geeky techie chat about the ticket sale

[eFestivals]

Looks like simple email clickthrough tracking to me. Very commonly used in marketing campaigns.

It might have been done for clickthru tracking, but there'd be more sensible ways of doing it.

And it's more than just click thru tracking as a proper look at the actual detail (that I posted above) will tell you.

Also, why would See or Glasto be using a domain that isn't theirs? Why would they use a See affiliate ID that is assigned to a record company? Etc, etc. It seems a bit odd (tho I know they've used domains that aren't theirs before now - tho as fakes, rather than something to actually be utilised).

[UEF]

It might have been done for clickthru tracking, but there'd be more sensible ways of doing it.

And it's more than just click thru tracking as a proper look at the actual detail (that I posted above) will tell you.

Also, why would See or Glasto be using a domain that isn't theirs? Why would they use a See affiliate ID that is assigned to a record company? Etc, etc. It seems a bit odd (tho I know they've used domains that aren't theirs before now - tho as fakes, rather than something to actually be utilised).

I'd imagine all for reasons of ease. Vivendi who own Seetickets also own Universal. The call goes out to see who in the company can send a mass email and they use a system they own, which (in this occasion at least) uses a tracker on a universal domain.

The extra arguments (supplied in the URL) may simply be ignored by the Glasto page and picked up by their other sites that utilise them.

Or, you know, conspiracy

[eFestivals]

Or, you know, conspiracy

yeah, cos a record company buying its Glastonbury tickets is a conspiracy, one they each do every year.

The answer I gave was an answer that fitted the info I was supplied with.

Get over yerself.

[stuartbert two hats]

but "More capable" means "less chance" right? the more issues there are the more chance persistence will pay off - if it goes in 2 minutes we will realistically all be saying goodbye to glastonbury apart from the odd year as there will be no way to get around it?

I have no idea why you think More Capable = Less Chance. It would be exactly the same chance, unless you think that a slicker sales process would mean more people would try for tickets?

In fairness, they've come a long, long way over the last decade. I can remember spending hours and hours refreshing blank screens and calling an engaged tone back when Reading Festival used to sell out.

I'm not sure who else there is that could do it better - or what better would even look like really.

Broadly speaking I agree. For me, better would look very similar, except the holding page would always load and when you entered your payment details, they don't time-out. Other than that, I think they have it nailed - holding page that pushes people to a reg details + payment page. They just need fewer timeouts.

Edited October 6, 2014 by stuartbert two hats

[Pinhead]

Wouldn't want any other company to have a go at managing the on-line ticket sale now tbh. See have had a number of years to get it right - give it to another company and I'd bet you'd be back to year zero all over again as they totally underestimate what is required....

[parsonjack]

Nah ... all you'll have been doing is directing your traffic to all to one server, instead of it being randomly directed at three servers.

You decreased your chances via your research, you didn't increase it.

Hmm. See have 3 servers on the 194.168.x.x subnet that DNS directed to yesterday. They also have 2 others elsewhere that are possibly used as a DR environment or as failover for the main front end.....there are 2 IP'S, neither in the range above....I can PM them to you if you would like to check them out.

Last week DNS was resolving to these 2 servers only for over 24 hours - I assume while work was carried out on the primary rig - and all See services including the Glastonbury pages available at that time were functioning as normal.

When See updated their DNS to point back to the main 194.168.x.x servers I added an entry to my Hosts for both of the other IP's and after flushing DNS cache etc could still connect. A quick check with HttpWatch and Fiddler showed I was hitting the other boxes and not the 194.168.x.x ones.

I was then able to buy a coach ticket instantly on Weds...having done the same for the resale in April when a second machine with no Hosts entry failed repeatedly.

Fully accept that forcing a connection to a single server instead of 3 reduces the chance....but forcing a connection to a far more lightly contended single box has to be an advantage.

My question is still the same....what are See doing to stop this being possible, as it was both just before and immediately after yesterday's sale?

[stuartbert two hats]

Hmm. See have 3 servers on the 194.168.x.x subnet that DNS directed to yesterday. They also have 2 others elsewhere that are possibly used as a DR environment or as failover for the main front end.....there are 2 IP'S, neither in the range above....I can PM them to you if you would like to check them out.

Last week DNS was resolving to these 2 servers only for over 24 hours - I assume while work was carried out on the primary rig - and all See services including the Glastonbury pages available at that time were functioning as normal.

When See updated their DNS to point back to the main 194.168.x.x servers I added an entry to my Hosts for both of the other IP's and after flushing DNS cache etc could still connect. A quick check with HttpWatch and Fiddler showed I was hitting the other boxes and not the 194.168.x.x ones.

I was then able to buy a coach ticket instantly on Weds...having done the same for the resale in April when a second machine with no Hosts entry failed repeatedly.

Fully accept that forcing a connection to a single server instead of 3 reduces the chance....but forcing a connection to a far more lightly contended single box has to be an advantage.

My question is still the same....what are See doing to stop this being possible, as it was both just before and immediately after yesterday's sale?

Smart. Can you PM me those IP addresses?

[billum]

My question is still the same....what are See doing to stop this being possible, as it was both just before and immediately after yesterday's sale?

I confess that my technical understanding is way below par here, but if you're saying that you could directly contact those spare servers instead of going through the normal resolution system, but not *during* the actual sale (which is when it would have been of benefit), then why is it even a problem?

Or are you saying that it worked for you during the coach sale and so gave an unfair advantage, so they need to tighten the coach sale up to the same level as during the main sale?

[parsonjack]

I confess that my technical understanding is way below par here, but if you're saying that you could directly contact those spare servers instead of going through the normal resolution system, but not *during* the actual sale (which is when it would have been of benefit), then why is it even a problem?

Or are you saying that it worked for you during the coach sale and so gave an unfair advantage, so they need to tighten the coach sale up to the same level as during the main sale?

Without getting into the semantics of what is fair and what isn't....my method worked for first few minutes of the coach sale, as it did for the resale back in April...after which the connection seemed to be blocked and resulted in resolution errors. It didn't work at all yesterday so the tickets I bought were as fairly gained as any other.

For my interest I would like to know how See detected the connection to the 'spare' server and dropped it. Perhaps they merely took that service off-line for the duration knowing that folks like me would have an advantage by using it.

[billum]

(I wasn't making a judgement on fairness vs unfairness btw - if an access point is live and people find it then all's fair in love & ticket sales as far as I can see - I just didn't see how it was an issue if it wasn't open during the main sale)

[parsonjack]

(I wasn't making a judgement on fairness vs unfairness btw - if an access point is live and people find it then all's fair in love & ticket sales as far as I can see - I just didn't see how it was an issue if it wasn't open during the main sale)

Essentially I'm just interested, as a techie, how See stop it being used during sale....as I say, maybe they just pull the plug on the Web service on those boxes, hence the resolution error.

[DeanoL]

Also, why would See or Glasto be using a domain that isn't theirs?

I dunno but it is legit. I checked the email and mine is the same, it comes from do_not_reply@inbound.vice-versa.info , which is a mailing list provider.

The last e-mail I had from them was a couple of days before this year's festival, with info on Leave No Trace, water bottles, the app, etc. Had the same affiliate link tracking. eg: property lock ups: http://zaphod.uk.vvhp.net/v-v/0e5619ce41b9f6167358-15199300

[Pinhead]

The risk you take with that is that if they are truely intended as standby servers they may not be set up to process actual transactions and may instead process them against a test database or similar.

I would be surpised is See went as far as to have a DR mechanism in place. More likely perhaps is that if these were processing real transactions they were either capacity standbys for the main cluster or were the transaction cluster to which transactions were passed when they were redirected from the main front end connection handling servers.

[Hsr1234]

I work in IT.

Didn't get a ticket.

Logic tells me it's random who gets them, but experience is telling me that there are regional variations and that if you live in Yorkshire you won't see a booking page. 10 devices in Yorkshire didn't get passed the holding page this year. One on VPN did, but too late to get a ticket.

Similar last 2 years, trying from Yorkshire didn't get a sniff.

I am seriously considering driving to London for the resale. Intellectually I know that makes no sense but emotionally I suspect I may end up doing this!

(Also: what is the collective verdict of the advice now based on user experience to not use multiple browsers/tabs? I only had one browser open on each of the 5 devices I was using but now wondering if this was a big mistake!!!)

[celticvillan]

I live in Yorkshire, and got we got 12 tickets. Just luck I think, and F5'in like a mother flumper!

[stuartbert two hats]

I work in IT.

Didn't get a ticket.

Logic tells me it's random who gets them, but experience is telling me that there are regional variations and that if you live in Yorkshire you won't see a booking page. 10 devices in Yorkshire didn't get passed the holding page this year. One on VPN did, but too late to get a ticket.

Similar last 2 years, trying from Yorkshire didn't get a sniff.

I am seriously considering driving to London for the resale. Intellectually I know that makes no sense but emotionally I suspect I may end up doing this!

(Also: what is the collective verdict of the advice now based on user experience to not use multiple browsers/tabs? I only had one browser open on each of the 5 devices I was using but now wondering if this was a big mistake!!!)

Unless you know hundreds of people in Yorkshire and London who tried for tickets, it's just anecdotal evidence you're dealing with. Best thing you can do is recruit a friend to help you get a ticket. Find one in London if you like, but it's really lucky pants territory.

[Thearg]

I work in IT.

Didn't get a ticket.

Logic tells me it's random who gets them, but experience is telling me that there are regional variations and that if you live in Yorkshire you won't see a booking page. 10 devices in Yorkshire didn't get passed the holding page this year. One on VPN did, but too late to get a ticket.

Similar last 2 years, trying from Yorkshire didn't get a sniff.

I am seriously considering driving to London for the resale. Intellectually I know that makes no sense but emotionally I suspect I may end up doing this!

(Also: what is the collective verdict of the advice now based on user experience to not use multiple browsers/tabs? I only had one browser open on each of the 5 devices I was using but now wondering if this was a big mistake!!!)

Last year living in London I got tickets for my group who apart from me live in a small town in the midlands,none of them got through,this year I am in the midlands and I got the tickets for my London group,they didn't get a sniff.

[Hsr1234]

Intellectually I know it's luck!

[DeanoL]

Logic tells me it's random who gets them, but experience is telling me that there are regional variations and that if you live in Yorkshire you won't see a booking page.

If it were genuinely the case on that sort of level, it'd get noticed. Glastonbury do do analytics on who books tickets, if suddenly a big portion of the country saw zero sales, it'd be quite apparently.

[UEF]

To contribute to the question of the north/south divide: I was in Scotland when I ordered my 12 tickets. Got fuck all in London last year.

[parsonjack]

The risk you take with that is that if they are truely intended as standby servers they may not be set up to process actual transactions and may instead process them against a test database or similar.

I would be surpised is See went as far as to have a DR mechanism in place. More likely perhaps is that if these were processing real transactions they were either capacity standbys for the main cluster or were the transaction cluster to which transactions were passed when they were redirected from the main front end connection handling servers.

RE the first para...I had the same fears...which is why before the resale I tested it by running through the entire process to buy a ticket to a random gig somewhere....I got all the way to the Submit payment stage but stopped there. For the resale I did purchase a ticket for a friend which duly arrived and a good time was had, although I wasn't totally sure until the ticket actually hit the mat.

Re second para I think you may be correct in one or other of those scenarios....just not sure which. In any case the facts are that for at least the last resale, and the recent coach sale, I was able to purchase a ticket using a Host file hack to a non-advertised See Server while another laptop with standard DNS failed repeatedly.

[UEF]

If there isn't something 'regional' going on, can anyone explain (politely) the perceived increased numbers of festie-goers from the North West coming each year... is it just a changing demographic we're seeing?

Edited October 6, 2014 by UEF

[Stu H]

Why would See Tickets want to implement a technology solution that decides how many people from a certain part of the country get X amount of tickets? It's needless setting up and testing.

Glastonbury want to sell all the tickets. See want to sell all the tickets. They don't care where from.

[Thearg]

If there isn't something 'regional' going on, can anyone explain (politely) the perceived increased numbers of festie-goers from the North West coming each year... is it just a changing demographic we're seeing?

You're opening a can of worms there.

Edited October 6, 2014 by Thearg

[Vacant0]

If there isn't something 'regional' going on, can anyone explain (politely) the perceived increased numbers of festie-goers from the North West coming each year... is it just a changing demographic we're seeing?

You've answered your own question. Its 'perceived'.