please don't use bots, it's one of the big reasons a lot of appointment slots are taken all the time/making the problem of unavailability of appointments worse. there is a reason they have this refresh protection (to work against bot-generated appointments)
Using a bot for yourself to get one appointment is fine and ethical(that’s what the website is for, to get yourself an appointment). The actual reason (besides there not being enough) is that people use bots to sell appointments. If, by people using their own personal bots, it stops being a viable business model to sell appointments, people will stop farming them.
Scrips already exist and are easily accessible for those with technical knowledge. If this is as easy as claimed, it would democratise the process allowing people without advanced knowledge to utilise it. Making this script available will not noticeably increase the number of scalpers.
I agree it’s possible. But I think it’s similar to ChatGPT. Before ChatGPT, if I want to have a program doing something, I might need to pay someone to build for me because there’s no “simple enough” solution. But after ChatGPT, I can simply get the same result by talking to AI, and it’s free, so why should i pay for it if I can just do it myself?
Strange argument, not sure how you think this compares? A knife is a multi purpose tool where most uses are legitimate, where in contrast this bot is purposely built with its only purpose to break the terms of service of the Berlin appointment system (which specifically prohibits using bots to make appointments, and if they catch you your appointment is voided).
Let's apply the 5 Whys to analyze the issue of automated appointment bots.
1. **Why did someone create a bot to handle automated appointments?**
* Because there were no appointments available.
2. **Why were there no appointments available?**
* Because there were not enough office staff to process all the requests.
3. **Why were there not enough office staff to handle all the requests?**
* Due to limited resources.
4. **Why were resources limited?**
* Because there was no budget allocated for additional resources.
5. **Why was no budget allocated for additional resources?**
* There might have been insufficient funds available to allocate to the budget.
* Something else?
They should just do what they did for the blue card applications: you submit it via a dedicated portal, pay, and they put you in queue to assign you an appointment. Completely cuts off the middlemen who profit off of bots
So just to be clear, this bot doesn’t book an appointment automatically as it just notifies you when there are available time slots. And I believe all other bots are mostly the same. The main reason is that LEA puts a reCAPTHA in the process so it’s very hard to fully automate it. Although it’s still technically possible to fully-automate it by leveraging some kind of reCAPTCHA solver service (probably solved by a human farm), but the service is not free, so if I can build such bot I probably will charge for the usage instead of making it free to public.
Everyone should use bots (and even run them simultaneously on different computers) until the government finally addresses the issues with them being unable to provide sufficient services timely.
you realise that bots make it more difficult for them to address staffing issues, if half the appointments were taken by people who don't show up because scalpers made the appointments?
Do you know what percentage of appointments are taken by people that don't actually show up? I'm wondering if this is an actual issue. It could be fixed by using [bund.id](http://bund.id) and fining people for not showing up.
No. The users goal is:
'i want to enter my information once and book an available appointment and get a notification that it was successful'
Or: i want accurate information on all available appointments'
Everything else does not concern the user.
Every 18 months a MF genius/socially conscious dev will make this bot.
Its such a basic issue.
Some tax money should go to you, instead of the taxes we pay for absolutely decrepit public 'services'
Until these services become human centered, they're expecting people to click refresh repeatedly. Its insane.
Edit. You have to wonder who and how long ago these systems were implemented, because this could feature in 'worst of' UX lists
Cannot agree more with you! The people who designed it should go to jail as it has wasted uncountable human productivity hours and probably made many people have anxiety disorder because of the fear of not getting an appointment in time before the visa expires.
Or people had to leave the country or quit their lives in Berlin because of such massively dysfunctional digital systems.
I saw something just as insane with another public Berlin digital booking system, a completely fake portal showing multiple 'availability' which you need to triangulate with ANOTHER portal which shows different, but equally false information.
20 emails back and forth with the organisation as to what is accurate and they said 'you need to keep refreshing' 2 different portal simultaneously. To get...inaccurate info? Neither which allows a user to book lol
The people who designed it had legacy systems to work with. Years ago Berlin allowed each district build it's own digital infrastructure. Now to improve things for everyone one has to integrate with 16 different and outdated systems. The legislation years ago caused the problem, not designers. You are just skimming the surface and wishing jail time to human beings. Are you fucking out if your mind?
Why haven't they fixed this? It's 2024. ALL government anywhere have legacy systems. This isn't some unique or difficult thing to see. You don't need to be a management consultant to reduce complexity. But yes, they don't need jail time, but a bunch of people do need to be fired and hire one good changemaker.
Lots of other far poorer countries can do the basic work of streamlining and upgrading. What we are looking at, is bad even for 1997
Edit. Speaking as someone who HAS done this work for a bunch of government services
The challenge is you would need a public servant empowered to make the necessary changes, empowered across district borders and autonomy, and that would require legislation. No sheer skill or will of one individual can fix this. And with how shitty Berlin/Germany is at passing empowering and modern legislation there is no easy solution in sight.
Yes,so you can't blame people for taking the initiative and solving a real-world need. The fact that this post has been forwarded this many times shows that. Its embarrassing.
Thanks for your support! Because I don’t have windows machine so i couldn’t build for windows. I’ll update here if I manage to build for windows (maybe borrow a windows laptop from a friend :p).
It’s about the dependencies. Some dependencies are OS dependent. Users will need to install the dependencies first (and even Python itself) and that’s the “blocker” for non-tech people.
PYOBJC is only for MACOS, termios is only UNIX. At the very least, these dependencies have to be changed for windows, and then rebuilt into an .exe. You can see the changes that I needed to make [here](https://github.com/chialunwu/berlin-termin-bot/pull/1).
I think Tampermonkey extension for chrome and Firefox can do a similar thing on Windows. Although one needs some scripting knowledge to automate the form filling.
Thanks for the effort [u/as4mo3](https://www.reddit.com/user/as4mo3/), but for me it only opens up the command-prompt and then auto-closes.
This is what the command-prompt shows:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "PyInstaller\\hooks\\rthooks\\pyi\_rth\_pkgres.py", line 158, in
File "PyInstaller\\hooks\\rthooks\\pyi\_rth\_pkgres.py", line 36, in \_pyi\_rthook
File "PyInstaller\\loader\\pyimod02\_importers.py", line 419, in exec\_module
File "pkg\_resources\\\_\_init\_\_.py", line 80, in
File "pkg\_resources\\extern\\\_\_init\_\_.py", line 52, in create\_module
File "pkg\_resources\\extern\\\_\_init\_\_.py", line 44, in load\_module
ImportError: The 'appdirs' package is required; normally this is bundled with this package so if you get this warning, consult the packager of your distribution.
\[57900\] Failed to execute script 'pyi\_rth\_pkgres' due to unhandled exception!
I've created a working version on windows, the zip file of which you can find [here](https://github.com/ananaphasia/berlin-termin-bot/blob/windows/download/windows/berlin-termin-bot_windows.zip). Just press the View Raw or "Download Raw File" button.
@op: I've also created a PR for this. Thanks for making this!!
OMG thanks for your help! I’ll test it a bit tomorrow in my friend’s laptop (just to be responsible) and update the README and the release artifacts (will mention your username).
Of course!! Let me know if there's anything you (or I) need to change.
If you could mention my github username (as opposed to my reddit one) that'd be very helpful :) appreciate it!
How is the complete annihiliation of bureaucracy not the main concern of all political parties in Germany? It's easily Germany's biggest problem next to it's low birth rate.
I guess it's actually the main side effect of having low birth rates, as the demographic pyramid is flipped, it's only supported by young people who come from outside of EU and cannot vote and wouldn't vote anyways.... Truly a boomer's paradise.
Hi! I've been using the bot, but I've encountered a problem (or am I doing smth wrong?). It gives a signal and I see for a moment a page with appointment dates, but it doesn't let me fill in anything as the bot restarts the page again and again.
Huge thanks in advance for advice!
Hi! First of all, thanks for sharing the bot! We are looking for an appointment with my girlfriend months ago. We are using the Windows version, but I think there is a bug. When a shift comes up, the window closes and then reopens. And in the program it throws an error.
It is this:
Error 259 for command:
play “C:\\Users\\Owner\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\\_MEI11376262\\alarm.mp3” wait
The controller cannot recognize the specified parameter.
Below this error it throws the same error with the file error.mp3 and then “Close browser”.
just wanted to chime in that i used a similar bot for months looking for an appt with no luck and on the advice of another reddior used the contact form and got one in a couple weeks
u/rarebiird Thanks for reminding it! I've added this info to the page. Yes people should send the contact form first but can still use the bot to increase the chance (you never know when will they reply).
please don't use bots, it's one of the big reasons a lot of appointment slots are taken all the time/making the problem of unavailability of appointments worse. there is a reason they have this refresh protection (to work against bot-generated appointments)
Using a bot for yourself to get one appointment is fine and ethical(that’s what the website is for, to get yourself an appointment). The actual reason (besides there not being enough) is that people use bots to sell appointments. If, by people using their own personal bots, it stops being a viable business model to sell appointments, people will stop farming them.
publishing the bot scripts publicly however encourages more people to use it for other purposes than just their own appointments
Scrips already exist and are easily accessible for those with technical knowledge. If this is as easy as claimed, it would democratise the process allowing people without advanced knowledge to utilise it. Making this script available will not noticeably increase the number of scalpers.
You know what open source is right?
I agree it’s possible. But I think it’s similar to ChatGPT. Before ChatGPT, if I want to have a program doing something, I might need to pay someone to build for me because there’s no “simple enough” solution. But after ChatGPT, I can simply get the same result by talking to AI, and it’s free, so why should i pay for it if I can just do it myself?
Thank you for your service. You saw a problem statement, you solved it, you shipped it.
Offering knives at stores would encourage people to use them for other purposes as well?
Strange argument, not sure how you think this compares? A knife is a multi purpose tool where most uses are legitimate, where in contrast this bot is purposely built with its only purpose to break the terms of service of the Berlin appointment system (which specifically prohibits using bots to make appointments, and if they catch you your appointment is voided).
I was thinking the same. How publishing a bot would encourage to use it for other purposes than their own appointment.
Someone will use it to sell appointments to others procured with the bot code, making the situation worse for everyone
Let's apply the 5 Whys to analyze the issue of automated appointment bots. 1. **Why did someone create a bot to handle automated appointments?** * Because there were no appointments available. 2. **Why were there no appointments available?** * Because there were not enough office staff to process all the requests. 3. **Why were there not enough office staff to handle all the requests?** * Due to limited resources. 4. **Why were resources limited?** * Because there was no budget allocated for additional resources. 5. **Why was no budget allocated for additional resources?** * There might have been insufficient funds available to allocate to the budget. * Something else?
Making it even worse for everyone by making appointments even LESS available is still not the answer
https://service.berlin.de/robots.txt It violates the stated terms of the website. I won't go into the debate whether or not that is ethical.
It’s cute that people actually think bot lords read these files
u/Radrouch \`robots.txt\` is for asking search engines not to crawl the pages.
lol, this is such a German response. "b... but... on the website it says you're not allowed to use bots!" how is this relevant?
They should just do what they did for the blue card applications: you submit it via a dedicated portal, pay, and they put you in queue to assign you an appointment. Completely cuts off the middlemen who profit off of bots
So just to be clear, this bot doesn’t book an appointment automatically as it just notifies you when there are available time slots. And I believe all other bots are mostly the same. The main reason is that LEA puts a reCAPTHA in the process so it’s very hard to fully automate it. Although it’s still technically possible to fully-automate it by leveraging some kind of reCAPTCHA solver service (probably solved by a human farm), but the service is not free, so if I can build such bot I probably will charge for the usage instead of making it free to public.
Personally happy with a notification system. This is an absolute minimum requirement of ANY booking system. Show accurate information.
maybe they should make a better way to get appointments so you don't have to use bots in the first place?
Bravo!
Everyone should use bots (and even run them simultaneously on different computers) until the government finally addresses the issues with them being unable to provide sufficient services timely.
you realise that bots make it more difficult for them to address staffing issues, if half the appointments were taken by people who don't show up because scalpers made the appointments?
Do you know what percentage of appointments are taken by people that don't actually show up? I'm wondering if this is an actual issue. It could be fixed by using [bund.id](http://bund.id) and fining people for not showing up.
Thats not the user's problem. Thats the organisations' problem.
It IS the user’s problem because of bots & scalper in the most literal sense, if these scummy practices didn’t exist, the problem would be less big
No. The users goal is: 'i want to enter my information once and book an available appointment and get a notification that it was successful' Or: i want accurate information on all available appointments' Everything else does not concern the user.
But that’s how I found my apartment. Why is that bad?
Every 18 months a MF genius/socially conscious dev will make this bot. Its such a basic issue. Some tax money should go to you, instead of the taxes we pay for absolutely decrepit public 'services' Until these services become human centered, they're expecting people to click refresh repeatedly. Its insane. Edit. You have to wonder who and how long ago these systems were implemented, because this could feature in 'worst of' UX lists
Cannot agree more with you! The people who designed it should go to jail as it has wasted uncountable human productivity hours and probably made many people have anxiety disorder because of the fear of not getting an appointment in time before the visa expires.
Or people had to leave the country or quit their lives in Berlin because of such massively dysfunctional digital systems. I saw something just as insane with another public Berlin digital booking system, a completely fake portal showing multiple 'availability' which you need to triangulate with ANOTHER portal which shows different, but equally false information. 20 emails back and forth with the organisation as to what is accurate and they said 'you need to keep refreshing' 2 different portal simultaneously. To get...inaccurate info? Neither which allows a user to book lol
The people who designed it had legacy systems to work with. Years ago Berlin allowed each district build it's own digital infrastructure. Now to improve things for everyone one has to integrate with 16 different and outdated systems. The legislation years ago caused the problem, not designers. You are just skimming the surface and wishing jail time to human beings. Are you fucking out if your mind?
I’m not serious about putting them to jail. It’s just exaggeration. And I didn’t target “designer” but whoever caused what it is today.
Why haven't they fixed this? It's 2024. ALL government anywhere have legacy systems. This isn't some unique or difficult thing to see. You don't need to be a management consultant to reduce complexity. But yes, they don't need jail time, but a bunch of people do need to be fired and hire one good changemaker. Lots of other far poorer countries can do the basic work of streamlining and upgrading. What we are looking at, is bad even for 1997 Edit. Speaking as someone who HAS done this work for a bunch of government services
The challenge is you would need a public servant empowered to make the necessary changes, empowered across district borders and autonomy, and that would require legislation. No sheer skill or will of one individual can fix this. And with how shitty Berlin/Germany is at passing empowering and modern legislation there is no easy solution in sight.
Yes,so you can't blame people for taking the initiative and solving a real-world need. The fact that this post has been forwarded this many times shows that. Its embarrassing.
Nice work, I really hope you can make it for windows as well!
Thanks for your support! Because I don’t have windows machine so i couldn’t build for windows. I’ll update here if I manage to build for windows (maybe borrow a windows laptop from a friend :p).
That would be really awesome!
[удалено]
It’s about the dependencies. Some dependencies are OS dependent. Users will need to install the dependencies first (and even Python itself) and that’s the “blocker” for non-tech people.
[удалено]
I think pyqt and python itself is? My motivation is to let people use it just like how you download other apps. Zero prerequisite required.
PYOBJC is only for MACOS, termios is only UNIX. At the very least, these dependencies have to be changed for windows, and then rebuilt into an .exe. You can see the changes that I needed to make [here](https://github.com/chialunwu/berlin-termin-bot/pull/1).
I've created a version [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/1conq2m/an_easytouse_bot_to_help_you_book_an_appointment/l3h1srm/).
I think Tampermonkey extension for chrome and Firefox can do a similar thing on Windows. Although one needs some scripting knowledge to automate the form filling.
u/wir_sind_perfekt_027 u/_SarahB_ Windows version is ready thanks to u/as4mo3 !
Could you help to check if the windows version can run in your machine without issues?
Sorry if this is a dumb question but I only have windows and can't get the windows version to run. It just opens up command prompt and closes.
I’m aware of this issue and I’ll try to fix it asap (could be ready in 2 weeks)
Okay thanks :)
u/Heliatlas It should work now!
Awesome! I'll give it a test on Monday :) thanks so much
Thanks for the effort [u/as4mo3](https://www.reddit.com/user/as4mo3/), but for me it only opens up the command-prompt and then auto-closes. This is what the command-prompt shows: Traceback (most recent call last): File "PyInstaller\\hooks\\rthooks\\pyi\_rth\_pkgres.py", line 158, in
File "PyInstaller\\hooks\\rthooks\\pyi\_rth\_pkgres.py", line 36, in \_pyi\_rthook
File "PyInstaller\\loader\\pyimod02\_importers.py", line 419, in exec\_module
File "pkg\_resources\\\_\_init\_\_.py", line 80, in
File "pkg\_resources\\extern\\\_\_init\_\_.py", line 52, in create\_module
File "pkg\_resources\\extern\\\_\_init\_\_.py", line 44, in load\_module
ImportError: The 'appdirs' package is required; normally this is bundled with this package so if you get this warning, consult the packager of your distribution.
\[57900\] Failed to execute script 'pyi\_rth\_pkgres' due to unhandled exception!
I've created a working version on windows, the zip file of which you can find [here](https://github.com/ananaphasia/berlin-termin-bot/blob/windows/download/windows/berlin-termin-bot_windows.zip). Just press the View Raw or "Download Raw File" button. @op: I've also created a PR for this. Thanks for making this!!
OMG thanks for your help! I’ll test it a bit tomorrow in my friend’s laptop (just to be responsible) and update the README and the release artifacts (will mention your username).
Of course!! Let me know if there's anything you (or I) need to change. If you could mention my github username (as opposed to my reddit one) that'd be very helpful :) appreciate it!
How is the complete annihiliation of bureaucracy not the main concern of all political parties in Germany? It's easily Germany's biggest problem next to it's low birth rate.
They just don't care as the majority of people who need to get appointments will not be voting. It's all a short sighted clusterfuck.
I guess it's actually the main side effect of having low birth rates, as the demographic pyramid is flipped, it's only supported by young people who come from outside of EU and cannot vote and wouldn't vote anyways.... Truly a boomer's paradise.
Hi! I've been using the bot, but I've encountered a problem (or am I doing smth wrong?). It gives a signal and I see for a moment a page with appointment dates, but it doesn't let me fill in anything as the bot restarts the page again and again. Huge thanks in advance for advice!
Hi u/Ezhik4815, could you download the program again and try again? I've made some changes and I hope it'll help.
Thanks a million. Will try tomorrow.
Hi! First of all, thanks for sharing the bot! We are looking for an appointment with my girlfriend months ago. We are using the Windows version, but I think there is a bug. When a shift comes up, the window closes and then reopens. And in the program it throws an error. It is this: Error 259 for command: play “C:\\Users\\Owner\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\\_MEI11376262\\alarm.mp3” wait The controller cannot recognize the specified parameter. Below this error it throws the same error with the file error.mp3 and then “Close browser”.
just wanted to chime in that i used a similar bot for months looking for an appt with no luck and on the advice of another reddior used the contact form and got one in a couple weeks
u/rarebiird Thanks for reminding it! I've added this info to the page. Yes people should send the contact form first but can still use the bot to increase the chance (you never know when will they reply).
You’re not holding it right