Guess I'll peek out of my foxhole and add to your knowledge base. The three (3) commercially available programs (BidX, FxCal, & MagicWebFX) will get you a list of open time trips, BUT they WILL NOT automatically input a trip trade for you. You must enter the trade and the Control Code yourself!

The self-trading programs you speak of do exist and are illegal abominations . There are methods to finger these offenders, the company only needs the will to act.

For cheap open time hawkers, there are free browser add-on Scripts that allow you to automatically refresh a webpage every X seconds (think 5 or less). That's the brute force method mentioned above. It is available to every pilot and this free script method is probably responsible for more bandwidth abuse than all the commercial programs customers combined. So every pilot using these Scripts contributes to the problem as much as any commercial program user. That's why Scripts are referenced as well as bots.

The 3d party commercial programs exist because they make dealing with the website easier for the line pilot. They were not designed around their trip trade features. Face facts: Open time has always been a crap shoot outside of the morning sick window, because one never knows when a trip is going to appear (unless you have inside info). So the only thing you gain when using these programs is convenience and perhaps a little early warning (depending on your timing). Even with them, it is still a race to Manually enter the trade and the Control Code to get that earlier time stamp.

The ultimate solution is to upgrade the p.f.c website and servers to handle the traffic, but that involves a monetary investment on the company's part. Failing that, the next best solution is to somehow change the trip trade paradigm.