[Vingdoloras]

Here's what I do when I need to go to a Bürgeramt: For every type of appointment you can make, there should be an official website containing links to each Bürgeramt's calendar page. Bookmark that website, not the individual pages. Find one or a few locations you'd prefer, then open each calendar in a separate browser! Opening multiple in one browser doesn't work, as it remembers your last selection per browser session. Next, keep refreshing and checking the calendars every 30 minutes. Slots free up pretty often, but they're also full again soon after. If you're lucky, you can figure out when canceled appointments are entered into the system for your location (for mine it was 10AM every day). Around that time, there's a good chance you might even get a few slots that are only a week or two into the future. Once you figured out when slots open up, check around that time daily. Book the first slot you can get, then keep doing this for a few days and book any slot that is better than your previous one (but be nice and cancel the old slot).

It's a lot of work, and it shouldn't be necessary, but I'd never go into a Bürgeramt without an appointment and this method has worked for me every time so far.

[nicbou]

I wrote a tool for that: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/berlin-burgeramt-appointme...

It's officially sanctioned by the city, but it's capped to one request every 3 minutes to avoid replacing the official website. Every few months, I ask them for permission to add other services, and I get ghosted.

However, the tool is open source, so you can just `pip install` it and run it on any appointment type you want.

https://github.com/nicbou/burgeramt-appointments-websockets

[ravdeepchawla]

Maybe this was you as well https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/q7ekx8/1010_is_the_... :-)

Your form helped immensely in the anmeldung process last year for me. Keep fighting the good fight sir.

[RileyJames]

This, with a little more automation, is exactly how I was able to book a covid quarantine hotel to return to NZ.

It felt pretty unfair that the average user was at an impossible disadvantage because the system had no protection against automation.

It was quite obvious others were already running automation, but I only booked for myself and then turned it off.

I was impressed NZ got a highly functional system up and running extremely quickly, but it became a game of high frequency trading.

[seb1204]

You make great use of modern technology and ingenuity. Congratulations, everyone should do the same. Sarcasm end. As a German living abroad I look in horror at the stories I read. Where I live changing the official registered address is a log into the gov services site, change it and two weeks late I get a letter with ned address stickers for my driver's licence. The driver licence on my phone does not need a sticker obviously.

[kioleanu]

You can automate that with a browser extension that checks the page and plays a sound when it changed