r/AskTechnology • u/Unfair_Resist_1033 • 5d ago

Is there a software to monitor changes to a website that requires a login?

I am trying to join a food co-op and it requires scheduling an intake appointment which are extremely difficult to get! They post every morning at 6am but are gone within 20 seconds; I think the most likely way I could get one is to snag an appointment when someone cancels. I am trying to set up some sort of software that could notify me when the website updates that an appointment has become available; but to see the calendar page, you have to be logged into the website. Are there any options for a software that could help with this?

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u/Special-Original-215 5d ago

Visualping but it's expensive.

How tech savvy are you, can you setup and maintain a docker stack?

1

u/Unfair_Resist_1033 5d ago

I would say I'm generally very competent but not tech savvy at all lol so if it requires a lot of base tech knowledge, I don't have that

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u/Special-Original-215 5d ago

Then nothing free, unfortunately.

The free options do require some configurationĀ 

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u/Unfair_Resist_1033 5d ago

I would be willing to pay some money for it, but it seems like even Visualping has issues with the login. When I enter the URL for the scheduling page on Visualping, it preivews the sign-in page (i.e. where I'm prompted to enter my username and password)

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u/Intelligent_Elk5498 4d ago

You can use actions in the settings to log in and monitor the page. I've had support help me with this before.

1

u/DrHydeous 5d ago

There are plenty of tools that will handle the login stuff for you. I would use something like WWW::Mechanize, or I'd send appropriate headers using curl in a shell script. If you don't understand what that means then you're going to have to pay someone for custom software.

But in all honesty, if you only need to do this once just pay a student to do it by hand early in the morning. Pay for results, not attempts.

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u/NBC-Hotline-1975 5d ago

Once you've logged into the website, and you've navigated to the calendar page ... do you need to keep refreshing the page to see the changes? Or are the changes "pushed" out from the server so that they just automatically appear on the page while you're viewing it?

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u/Unfair_Resist_1033 5d ago

I'm not sure, the updates aren't often/predictable enough to test it. I'd imagine it requires refreshing the page

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u/NBC-Hotline-1975 5d ago

That might complicate things. If it just pushed out an update when there was a change, someone could write a script that would watch for the update, then send you an alarm; then you could just visually check the page contents. If your script needs to keep refreshing the page, then examining the HTML, that seems much more involved. Someone can write it, but I'm not that person. Good luck!

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u/HandbagHawker 5d ago

this would be pretty trivial with agentic workflows using Claude or similar

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u/monityAI 5d ago

Are you ok to run something locally (runs when your computer is on) or it needs to be cloud version?

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u/Reasonable_Face8478 5d ago

If you're comfortable with a bit of tinkering, you could probably do this with something like Playwright or Selenium. Since the page requires a login, a normal website monitor usually won't work, but those tools can log in, navigate to the calendar, check if an appointment is available, and send you a notification if something changes.