Hey everyone, I just wanted to apologize for the registration issues. The chronicle article dukechronicle/articles/2014/11/07/course-registration-postponed-after-aces-issues outlines the reasons pretty well. When I released the code, it was something which I and some friends of mine had been using for previous semesters without issue. It doesnt work any faster than signing up for classes the normal way (its actually slightly slower), and it does do any crazy hacking like breaking into their database. I could have just kept the program to myself and used it like normal, but I decided that other people would benefit from it too, so I shared it without restriction to everyone. The summary is that the program acts exactly like a web browser, logging into ACES and clicking the same buttons you do to register. When using it not during class signups it only takes ~15 seconds to complete. But during the huge load due to Dukes first-come-first-serve policy, the server lags in responding and after a delay the program refreshes the page to try again. The code for the curious is on https://github/MatthewARoy/AutoRegistration since it is already linked in the article, but Im going to have to ask people not to use it with the current capacity of ACES. Hopefully this incident can spark discussion on the current class registration system, which is in my opinion far from ideal.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 01:57:49 +0000