News

A bit more detail...

Posted On: 2010-12-01 13:13:14

Well, this was the smoothest ticket sales process we've had in a while.  That said, there are still some issues worth addressing:

- The "go live" time.   The reg system didn't go live until about 2 mins after the hour.  We have a manual "go live" process so we can make a  go/no go decision based on load and other factors.  Unfortunately, when we went to go live at noon, our session to the go live button timed out and we had to re-auth and then light up ticket sales.  At that moment the link was live and accessible for everyone.  There were no propagation issues or anything like that... and all tickets were gone 9 seconds later.

- Yes, 9 seconds.  All tickets for this round were accounted for in 9 seconds.  While that's 50% slower than last time, that's not due to decreased demand.  In fact, from a gut check perspective, it seems we saw more demand.  We use our load balancer to protect the cluster from over use, and we touched on the limits this time which didn't seem to have happened last time.

- The matrix.  There's a matrix of available tickets on reg.shmoocon.org.  While it appeared to show that there were tickets available after even 20 minutes, that wasn't the case.  That matrix only shows tickets that have reached the final "reserved" state.  It doesn't take in to account tickets that are in other states.  After 9 seconds, all tickets were accounted for in some way or another.  It just took a while for the stragglers to make it through the process to that final reserved state.

That's the big stuff.  The cluster worked again as we hoped it would.  Also, we check through logs during and after each round for ticket hoarding shenanigans.  So far, things look good.  It appears the demand for tickets was legit.

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Round Two Sold Out

Posted On: 2010-12-01 12:18:40

Yup...the link didn't go live until ~12:02.  Otherwise it appears things worked as planned.  We'll post more later today.

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A Whole Lotta Update

Posted On: 2010-11-29 13:12:33

December 1st is a big day round these parts.  First and foremost - The 2nd round of ticket sales will go live on Wednesday at Noon EST.  We've fixed the issue from last round and expect things to go smoothly and quickly.  Be ready.

Also, the "Curse of the ShmooCon Ticket Sales" tshirt contest ends on December 1st (let's go with 11:59 PM EST).  We've had a number of good submissions so far but we'd love to see more.  Remember - two tickets to ShmooCon are up for grabs in this contest.  Email us your best artwork poking fun at our ticket sales process (we were thinking something a la 1950's horror flick, but really the world is your oyster).  Winner will be announced by December 10th.  Oh yeah, we'll also print the winning design on a tshirt, cuz it's always more fun to wear your shame.

Finally, the CFP closes at 11:59 PM EST on November 30.  Ok, technically that ain't the 1st, but it's close enough.  Now's the time to get in your last minute submissions.  To those still waiting on news about early submissions - it's forthcoming.  Between ticket sales and the Thanksgiving holiday our time allotted to reviewing the record number of submissions got a bit chewed up.  We're back in the thick of it now though. 

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Quick Update and Info on Purchasing

Posted On: 2010-11-16 12:15:19

So the good news is that  500 tickets were reserved in six (that's SIX seconds, not the 16 as previously reported) and the server didn't throw itself off a cliff when it saw you all coming. 

The bad news....yeah, unfortunately there is a bit of that.  In a nutshell there was a glitch that allowed folks to reserve tickets in a zero amount.  As the folks who helped write the cart explained it to us:

The bug was in fact created when we removed the confirmation step*.  Why did we do that? In load testing, we experienced very long, slow results when submitting the form, including frequent errors (for which we had to hit refresh). Because of this, we decided that the confirmation step was only going to add to everyone's stress (making them have to wait / stress through TWO submissions instead of one), and so it was removed. However, this resulted in the check for 'reserving zero tickets' being bypassed as well. So some people who had only "waitlisted" tickets were able to get a confirmation screen that they'd completed the process, but with no tickets loaded (since they had, in fact, reserved exactly nothing).

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WOW!

Posted On: 2010-11-16 12:11:15

So yeah...when things work (mostly) right...

It looks like 500 tickets were reserved in a mere 16 seconds.  More details to follow but round one is SOLD OUT.

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