had an issue finding a mostly secluded campsites close to water and beautiful terrain.

I second this. It’s been very easy to find National Forest and WMA campsites in North Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Chattahoochee and Nantahala National forests and my favorite.

Around here in the East it’s often called “dispersed camping”.

Yup. For example, one can camp > 1/4 mile from shelters/huts and more than 200ft away from of a body of water/trails/trailheads just about anywhere in the White Mountain National Forest in NH and Maine. Below alpine zone of course, except for winter (where you camp on greater than 2 feet of snow, but not many folks are that adventurous :)

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb53637...

I have this experience in North Georgia as well. WMAs and National Forests with roadside camping. Preferably roads without RV access. They call them dispersed campsites.

State parks are terrible from the fees, crowds, and rules. It’s more like camping in a grass parking lot than anything else.

The Dawson WMA has added a $7/night camping fee in addition to the land access fee (or a fishing/hunting license). Hopefully that doesn't spread to other WMAs.

The internet says it’s the City of Atlanta owned tract of the WMA. It was the proposed site of the second Atlanta airport and a former nuclear testing area for Lockheed.

It’s much closer than my other spots. I’ll check it out soon, maybe even Friday. Looks like they just stocked Amicola creek with trout.

Ya, I agree, I don’t think I’ve ever actually camped in an official camping lot/spot. I’ve always trecked in and got away from the noise. Never knew this was a problem.

How do you find these spots? That sounds like a great excuse to bring out the 4x4.

You look at a map of interesting roads, maybe look at satellite imagery of the area if you're not at all familiar with it, and take your 4x4 out for a drive.

Go slow, keep your eyes open, and you'll probably see a spot which looks perfect to camp at in no time.

These days, forest roads and primitive roads are often marked on Google / Apple maps and OpenStreetMaps. So asking your phone for directions to a national forest usually works well, as long as you check the camping rules and conditions ahead of time. You'll usually just see a series of pull-outs with fire pits and cleared areas along the unpaved roads.

Lands managed by the BLM or USFS usually allow dispersed camping in at least some areas, but it's still a good idea to double-check before you leave, and you should be aware that the same lands are often used for other activities like hunting, logging, horse-riding, grazing, offroad vehicles, etc.

You can also get more specialized outdoors mapping apps which can download data like USGS topographical maps and quad sheets for offline use. If you think you might like the backcountry, a satellite messenger is a good investment and those often have companion phone apps.

Don't forget to bring a big battery if you rely on electronics for mapping, though. And you can usually get decent paper maps from local NPS/USFS/etc visitor centers once you get to the area. The people in those visitor centers will also tell you where good sites / hikes / drives / views are, but then you have to actually talk to someone.

Also, read about pack-in/pack-out policies, what a cathole is, and how to keep your food from attracting animals.

You just look up the regulations in your area, Federal Forest and Wildlife Management land have uniform rules as far as I can tell. Then you explore. I just spent a few weekends off riding and cruising the mountains this summer, visiting places and taking notes of good camp sites. That’s part of the fun. You can find sporadic information online, but generally I think people keep their favorite spots to themselves? Great reason to bang around, bring food. I set up the back of my truck to sleep in. Poor mans Tepui tent.

Hang on. Is this hyperbole or are you saying you've actually had not one, but multiple summers ruined just because you could get a particular spot? Seems like too rigid a definition of a summer to enjoy the very nature of summer.

People take this stuff seriously, and some spots in parks are truly magical, especially if you can get 2-3 adjacent spots for extended family.

Long ago, I ran part of the backend systems for a contractor that had a variety of state and other parks. One set of islands on a lake in particular were very important to a number of people for various reasons.

Specific weekends were in particularly high demand, and people discovered gaps in the booking and rescheduling policies that would allow them to reserve the spot at a different time, then do multiple re-books. IIRC, they would spend about $500 in re-booking fees and would have to coordinate re-booking in multiple specific, inconvenient time windows. (Part of it involved a window where the phone system would accept changes before the online system)

Somebody figured it out, and it escalated to the point where the legislature was investigating it and one of the VPs had to testify to a committee.

Wow. At this point I could see wanting to do this just for the hell of it, but personally couldn't imagine doing that just for the spot. Also, who the hell would want to "camp" with two extra sites of extended family!? /s but not really

I'm more interested in bots hogging camping spaces. Why? What's the purpose?

Edit: This seems to explain it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625871

The bots on the good camping sites are insane, it's clearly a few people who have figured it out. Some even sell alerting services. Keep in mind, in some places, there aren't any other options, looking at the most commonly watched ones they are in very unique places like the Florida Keys. They get resold on the secondary market or you pay someone a premium upfront to bot the reservation for you. Call the parks, they will acknowledge it (or did to me), it's also obvious when all spots are booked in milliseconds.

> Hang on. Is this hyperbole or are you saying you've actually had not one, but multiple summers ruined just because you could get a particular spot? Seems like too rigid a definition of a summer to enjoy the very nature of summer.

My thoughts exactly.

Stuff like this seems like a clear example where a lottery would make a lot more sense than a FCFS system.

What good is a lottery when it's a few hundred people vs. 20,000 bots?

Online camping spot reservations need to ask for your name at the time of reservation, and ensure the name matches your ID when you arrive at the park. This is how many (non-Ticketmaster) concert e-tickets work.

Presumably ginko means a lottery between people who've provided IDs

Yes, it's worked pretty well for eg fusion festival (well, they don't really enforce the I'd thing, but apart from that..): https://www.fusion-festival.de/en/x/start

(ticket raffle not up yet for 2020, though)

Can you elaborate? This sounds interesting...

I don’t think it was some crazy bot net trying to make money off camping slots. It’s simply a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds that figured out how to automate the booking system for the most desirable camping spots in the bay. But a few of them got greedy I think. Not sure why.

One of my coworkers wrote a bot and shared it around the company. Not sure how far that bot spread but I’m sure other people did the same.

And by bot I mean a pretty trivial selenium script. The parks really should have had better defenses.

> The parks really should have had better defenses.

Requiring a deposit payment at time of booking is a pretty easy one. Make it non refundable if it continues to be a problem. Increase the price if it still is a problem.

If the goal then is to make it fair for everyone regardless of ability to afford it, require a legible scan of ID or passport and restrict each person to reserving 1 spot in the future at a time, and they must be the person stating in the camp site so someone has to verify their ID at the camp site too, otherwise they can now resell that reservation like ticket re-sellers.

I don’t see other options of “fairly” distributing something with limited quantities. Trying to do it on the technical side by trying to prevent automated scripts is a losing battle in the long run.

or... limit concurrency. I'm not sure if people were making concurrent reservations, but normal people don't need, say, 4 campsites on the same block of days at 4 different campsites. if this wasn't being abused, it probably will be at some point.

That would require checking identification.

Years ago in Texas I wrote a simple selenium webdriver script to check on the status of available camp spots in a popular state park and notify me when one became available. Kind of a last ditch effort to camp as people would book months ahead of time but would sometimes cancel their reservation when they realized they can’t make it. I think they’d do it before their small deposit became non-refundable.

The alternative of manually checking every day would have likely resulted in never getting a spot. I was using my skills to hack together a solution for myself in a crappy situation.

This was pretty much my experience as well: had to build a small scraper 2 years ago to alert me whenever spots for camping became available in Yosemite. Bear in mind that this was around 3-4 months in advance. Just for the sake of it I let it run after we had the spots, to understand how many people cancelled, and the amount of cancellations are actually insane.

While I don't think my approach was too harsh (I wasn't constantly querying nor booking automatically), it could be solved if they provided their own alert system, or discourage the book-cancel behaviour (higher cancel fees? Might not make much sense since the camping itself is pretty cheap...)

The most coveted camp sites are booked months in advance on the day that the site becomes available. The days vary by park and by site. Individuals trying to plan a backpacking trip have to complete with outdoor adventure travel businesses trying to secure the best places. Park rangers are aware of the schemes and try to impose policies and procedures to promote fairness, since businesses will snipe first come first serve without hesitation if allowed to do so.

> it’s insane how much of the bot efforts were dedicated to getting camping spots.

is there? whats the source.

> I had many summers ruined because I couldn’t just get my old favorite camp spot

...you are joking, right?

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