[uwthrowaway]

I'm a uw cs student, it is made pretty clear that you're not supposed to trade spots or otherwise automate any part of the registration. Students typically know not to talk about this stuff.

While well-intentioned, if this was commonly used it would mess registration up even more by making the "constrained" classes valuable and would be filled up quickly by people who wouldn't take them.

[buildbot]

I was an EE student and worked for UW CSE back in the day, someone tried to do this back then as well and got very in trouble.

There may have been some browser automation scripts about… I wouldn’t know.

[hirvi74]

How were said student(s) even caught? I am assuming someone spoke too loudly or shared too much, but I'd be lying if I said I was not hoping for some kind of technical solution.

[buildbot]

Not sure, but UW IT isn’t incapable of noticing repeated requests from the same IP or something, I assume most students are not setting up systems that go over residential proxies.

[thorncorona]

You typically need to be signed in in order to get all the course info.

[buildbot]

UW does have that info publicly available: https://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/WIN2025/

You do have to be signed typically to actually make changes of course, I imagine this tool would have to have your netid login… (yikes)

[loeg]

I benefited from a UW CSE spot trade in like 2010 and didn't get in trouble for it at the time.

[uwthrowaway]

Yeah, a small amount of "organic" mischief isn't bad IMO, but it's problematic on a larger scale.

[buildbot]

Yeah I agree, not ideal given how limited capacity is in some classes.

[lupire]

Can you explain when this horrific behavior (seat trading) is explicitly supported by UW, when they could simply NOT accept requests for trading seats?

I sign up for a class. I am on the roster. How is it possible for me to put your name on the class roster, for credit, transcript, and diploma, without the university going out of their way to help?

These aren't anonymous concert tickets or XBoxes. They are personally identifiable registrations.

[badgersnake]

It seems odd that they would want the author to provided them with a system to automate it then.