Hacker News Reader

Comment by reagan83 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...)

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com