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by cldellow 1139 days ago
Canada has some national parks that do something like this. Lake O'Hara's booking system this year is a random queue:

> In lieu of a random draw, Parks Canada will be employing a queuing system to help manage the expected high demand. Users may navigate to the reservation service webpage beginning at 7:30 AM. At 8:00 AM all users waiting will be randomly assigned a place in the queue. This is not influenced by how long users have been waiting. Any users arriving to the website after 8:00 am will be placed in the back of the line. When users reach their turn, they will be alerted via an on-screen message. At that point, they have 30 minutes to proceed to the reservation website and make a reservation.
2 comments
geraldwhen 1138 days ago
If this is queue-it, there are mass automation tools. Even if it isnt, $50 in resi proxies will give you 100 positions in the queue vs 1.

Source: I won a lot of queues by Sony, AMD, and Walmart.

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Retric 1138 days ago
Holding a lottery without limiting people to one entry by say requiring your name to enter is dumb, but I am not surprised this happens.
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geraldwhen 1138 days ago
Gerald, Gerrald, Ger.ald.

Sony was restricting PS5s by address at one point, but adding an apartment number (to a house) or a 0 to an address got around the limit for the first year.

Depending on how valuable the item is, an incredible amount of manpower will go into defeating bot protections. I made a lot of money after spending a lot of time doing adversarial research and bot development.

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Retric 1138 days ago
It’s easy enough to require the name to exactly match the credit card name used or your kicked out of the fast queue.

That’s the thing about these lotteries, rejecting people isn’t an issue.

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geraldwhen 1137 days ago
Credit card name can also be fudged. And with 200 valid queue positions with <1 minute timers, that’s a lot of attempts.

I’ve beaten every queue system I’ve come across, and that includes at least 8 different retailers.

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Retric 1137 days ago
> Credit card names can also be fudged.

Not really, in cases where it actually matters like car rentals they don’t let you do many things that “fool” the half assed systems.

Frankly most queue systems aren’t designed to be robust because the company doesn’t care they are making the same money either way.

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ghaff 1138 days ago
I'm going to say that, in this day and age, an online reservation system for very scarce reservations that basically requires sniping to win a slot is a bad system.
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