Former SRE for the ground up rebuild of Recreation.gov - I gave a talk at Datastax's Accelerate conference this summer about how we built this site, and briefly covered how we combated bots for a while. Enjoy!
Recreation.gov
111–120 of 205 posts
Re: Recreation.gov
#112Front and center of any website to outdoor activities should include some education about Leave No Trace ( https://lnt.org/ ). It's an absolutely laudable effort to get more people outdoors. However, people new to the outdoors aren't very cognizant of the kind of footprint they leave behind, not to mention the *holes who intentionally throw trash at public parks like they're in their own backyards. For the former typ…
And for people who follow the LNT protocol, and perhaps even carry other people trash, the next step I suggest is to destroy bushcrafters' "shelters". They disrupt soil, more often than not made out of live cut trees (and hinder wood decomposing when not) and 9 out of 10 times, will come with beer cans/tp scattered around and it's illegal to 'build' them on public land. If you happen to see one, destroy it, you'll be…
Not knowing anything about this topic, I’m curious about why this comment is downvoted.
Re: Recreation.gov
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it was some crazy bot net trying to make money off camping slots. It’s simply a bunch of Silicon Valley nerds that figured out how to automate the booking system for the most desirable camping spots in the bay. But a few of them got greedy I think. Not sure why. One of my coworkers wrote a bot and shared it around the company. Not sure how far that bot spread but I’m sure other people did the same. And…
> The parks really should have had better defenses. Requiring a deposit payment at time of booking is a pretty easy one. Make it non refundable if it continues to be a problem. Increase the price if it still is a problem. If the goal then is to make it fair for everyone regardless of ability to afford it, require a legible scan of ID or passport and restrict each person to reserving 1 spot in the future at a time, an…
or... limit concurrency. I'm not sure if people were making concurrent reservations, but normal people don't need, say, 4 campsites on the same block of days at 4 different campsites. if this wasn't being abused, it probably will be at some point.
Re: Recreation.gov
#114Recreation.gov was recently rebuilt and runs on Kubernetes. Details:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/seeking-happy-campers-governmen...
Re: Recreation.gov
#115I worked in the bot defense space for quite some time, and it’s insane how much of the bot efforts were dedicated to getting camping spots. I’m happy to see this being recognized because I had many summers ruined because I couldn’t just get my old favorite camp spot.
Stuff like this seems like a clear example where a lottery would make a lot more sense than a FCFS system.
Re: Recreation.gov
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The parks really should have had better defenses. Requiring a deposit payment at time of booking is a pretty easy one. Make it non refundable if it continues to be a problem. Increase the price if it still is a problem. If the goal then is to make it fair for everyone regardless of ability to afford it, require a legible scan of ID or passport and restrict each person to reserving 1 spot in the future at a time, an…
or... limit concurrency. I'm not sure if people were making concurrent reservations, but normal people don't need, say, 4 campsites on the same block of days at 4 different campsites. if this wasn't being abused, it probably will be at some point.
That would require checking identification.
Re: Recreation.gov
#117I worked in the bot defense space for quite some time, and it’s insane how much of the bot efforts were dedicated to getting camping spots. I’m happy to see this being recognized because I had many summers ruined because I couldn’t just get my old favorite camp spot.
Stuff like this seems like a clear example where a lottery would make a lot more sense than a FCFS system.
What good is a lottery when it's a few hundred people vs. 20,000 bots?
Online camping spot reservations need to ask for your name at the time of reservation, and ensure the name matches your ID when you arrive at the park. This is how many (non-Ticketmaster) concert e-tickets work.
Re: Recreation.gov
#118Lol at the copyright notice at the bottom. I notice the app is made by Booz Allen Hamilton. It's a shame we have to farm this stuff out to contractors and not use the USDS or 18F.
this doesn't seem restrictive - https://www.recreation.gov/use-our-data
Re: Recreation.gov
#119Is this peak hacker news where the titles have regressed into just the base url that's repeated to the right?
What do you think would be a better title?
"Recreation.gov is a travel site for the USA's national parks with easy access to maps, permits, tours and activities."
Really though anything would be better than just linking a site and repeating its URL. That is just lazy clickbait that implies something so special that no description is needed. I'm not sure why this site seems to be infatuated with mystery titles with no description at all.
Re: Recreation.gov
#120which country is this for?