frustrating but not surprising to hear this. bots can’t be stopped, only mitigated. i’ve seen this before in my line of work. we make a change to try and prevent them, and then the next day there’s already a workaround. I think the last stat we shared with a client was that 60% of all internet traffic is bots. good times.
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I was able to walk up last Monday (6/2) and Wednesday (6/4) and found tee times available for the black course as a single both days. One day the group even played as a threesome. Might be due to being a weekday and not a lot of people showing up at 5 am or could be the power of the NLU pod.
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I would chalk that up to the weekday than anything else. As a single, weekdays tend to not be crazy at Bethpage.
Trying for a time in t-minus 6 minutes. Wish me luck
1 5:10 time for 2 golfers with a refresh on hard wired internet at exactly. expected nothing less.
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Pardon the bump from the past, but i did it. I did the thing. I got to Bethpage at 5pm last Tuesday thinking i’d be able to play on Wednesday and got laughed at, so I decided to hotel it and come back the next morning at 5am. Even then, i only got spot number 19. Camped out all day and night. Got a spot for Thursday at 9am. When i say it was worth it, i mean it. Even as a 4 handicap i ended the day triple/quad (and i hit ok shots!) for a 94. 15-18 is an unimaginably hard stretch of golf. But it was such a cool experience, and the vibes from the folks in the lot were so great. Golf sickos only. It’s the most punishing golf course i’ve ever set foot on. Plus the WAPO posted the funniest picture of me i could have imagined.
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I’d like to report that I just tried to get a time for next Monday at Montauk Downs and every single tee time before 3pm was booked within 5 seconds.
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I did the thing last summer and this is what stood out to me. The course is relentless and wears you down.
I started out playing well. Bogey at the first (hit the fairway but a sloppy second and didn’t get up and done), bad drive on 2 but chipped out and made a great up and down, standard par at 3, good drive at 4 and made birdie.
Now I’m feeling it, swinging well and even par. Hit an absolute seed of a drive on 5 but the wind pushes it right and it ends up in the right rough by a foot and it’s one of those lies where there’s no chance. Like a fool, I try to muscle a 7 (or 6?) anyway, and … it was ugly. I was lucky to make bogey.
So what happens when you hit a good drive and end up with that bad result? You start pressing. Bad drive at 6. Bogey. Bad drive at 7. Bogey. Rinse, repeat.
The fairways are so narrow and the punishment so severe that it is a bit ridiculous. This is true for pros so of course it is true for the rest of us. Eventually you’ll hit a pretty good drive that still finds the rough and that it is a frustrating feeling. It is so so hard to swing freely after you hit a good one that leaves you completely wrecked.
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Yep, an old timer found me in the parking lot and asked me if it was my first time. I said yes and he grabbed my shoulder like a true ghost of Bethpage future and said “let me tell you, when you miss the fairway, just chop it out and move on”. I absolutely did not listen to him and i paid the price.
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incredible image
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So I’ve been trying to get tee times as a ny resident 1 week out on various courses at bethpage and at Montauk downs since last week. Mostly out of curiosity and also cause I’m trying to play once or twice the next 2 weeks.
I don’t do it as much as I used to but from 2018 through 2022 I did the online tee time rapid click game very often. And the last 2 years less but still a couple times.
In my estimation the bot situation is worse than ever. I’ve been purposely filtering for random midday weekday times here and there and I can tell you they’re ALL gone within 3 seconds.
My guess is that the reporting backfired and just made people more aware that you can get bots to do this for you. Throw in the fact that you can probably just have chatGPT write you code for a bot and this shit is done for boys.
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Well. In terms of Bethpage, 3 of the courses are closed thru the Ryder Cup right now. So that can’t help either.
And i would assume a lot of that traffic looking to play elsewhere would put a squeeze on any other available courses.
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I would think this would make it harder for “cheap bots” to steal multiple tee times, but a more sophisticated operation would still be able get around the 2FA. So I think it will help a bit but not fully eliminate the bot issue.
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it should help with the bots until someone makes a bot to grab the OTP code
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I’ve now gone fully into the camp of walk up only for all 5 courses full time.
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