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Comment by hamilyon2 | Hacker News Reader

I experienced this firsthand with government immigration websites. The thing is there are only so many time slots and and people are forsed to use a certain web site to apply, so everyone is hunting for available time and generally none are available.

So, some creative people set up bots which check periodically for them. They are paid services which will do that for you. Now we have bots hammering gatekeeper's website. Perhaps hundreds of bots.

Which results in the website is being unavailable, serving a serious qps to bots. I think it is only a matter of time before someone will write bots that will apply to application bots hoping that more entries with their information will provide them with better probability of success.

This is so dystopian and cruel to the average person, and I don't think there is a good solution besides a deep anti-bot expertise whithin the primary website development team

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> I don't think there is a good solution besides a deep anti-bot expertise whithin the primary website development team

But there is a solution: the website team should get their act together and remove the "first come first served" aspect altogether.

Do you, citizen, want to register? Cool - leave your e-mail and we'll call you. Is the service optional? Then we'll pick at random from the pool of applicants and e-mail them. Is the service mandatory? Then sign up and we'll call you once you reach the top of the queue. Add a quick ID/credit card/whatever check on top (like good concert venues do), regular e-mail updates to let people know they haven't been forgotten, and you're done.

Any second year CS student could write such a system. The difficult part is accepting that the current approach doesn't work and looking for alternatives.

"Thank you for waiting three weeks for your appointment selection. We are happy to offer you a time slot next Friday, from 1 pm to 1:15 pm. Click here to accept: [button]. If this does not suit you, click here to get sent back to the queue: [button]."

Half the point of these services tends to be giving users some choice in when they have to show up somewhere. Because not everyone can make time in the middle of business hours of an arbitrary day. Not to mention that you might simply be out of town.

Applicants specify their preferred time slots in decending order and the government agency chooses the time. This is how the my country does it.

>Then we'll pick at random from the pool of applicants and e-mail them

This is where having your own email domain with unlimited accounts is useful.

The thought did cross my mind, which is why I'd also ask for an ID or equivalent. If you don't show up with that specific ID on the day of your appointment, you lose the appointment. And you can use that ID number to deduplicate requests.

If you don't do that, I 100% agree with you - scalpers could then register with hundreds of accounts for reselling, and we would be back where we started.

>Do you, citizen, want to register? Cool - leave your e-mail and we'll call you. Is the service optional? Then we'll pick at random from the pool of applicants and e-mail them. Is the service mandatory? Then sign up and we'll call you once you reach the top of the queue.

Wait a minute, wouldn't that be more work for "us"?

Let me think ....

It gets more fun when there are arbitrary restrictions on process. Fun anecdote: South Africa's Home Affairs website, where you make bookings for passports, only lets you book appointment dates 2 weeks ahead normally. It's effectively permanently booked even without bots this way.

Luckily, if you're technically inclined, editing the value of the input element via dev tools is accepted by the form.

Heh, I've done the same thing to calculate my tax.

The tax agency had grayed out the "calc tax" button until the declaration period started, but you could just enable it with the enable flag.

Did nothing but read querry their servers though.

It's not filtered out on the back end?

I faced a website like this recently when booking a slot at my own German embassy, went a different route around the embassy instead. What I don't like about the slot system: You won't get a convenient time slot anyways so why do they bother setting it up like this in the first place? Why not just register with your contact details and receive an email with a guaranteed spot at a selection of three days instead. No more need to reload and no need for bots. The Upper Austrian government did this for covid vaccinations in the early phase and it worked very well that way (early, high vaccination rate amongst the elderly and certain professions).

That reminds me of the chaos that ensued in my state in the early days of Covid-19 vaccination when they were still having centralized systems where the elderly could book an appointment. Of course, they had way more demand than supply but still insisted on First Come, First Served, so you ended up with every member of the extended family being asked to try and book a slot, quickly overwhelming their booking systems.

At least you didn't need to worry about it all day: there wasn't a chance in hell to get something 3 minutes after the booking system opened each day.

Friends described how stressful it was for them, their parents being completely helpless and essentially fearing that their health depended on getting one of those elusive appointments, and being devastated each day they didn't succeed.

In some miracle of competence my district alotted shots by decreasing age limit so that it were no "shortage" or lagfest for those eligible in the booking system.

We have all the data about everyone in the registers, but god forbid we use them to lower friction in case of emergencies! Good to hear that some got it right.

This is pretty much the only way you can book a driving test in the UK at the moment unless you want to take your test in a random place in the Highlands.

Berlin?

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