DVC Availability Checker

[cel_disney]

I LOVE this tool!! Well done!!


I think that since any member can check inventory inside 7 months, that if you made this a tool limited to the 7 month dates - you would be more in line with what renters are doing. Heck - if more members used this, we could maybe even reduce the loud on MS...

 

[cel_disney]

I LOVE this tool!! Well done!! I think that since any member can check inventory inside 7 months, that if you made this a tool limited to the 7 month dates - you would be more in line with what renters are doing. Heck - if more members used this, we could maybe even reduce the loud on MS...

Another question - does this use your user name/password to assess availability? Or would it use ours? I think having it use OURS to log into DVC would reduce any issues dvc might have with it!

 

[fitnessmouse]

Another question - does this use your user name/password to assess availability? Or would it use ours? I think having it use OURS to log into DVC would reduce any issues dvc might have with it!

Yes, this!
That way, we don't get any information we are not supposed to get.

 

[DeDobber]

Another question - does this use your user name/password to assess availability? Or would it use ours? I think having it use OURS to log into DVC would reduce any issues dvc might have with it!

It uses my password. It also isn't actually making requests on the DVC site when you are doing searches on ******.com. The app has already made all the requests at some point in the previous 6 hours, give or take. You're just seeing what it saw a few minutes/hours ago.

 

[DVC Dude]

It uses my password. It also isn't actually making requests on the DVC site when you are doing searches on ******.com. The app has already made all the requests at some point in the previous 6 hours, give or take. You're just seeing what it saw a few minutes/hours ago.

wow, your bandwidth stats on the DVC website must be off the charts.

How fast does your program work to gather all the data each search?

I love this bot as it 100% automates the laborious process of clicking and searching and waiting for 3-4 resorts to show up and gives a 100% availability picture.

 

[DeDobber]

wow, your bandwidth stats on the DVC website must be off the charts.

How fast does your program work to gather all the data each search?

I love this bot as it 100% automates the laborious process of clicking and searching and waiting for 3-4 resorts to show up and gives a 100% availability picture.

Well, it gives you a 95% availability picture. There could be bugs, it doesn't look for accessible rooms, and the data is always a few minutes to a few hours old.

It takes about 2.5 hours and makes about 2000 requests to get through everything. One day of data is about 135MB, so the cost is basically zero, although I still have to pay for hosting, but it's on a friend's server.

 

[samfsu]

Well, it gives you a 95% availability picture. There could be bugs, it doesn't look for accessible rooms, and the data is always a few minutes to a few hours old.

It takes about 2.5 hours and makes about 2000 requests to get through everything. One day of data is about 135MB, so the cost is basically zero, although I still have to pay for hosting, but it's on a friend's server.

Its a great resource and thanks for making the search changes

 

[glvsav37]

You made the Twitters today. @DVCNews.
#bigtime

 

[DVC Dude]

It takes about 2.5 hours and makes about 2000 requests to get through everything. One day of data is about 135MB, so the cost is basically zero.

First of all - I really love your program and think it is a thing of mathematical and programming beauty. Sure the interface is 1996 era Craig's list, but who cares as speed and data accuracy are the most important things.

Disclaimer - I personally used your site to search for a room and resort request that was sold out as I was checking every day or so whenever I remembered (but was unsuccessful) and within a few days of entering my request into your site I received an email on my iPhone that the room was available. I immediately booked the room and was SUPER HAPPY with the results. If I did not use your site, I may never have been able to book this room.

Let me make some guesses in regards of DVC server requests (feel free to correct these if you have better data):

If there are 400,000 DVC members and on any random 365 day of the year 1% of the members (4,000 members) make two online requests, that would be 8,000 requests for a typical DVC day. I would bet that half of all members still call the 800 number and do not use online booking, so my numbers could be high. Also, a typical online request will take something like 15 seconds, so I will estimate 30 seconds per member x 4,000 members per day = 2,000 minutes or 33 hours of computer power.

If you are making 2,000 requests per cycle and use 2.5 hours of computing time per every data refresh and you refresh 4x per 24 hours, then your grand total daily use is: 8,000 requests and 10 hours of server time

So, I estimate that you are currently making 50% of all DVC online room requests and using about 1/3 of their computer power.

What you are doing is similar to the high speed high frequency day traders and institutional investors where they are responsible for most of the movement on wall street, not the mom and pop investors.

I do NOT have any problems with you doing this, but Disney may differ and may try to halt this as if 2 more programmers developed similar bot programs to yours, then the majority of DVC computer power would be consumed by only 3 people or IP addresses.

Keep up the good work !!!

 

[disneynutz]

I would think that Disney doesn't want the general public knowing that there is limited room availability.

That could really hurt potential sales.

Bill

 

[Sammie]

First of all - I really love your program and think it is a thing of mathematical and programming beauty. Sure the interface is 1996 era Craig's list, but who cares as speed and data accuracy are the most important things.

Disclaimer - I personally used your site to search for a room and resort request that was sold out as I was checking every day or so whenever I remembered (but was unsuccessful) and within a few days of entering my request into your site I received an email on my iPhone that the room was available. I immediately booked the room and was SUPER HAPPY with the results. If I did not use your site, I may never have been able to book this room.

Let me make some guesses in regards of DVC server requests (feel free to correct these if you have better data):

If there are 400,000 DVC members and on any random 365 day of the year 1% of the members (4,000 members) make two online requests, that would be 8,000 requests for a typical DVC day. I would bet that half of all members still call the 800 number and do not use online booking, so my numbers could be high. Also, a typical online request will take something like 15 seconds, so I will estimate 30 seconds per member x 4,000 members per day = 2,000 minutes or 33 hours of computer power.

If you are making 2,000 requests per cycle and use 2.5 hours of computing time per every data refresh and you refresh 4x per 24 hours, then your grand total daily use is: 8,000 requests and 10 hours of server time

So, I estimate that you are currently making 50% of all DVC online room requests and using about 1/3 of their computer power.

What you are doing is similar to the high speed high frequency day traders and institutional investors where they are responsible for most of the movement on wall street, not the mom and pop investors.

I do NOT have any problems with you doing this, but Disney may differ and may try to halt this as if 2 more programmers developed similar bot programs to yours, then the majority of DVC computer power would be consumed by only 3 people or IP addresses.

Keep up the good work !!!

I am not a computer expert by no stretch of the imagination but wouldn't what you have said be a violation of the Terms of Use for the DVC site in respect to high-volume or automated use of WDIG Sites is prohibited.

 

[stevelee]

why do people complain... this is a great site... keep quiet about it, dont keep bringing it up, keep in on the downlo and hopefully it will last and they wont have a reason to do something to stop it... keep mentioning rukles and you are potentially giving them ideas or a reason to do something to stop it from working.

 

[Sammie]

why do people complain... this is a great site... keep quiet about it, dont keep bringing it up, keep in on the downlo and hopefully it will last and they wont have a reason to do something to stop it... keep mentioning rukles and you are potentially giving them ideas or a reason to do something to stop it from working.

As a member my concern is increased traffic means increased dues. I personally do not want to pay any more than necessary and especially don't want to pay for non members using the site even through the back door. Considering the information can be as much as 6 hours off, I see no real time advantage to members. I see some advantage to Nonmembers and again, that I am completely and totally against.

Also I don't want the added traffic to crash the site or slow down Member use it is bad enough without any additional traffic added to it. I mean even today it was down for quite some time for unplanned maintenance.

I think using it for personal use only would have been the way to keep it on the down low. Some are just using it to see what if, not even fixing to book a trip, so there is added traffic for no good reason.

As to mentioning rules, seriously you think if you don't mention them they don't exist. The terms of use for DVC website are pretty clear.

Disney monitors all these sites, so it was pretty much brought to their attention as soon as it was posted, tweeted, wrote about etc. You can blame that on someone else.

 

[DVC Dude]

If you are making 2,000 requests per cycle and use 2.5 hours of computing time per every data refresh and you refresh 4x per 24 hours, then your grand total daily use is: 8,000 requests and 10 hours of server time

So, I estimate that you are currently making 50% of all DVC online room requests and using about 1/3 of their computer power.

I personally would recommend that you cut your comprehensive data mining to only once per day. For example, run the full data searches starting at 5am EST as it will be fresh at 7:30am as will give a full day of fresh data to anyone visiting your site.

You can always run 4x per day searches for any registered users that create an ongoing saved search or a new single user search request as this will not tax the server very much. think of this as a premium service.

I think that the above schedule would have almost zero impact on regular DVC members and will not tax the server or slow anyone access to the site. I am concerned that if there is heavy use of these type of data mining bots, Disney would shut the access down.

Also, the costs to us members for people running these bots is very minimal as it is just bandwidth and that is not expensive at all.

 

[robinb]

This is TOTALLY awesome .

 

[DeDobber]

I think there are pros and cons for the service, based on what people have said.

Some say they think Disney doesn't want nonmembers to have this data, but I've already seen one comment with someone saying that the availability info is helping them make their purchase decision.

Some say the data is stale and therefore not useful, but I've heard multiple stories every week about people getting rooms that they otherwise would not have.

Some say I'm violating their terms, but it's up to them to enforce their terms, and, if I'm violating their terms, then I see the same terms being violated on this board and elsewhere without repercussion. Most controversially, non-members are given availability info every day by every rent/trade board/service that exists, and, so far, DVC hasn't cared about that.

In the end, this service seems to (on the whole) make DVC owners happy. So DVC customers have been made happier by the existence of this site. I don't see how that's a bad thing to DVC.

 

[DeDobber]

I personally would recommend that you cut your comprehensive data mining to only once per day. For example, run the full data searches starting at 5am EST as it will be fresh at 7:30am as will give a full day of fresh data to anyone visiting your site.

You can always run 4x per day searches for any registered users that create an ongoing saved search or a new single user search request as this will not tax the server very much. think of this as a premium service.

I think that the above schedule would have almost zero impact on regular DVC members and will not tax the server or slow anyone access to the site. I am concerned that if there is heavy use of these type of data mining bots, Disney would shut the access down.

Also, the costs to us members for people running these bots is very minimal as it is just bandwidth and that is not expensive at all.

This is a compelling argument, but, by the same measure, those 4,000 users implies that, on average, 167 are using the site in any given hour. Maybe 100 at the low-traffic time, and 250 at the high-traffic time. My program is just one more user. It doesn't do anything in parallel. It acts just like a surfer would, and doesn't do anything crazy like send 200 requests in 20 seconds.

If, at low time, 100 users are on, and they spend 5 minutes on the site, it means that in any given minute, at least 8 users are on the site. My program makes it 9. At peak time, maybe there's 20 users on the site, which means my program makes it 21.

The only difference is that my program uses the site for 10 hours, while others use the site for 5 minutes. Just as an FYI, yesterday on ******.com, we had the following number of searches per person:

251 people did 1 search
133 people did 2 searches
83 people did 3 searches
25 people did 4 searches
33 people did 5 searches
50 people did more than 5 searches (the most was 23)

How many searches would that equate to on dvcmembers.com, I wonder?

 

[DeDobber]

You made the Twitters today. @DVCNews.
#bigtime

I noticed. 105 people signed up yesterday. Cha-ching! Oh, wait . Oh well, more internet hugs for me.

 

[TinkGirl]

DeDobbler, Internet hug from me! Your app helped me piece together a spontaneous trip. Thank you!

 

[TinkGirl]

Sorry--DeDobber