DVC Availability Checker

[DVC Dude]

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.

I made the suggestion to limit your comprehensive search to 1x per day instead of 4x per day so you reduce your bandwidth on the DVC servers and hopefully avoid the scrutiny of DVC IT department as someone that consumes lots of bandwidth.

Also, you can increase the saved searched to once per hour or once per 3 hours, whatever the market demands as that is not a difficult search.

I would LOVE the option to put in an hourly search for a hard to find date and location.

Finally, the comprehensive data scrub will give great trend reports for casual lookers and the immediate premium search or hourly searches would be only for members.

I also think once you charge money, Disney will for sure, not like that. Perhaps you should get a banner ad just like this site.

Again, I love your site, but fear that they will soon block your IP address or find a way to throttle or eliminate bot searches.

 

[tjkraz]

I made the suggestion to limit your comprehensive search to 1x per day instead of 4x per day so you reduce your bandwidth on the DVC servers and hopefully avoid the scrutiny of DVC IT department as someone that consumes lots of bandwidth.

Even that is going to stick out like a sore thumb in activity logs. We're talking 2000-8000 queries per day when the next highest count is probably a member performing 15-20 searches. That much sustained traffic--likely with the same user credentials and IP address--is impossible to hide.

It's really just a question of whether DVC cares enough to do something about it. They aren't going to throw anyone in jail over this but they could modify the site to further restrict access.

Or if they don't want to immediately invest in system modifications, they could just fire off a 'cease & desist.'

Time will tell....

 

[DeDobber]

I think the hourly thing would be nice if it was, say, an iPhone app that you download that would just log in with *your own* credentials and check every hour.

Not the kind of thing I could put together in a weekend, though.

I have thought of increasing the frequency for saved searches, but some people have very large saved searches. Maybe increase frequency for saved searches of 14 nights or less...

 

[DVC Dude]

I think the hourly thing would be nice if it was, say, an iPhone app that you download that would just log in with *your own* credentials and check every hour.

If this existed as an iPhone app and it did hourly checks for a variety of searched on my own member number, I would pay $100 for that app

 

[DeDobber]

PS: While you're all here, I did actually make an iPhone app, just not for DVC. It's for women to organize their closets.

http://kloz.it

 

[disneynutz]

IMO it's just a matter of time until Disney takes some type of action. My guess is that they will issue or enforce existing website access policies.

They make the rules and they will enforce them if they feel it necessary. They also have a fiduciary duty to ensure that members are not negatively impacted by automated inventory searches.

Bill

 

[hakepb]

It's probably not much different than what Josh does with ride wait times:
http://www.easywdw.com/waits/

I think the DVC app might reducing load on Disney's side as the "frequent checking" web traffic moves to ******.

 

[childsplay]

For kicks, I went ahead and made it so that the checkout date is automatically set to the checkin date + 2 weeks if it was previously set to be further out than that.

Perfect! Thanks for changing that.

 

[Brian Noble]

why do people complain...

I'm not complaining. Indeed, I think it is incredibly useful. But I am also pointing out to the OP that the Terms of Service for most Disney sites explicitly forbids what s/he is doing, and that The Powers That Be may or may not take exception. If their IT staff are even sort of paying attention, they will certainly notice.

But, there's a good chance that they are not paying attention, or don't care. My institutional IT folks would know about this within a few minutes of the first cycle, and would have blocked the source IP address (and probably the entire subnet) a few minutes after that. That this tool still exists and still works says a lot.

 

[WMorganS]

I'm not complaining. Indeed, I think it is incredibly useful. But I am also pointing out to the OP that the Terms of Service for most Disney sites explicitly forbids what s/he is doing, and that The Powers That Be may or may not take exception. If their IT staff are even sort of paying attention, they will certainly notice. But, there's a good chance that they are not paying attention, or don't care. My institutional IT folks would know about this within a few minutes of the first cycle, and would have blocked the source IP address (and probably the entire subnet) a few minutes after that. That this tool still exists and still works says a lot.

Good god. It's not at all simple to track down the culprit at a large site. The organization running the front end HHTP servers is completely unrelated to the back end DBMS servers where the resulting performance problem lies. Your bandwidth is low, but you're clobbering the DBMS servers.

If you're running over 100 queries per hour on a regular basis, I guarantee there are programmers an DBMS guys trying to address it. Their rules are posted, and you are breaking them, so how they respond will probably depend on how much they think you've cost them to fix this.

 

[DeDobber]

Good god. It's not at all simple to track down the culprit at a large site. The organization running the front end HHTP servers is completely unrelated to the back end DBMS servers where the resulting performance problem lies. Your bandwidth is low, but you're clobbering the DBMS servers.

If you're running over 100 queries per hour on a regular basis, I guarantee there are programmers an DBMS guys trying to address it. Their rules are posted, and you are breaking them, so how they respond will probably depend on how much they think you've cost them to fix this.

I'm 100% sure that if/when they block me, it won't be because of the load that I put on their servers. The load is negligible. The reason I know this is because, for every request I make to their site, I am doing a similar amount of work on ******.com to store the data. Same with bandwidth. Their bandwidth out is my bandwidth in. What I'm doing to them requires a fraction of the load of a single webserver.

I'm not saying I won't get blocked. It just won't be because of the load that my script generates. As others have pointed out, if I get enough users, my app will actually reduce load on their servers.

I only need to save them 8000 searches a day for it to be a net gain for them. Yesterday, I served up over 1000 searches, which probably translated to more than 1000 searches saved on dvcmembers.com, since that is the whole point of the app -- to make it so you don't have to do as many searches to get the info you're after.

Once I'm doing 8000 searches per day, I will be pretty certain that I've actually saved them resources, as opposed to costing them resources. Not that I think the resources are of any concern to either of us at this point.

 

[disneynutz]

I'm 100% sure that if/when they block me, it won't be because of the load that I put on their servers. The load is negligible. The reason I know this is because, for every request I make to their site, I am doing a similar amount of work on ******.com to store the data. Same with bandwidth. Their bandwidth out is my bandwidth in. What I'm doing to them requires a fraction of the load of a single webserver.

I'm not saying I won't get blocked. It just won't be because of the load that my script generates. As others have pointed out, if I get enough users, my app will actually reduce load on their servers.

I only need to save them 8000 searches a day for it to be a net gain for them. Yesterday, I served up over 1000 searches, which probably translated to more than 1000 searches saved on dvcmembers.com, since that is the whole point of the app -- to make it so you don't have to do as many searches to get the info you're after.

Once I'm doing 8000 searches per day, I will be pretty certain that I've actually saved them resources, as opposed to costing them resources. Not that I think the resources are of any concern to either of us at this point.

Disney can block you for any reason they want if they think that you are causing issues with their servers, their members, their sales, or anything else.

There was a rental broker who was having members add himself on as an associate. Disney took exception so the changed the associate rule.

Bill

 

[DeDobber]

Disney can block you for any reason they want if they think that you are causing issues with their servers, their members, their sales, or anything else.

There was a rental broker who was having members add himself on as an associate. Disney took exception so the changed the associate rule.

Bill

I don't disagree. I suppose I'm just predicting "death by lawyer" or "death by paranoid salesperson" as opposed to "death by IT nerd". That said, IT nerd will probably by the executioner in all cases. They just won't also be the judge and jury.

 

[disneynutz]

I don't disagree. I suppose I'm just predicting "death by lawyer" or "death by paranoid salesperson" as opposed to "death by IT nerd". That said, IT nerd will probably by the executioner in all cases. They just won't also be the judge and jury.

How would you react if I were accessing your server allowing the general public to access info that is expressly forbidden?

My suggestion is that you focus on improving the product and less on taking on Disney.

If you know that death by lawyer is a good possibility, I would sunset the app and move on to the next project.

Bill

 

[DeDobber]

How would you react if I were accessing your server allowing the general public to access info that is expressly forbidden?

My suggestion is that you focus on improving the product and less on taking on Disney.

If you know that death by lawyer is a good possibility, I would sunset the app and move on to the next project.

Bill

It depends on whether I consider their use of my data harmful, helpful, or benign. Member after member has been made happy by this tool. Here's one I got 8 hours ago:

WOW. WOW. That is the word. Thank you so much for your app! I had waitlisted a room. Signed up for your alerts. I got your alert. It was available and I booked it. My reservation waitlist was never filled. Thanks so much for your expertise. I would be happy to pay for this app. You saved our vacation!

So, does this tool harm their business, help it, or is it benign? My belief is you could only say it harms it in the instance where DVC is at odds with its own owners, and doesn't want them using their points.

 

[cel_disney]

Part of me thinks Disney should also use this app to help fill its waitlists! Ha! Maybe you can sell it to them!

 

[WilsonFlyer]

Wow. Been at WDW and missed this. Great app.

Disney will shut it down soon enough, though, with a cease and desist. There is no way they are going to let a site that makes this data available to the general public stand, IMHO. It just hasn't hit anybody's radar screen yet, but it will.

Time will tell, I guess.

 

[disneynutz]

It depends on whether I consider their use of my data harmful, helpful, or benign. Member after member has been made happy by this tool. Here's one I got 8 hours ago:

WOW. WOW. That is the word. Thank you so much for your app! I had waitlisted a room. Signed up for your alerts. I got your alert. It was available and I booked it. My reservation waitlist was never filled. Thanks so much for your expertise. I would be happy to pay for this app. You saved our vacation!

So, does this tool harm their business, help it, or is it benign? My belief is you could only say it harms it in the instance where DVC is at odds with its own owners, and doesn't want them using their points.

It doesn't matter what .0001% of the members think, you are allowing non-members access to room inventory information. DVD is all about selling, if your app causes one lost sale you will be contacted. If Disney is damaged, you will be sued and Disney will win.

If Disney wanted to improve our ability to search for rooms they would change the website. We waited years and years for the member website that we have now so my guess is that it isn't a priority in Disney's world.

Bill

 

[Doug7856]

Thanks for a great tool! I too have bookmarked the web app.

 

[gatorskin76]

Now if you could just do the same thing, or something similar with Disney Dining reservations...