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[bad-pink-tink]

I am a member of an American based Disney forum and the big news today is the closure of a website called Disney Dining Buddy.

This was a website, which you set up an alert for particular restaurants in Walt Disney World in Florida. You paid the website $8 per reservation and they would alert you when or if a reservation for your chosen date and time became available. They did this by way of a bot or program which automatically crawled the website. Disney Dining Buddy is just one website that offers this service, for a fee. Some websites actually block book ADR and then sell them

Today Disney sent out a Cease and Desist to Disney Dining Buddy

Dear Loyal Customers,

Disney has requested that we discontinue our services as currently provided, and we have honored that request. We understand this may be disappointing to those of you who have found through us a solution to the stresses of dining planning. We share your disappointment.

We appreciate the grateful and positive comments we have received from you. Please know that we have truly enjoyed serving you.

If you have an active request for services from us, you will be receiving an email within the next week that contains information and instructions concerning refunds.

People on the other forum are speculating that
1. Disney websites were getting flooded by the bots, which was causing problems for their servers and giving genuine customers errors and not allowing genuine customers to get the ADR
2. Disney objected to the unofficial 3rd party use of their name

People on the other forum are now reporting that ADR that were unavailable a few days ago are now available

[norhel]

I heard on the DIS Unplugged podcast on Tuesday that Disney was working on shutting down several of those types of sites. But anyhow, if several of those type of sites are making a lot of ADR, I have no problem to understand that Disney want to close them. I know people has been complaining that it's hard to get several ADR's.

[Disneylove]

If a company is making money off Disney without having anything to do with then it's probably some sort of infringement alone, rather than flooding their site.