See tickets? That's crap, that is.

[j4]

Look, really, though, I reckon if enough of us joined forces we could write them a better booking system. I seem to remember thinking this last year, too (and this year's is worse).

We could make our millions, honestly (or at least have free gig tickets for the rest of our natural lives).

Who's in?

Comments

[juliet]

Hundreds of thousands.

The rough method they seem to use is:

- send vast majority of connections straight to "busy" server.
- allow small number of connections through.
- once you have a connection, your connection is prioritised (sent straight through to the real server) and you have 5 min to get through the 4 pages required (front page, which-ticket link, ID number, credit card). After that you're back to being one of the hoi polloi.

It's a reasonable theory.

What they appear not to have done is ensured that the "real" server can deal with the number of connections they're allowing through. So you occasionally get no-data pages returned, or "connection reset" or a brand new different "busy" page halfway through. Occasionally, this happens halfway through e.g. submitting your credit card details.

I suspect that the problem is somewhere in the connectivity part of things - that the "real" server doesn't have a sufficiently prioritised connection to the current privileged users, and/or to the credit card company.

In addition to this, to avoid what happened last year (people not getting a confirmation page & therefore rebooking & winding up with duplicate tickets), they've instituted a check on the ID numbers. If you've already been through once, you can't use those IDs again. Fair enough: except that if your transaction went tits-up halfway through, you have no idea whether your debit card did or didn't reach the server, & thus whether or not you've successfully booked.

It *may* be that for anyone whose IDs checked out & who got as far as the "paying" page, they've automatically allocated tickets & if the card failed for whatever reason they'll sort it out afterwards. One can but hope.