Re:How I Hacked My University's Registration System with Pyt...
by Mister_Snuggles on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:04PM
(#14620739)
The sad thing is that with a little bit of effort on the part of University IT, something like this could be built to put a lot less load on the system.
Using this example, couldn't someone (University IT) write an SQL script to dump out the current seat count/capacity for every "current" class and throw it on a web server somewhere? Assuming that the underlying database schema isn't completely insane, that would probably be about a half-day of effort. The student writing the scraper could then point it at the output of this script.
With a half-day of effort, you've reduced the load on the application, you've provided a service that the students probably want, and best of all you've got someone else to do most of the hard work.
Using this example, couldn't someone (University IT) write an SQL script to dump out the current seat count/capacity for every "current" class and throw it on a web server somewhere? Assuming that the underlying database schema isn't completely insane, that would probably be about a half-day of effort. The student writing the scraper could then point it at the output of this script.
With a half-day of effort, you've reduced the load on the application, you've provided a service that the students probably want, and best of all you've got someone else to do most of the hard work.