I just had an interesting experience.

Upcoming flight XXX-YYY-ZZZ.

At time of booking, R was open XXX-YYY but not YYY-ZZZ.

XXX-YYY is 45 minutes and YYY-ZZZ is 4-5 hours.

I didn't want to burn the RPU for 45 minutes and the site would not allow me to apply it to the 4-5 hour segment only and I was afraid to call in and let an agent touch my record, so I didn't apply the RPU. Instead, I used EF to set an alert for R space on YYY-ZZZ.

Today, EF told me that R=1 on YYY-ZZZ so I logged in to UA.COM, applied the RPU, and cleared into F on YYY-ZZZ. Now, waitlisted on XXX-YYY but don't care as it's so short.

I wonder if this counts as a queue-jumping behavior because I did something the site allowed me to, rather than asking an agent to do anything special as a manual process. I also wonder if this isn't possibly an even better process for securing an upgrade than wait-listing. EF works. Clearing into R on the web site works when R > 0. It's not clear to me that wait-list sweeps work consistently or properly.