Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ssanders82 3166 days ago
In college everyone's class registration would open at once, and classes would fill up quickly. Some people would even register for more than they were gonna take, to hold it for friends or just to figure their schedule out. If I didn't get into a class I wanted, I had a HTTPS script set to attempt registering for it every 5 minutes. As soon as somebody dropped it - boom it was mine.
2 comments
nicholasjarnold 3166 days ago
I did something super similar: In order to graduate on time I had to take an accelerated Spanish course (hard requirement despite years of Spanish in grade school and high school). Problem: The class had a pre-requisite that I hadn't taken yet. Solution: The Uni's registration system allowed for a 4 digit numeric code to be entered to bypass registration restrictions. I wrote a script to brute force that code, registered successfully and graduated on time. Muy bueno! :)

Edit: spelling

link
jay-anderson 3166 days ago
For classes that I needed/wanted to take which had prereqs I tried to show up on the first day of class and get an override signed by the teacher at the end of class. It usually worked. For example in a low-level music theory class I showed up and answered questions during the class (I think I correctly wrote out a d-flat major scale on the board). That was enough to prove to the teacher that I'd be okay in the class.
link
andegre 3166 days ago
ballsy!
link
dsfyu404ed 3166 days ago
Oracle Peoplesoft?
link
samfriedman 3166 days ago
We had a similar system. The problem wasn't in the classes filling up (though that happened too) but that the system was built for steady-state load and not peak load: if you weren't in and out within 10 seconds of registration starting, you were in for minutes of panic as the registration pages failed to load again and again while the classes you wanted were filled by those luckier than you.

Instead I made an autohotkey script to input my chosen course IDs and submit. Just pasting in a value, <TAB>, pasting in a value, <TAB>, etc.

All done in less time than even the savvy registrants who would copy/paste as fast as they could. An earlier iteration used a programmable keyboard macro: AHK wasn't on the lab computers for my first year.

link