![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I finally managed to make it through the signup process and get a ticket for the Radio 1 Hackney Weekend 2012 on the Sunday!
(OK, I'd have slightly preferred the Saturday, but by the time I got in they'd all gone. Still, for a lineup headlined by Rihanna and featuring a stack of other big names, that'll do fine, especially as it was essentially free.)
That actually made it worth the signup process, which resembled repeatedly slamming your head against a brick wall, except for being slightly less fun. It was a classic shambles out of the Olympic Tickets Reallocation stable -- well, different company, same basic failure to have enough server capacity to cope. Really, guys, what are people paying you for? Surely you must be expecting a mad scramble for popular tickets now? I mean, due to the fact it happens every single time?
At least today they'd apparently managed to tweak the system to serve up an actual holding page with auto-resubmission rather than yesterday's broken effort that usually came up with a cryptic back-end error message saying "your IP is not allowed access", but it still took well over an hour. I just left a browser window open to the page on one screen while working on the other.
And this sort of thing is, of course, completely unnecessary. Get people to pre-register with all necessary details and then allocate the tickets by some random process, and you wouldn't need a big server farm capable of handling a massive peak load; you could run the whole thing from a bog standard webserver. In fact, you could probably do the actual allocation from an iPhone, just to be flash. No need to put a premium on being a fast typist, or on being able to get to a computer at the key time, and no worries about automated signup hacks. I mean, if someone can come up with a more workable idea in thirty seconds on the back of an envelope ... you suck.
Oh well, (semi-)professional rant over. :) So, is anyone else going to this?
(OK, I'd have slightly preferred the Saturday, but by the time I got in they'd all gone. Still, for a lineup headlined by Rihanna and featuring a stack of other big names, that'll do fine, especially as it was essentially free.)
That actually made it worth the signup process, which resembled repeatedly slamming your head against a brick wall, except for being slightly less fun. It was a classic shambles out of the Olympic Tickets Reallocation stable -- well, different company, same basic failure to have enough server capacity to cope. Really, guys, what are people paying you for? Surely you must be expecting a mad scramble for popular tickets now? I mean, due to the fact it happens every single time?
At least today they'd apparently managed to tweak the system to serve up an actual holding page with auto-resubmission rather than yesterday's broken effort that usually came up with a cryptic back-end error message saying "your IP is not allowed access", but it still took well over an hour. I just left a browser window open to the page on one screen while working on the other.
And this sort of thing is, of course, completely unnecessary. Get people to pre-register with all necessary details and then allocate the tickets by some random process, and you wouldn't need a big server farm capable of handling a massive peak load; you could run the whole thing from a bog standard webserver. In fact, you could probably do the actual allocation from an iPhone, just to be flash. No need to put a premium on being a fast typist, or on being able to get to a computer at the key time, and no worries about automated signup hacks. I mean, if someone can come up with a more workable idea in thirty seconds on the back of an envelope ... you suck.
Oh well, (semi-)professional rant over. :) So, is anyone else going to this?
