[isotypic]

I am somewhat surprised issues of scripting and trading even exist in the registration system. Staggering enrollment times over a few days, with new waves every 20 minutes or so, mostly solves scripting issues since you are only competing with a fraction of the student body now. Giving courses waitlists once they are full, instead of allowing people to just directly register once a spot frees up, makes trading impossible since if you could trade you could have just registered for the course anyways.

I understand that the registration system is probably old and tied up in tons of just as old management software, but if the university really cared the solutions should be there.

[buildbot]

When I went there it was staggered, which causes this desire for spot trading - seniors register first, so if you are an freshman/sophomore/junior, you beg a senior to register a spot in a class you want then coordinate them deregistering just before you register for the class. This automated that and at scale could be a big issue.

[loeg]

So, for context, UW's registration system runs on, like, a single 1980s VAX.

[dpedu]

The school I attended in 2010 had a system like this as well. Awful backend with a simple, but still awful, web interface to talk to it. There was rumor you could telnet in and use an actual text interface, but I never saw it.

The system was replaced a few years later with an Oracle PeopleSoft implementation. Everybody hated it more.

[confidentlyinc]

That is confidently incorrect

[lupire]

I didn't know VAX had web APIs.

Do you know that software can be used to build a wrapper layer around other software?

[campbel]

I went to school about 20 years ago and we had staggered online registrations. Surprised the best solutions haven't propagated further.

[wil421]

Pretty much every schools uses staggered registrations to allow upper class men or even athletes the ability to get classes they need.

[potato3732842]

Punishing people is easy. Changing process is hard, especially when you're a dysfunctional bureaucracy.