Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
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Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
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Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#2This is remarkable.
Concert tickets are also being bought this way by bots for scalpers.
Ebay sniper bots are commonly used.
High Frequency trading is the high end this.
Perhaps it is unavoidable, perhaps other means for selling things online should be sought out, text messages with semantic replies required or something?
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#3Soon - "Auction Sniper now supports urbanspoon! First 3 reservations are free!"
There's something frustrating about reading this. Perhaps its that a technological advancement that was supposed to make life easier is being capitalized on by a small group of technically competent people, shutting out the average user.
I was thinking of going to PAX next year a few hours ago and decided to do a bit of research. For this year, the 4 day tickets apparently sold out in 23 minutes, and the rest within 5 hours. I'm having a hard time imagining how its going to be possible for anyone to get some this coming year without a bot.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#4Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#5Given their popularity, why doesn't this restaurant just get rid of the reservation system altogether? A lot of the popular/trendy/hipster magnet places here do this since it saves hassle and creates a certain allure when lines are out the door for a table.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#6Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.
Do restaurant's scale?
Find a bigger venue. Open another store.
Maybe they should just deploy to Heroku or Appengine and have them scale to meet their table needs.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#7Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.
Or open a second location.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#8Seems like Urbanspoon should be using some sort of scraping counter measures to make things a little more fair. I sent them an e-mail through their contact form (of course I wouldn't be suprised if those are sent straight to the trash/spam folder).
Also, is scraping legal? I would imagine, at the very least, the OP and others are violating the TOS. I have written a few scripts of my own for fun, but I would be careful about bragging about it on a public blog.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#9Perhaps the restaurant should raise its prices.
Indeed this I do not understand, nor do I understand why bands sell tickets so cheaply when they can be resold by touts outside the door for many times that price.
Re: Bot wars - The arms race of restaurant reservations in SF
#10This is remarkable. Concert tickets are also being bought this way by bots for scalpers. Ebay sniper bots are commonly used. High Frequency trading is the high end this. Perhaps it is unavoidable, perhaps other means for selling things online should be sought out, text messages with semantic replies required or something?
This is why we can't have nice things.
On the topic of scalpers, Louis CK apparently hired [0] scalpers to help build some anti-scalper checks (I assume it is similar to fraud detection rules: multiple purchases from the same IP, out of town billing addresses) that runs on his website where he now sells all of his tickets. If you get flagged by a rule, the ticket goes to will-call, so you have to show ID and the credit card at the event. That small step to prevent it significantly reduces the resale value for a scalper who can't attend the event.
Here's the interesting part: It worked! Roughly 25% of all tickets for major shows fall into the hands of scalpers. On Louis CK's last tour, of all 125k+ tickets he sold, than than 1% were scalped. [1]
What's really terrible about the whole scalping business is that it would be solved, but only by the people who care least: The venue has a perverse incentive allowing scalpers to buy every last ticket they can get their greedy little hands on. As long as a ticket gets sold, they don't care. Screw the fans.
Possibly NSFW language in these links. [0] http://www.wbur.org/npr/162514765/louis-c-k [1] http://boingboing.net/2012/07/06/louis-cks-direct-sales-conc...