People take this stuff seriously, and some spots in parks are truly magical, especially if you can get 2-3 adjacent spots for extended family.

Long ago, I ran part of the backend systems for a contractor that had a variety of state and other parks. One set of islands on a lake in particular were very important to a number of people for various reasons.

Specific weekends were in particularly high demand, and people discovered gaps in the booking and rescheduling policies that would allow them to reserve the spot at a different time, then do multiple re-books. IIRC, they would spend about $500 in re-booking fees and would have to coordinate re-booking in multiple specific, inconvenient time windows. (Part of it involved a window where the phone system would accept changes before the online system)

Somebody figured it out, and it escalated to the point where the legislature was investigating it and one of the VPs had to testify to a committee.

Wow. At this point I could see wanting to do this just for the hell of it, but personally couldn't imagine doing that just for the spot. Also, who the hell would want to "camp" with two extra sites of extended family!? /s but not really

The bots on the good camping sites are insane, it's clearly a few people who have figured it out. Some even sell alerting services. Keep in mind, in some places, there aren't any other options, looking at the most commonly watched ones they are in very unique places like the Florida Keys. They get resold on the secondary market or you pay someone a premium upfront to bot the reservation for you. Call the parks, they will acknowledge it (or did to me), it's also obvious when all spots are booked in milliseconds.

I'm more interested in bots hogging camping spaces. Why? What's the purpose?

Edit: This seems to explain it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21625871

> Hang on. Is this hyperbole or are you saying you've actually had not one, but multiple summers ruined just because you could get a particular spot? Seems like too rigid a definition of a summer to enjoy the very nature of summer.

My thoughts exactly.