So what went on with the holding page?

[Zoo Music Girl]

Sorry to hear that. It's a shit feeling alright.

[midnight]

At least I know I'm in good company!  

[Untz]

I wouldn't even know where logical begins when it comes to IT problems, but rebooting would have cost time as well, that was one of the reasons I dismissed it.

 

Never mind IT problems, I'm not sure there's any logic in a ticket sale at all.

 

I knew I wasn't getting anywhere either and knew I had to do something different, but with all the stress and not wanting to jeopardise what I already had I stuck with it.

[Indian.Summer]

Gutted not to get tickets!

I've got tickets every year since 2010 and have always used the same method - get on about 8-8.30am. Out of our group I'm usually the once that is successful.

This year was definitely different no one out of our group of 9 got tickets. Further more our extended group of a further 10 also all failed, which is never usually the way, everyone was geographically spread too!

We got to the holding page but kept getting the white screen.

Bring on April, if anyone has any tips to getting a ticket, please pm me.

Good luck everyone else!

[mrf]

Opened a window at 5:30am (I just happened to wake up early!)

Had explorer and chrome on a PC open, Safari on an iPad, Firefox on a laptop and safari on an iPhone.

Every single window experienced white screens, holding pages, stuck pages, crashes...

 

At 9.25 (ish) explorer got a tickets screen but then crashed during payment! Clicked refresh, finally came back to me, entered details again and got the booking complete screen!! Longest 1 or 2 minutes of my life! Then just after the booking complete screen came up, the SOLD OUT message came on the Twitter feed!

 

Hated every minute of trying, but my god the feeling was good when the booking complete screen came up!!!

[bethannny]

I had intermittent white screens on all of the 5 browsers across two computers that I was trying with. Page open from about 8:15 and started getting server errors about 8:55 (cue panic!)

I stuck with the whited-out ones and kept trying to refresh them - sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. The only one that worked about 80% of the time was Tor - which I eventually got through and got tickets on.

Glad I stuck with the others though - even though Chrome was throwing up errors maybe 60% of the time I also managed to get through on that and bag the second lot of tickets I needed.

It's all luck. Or I'm magic.

[Eks101]

I had a bunch of laptops all trying to connect.  Some had the white screen constantly, some had white screen combined with holding page, some had the holding page all the time.  All using the same Internet connection.  5 other friends who were trying only managed to see the holding page a few times and that's it.

 

Managed to get through to the reference number page on 2 of my machines but both were timing out, on about the 10th attempt (pressing back/submit) one went through but then timed out a bunch of times submitting details on the payment screen.  This is what annoyed me the most - what is the point of having a fancy load balancing system with holding pages if your back end then can't support the amount of connections that have been let through by it????  When you are through to the add details page you should then not have issues with time outs, otherwise the system has failed.

 

Fortunately managed to get the tickets in the end but they didn't half make it a stressful experience - more than last year.

[seanybiz1]

I got through to the payment screen 3 times. Each time I entered my details and pressed Confirm only for it to timeout each time! I never saw the confirmation screen : (

 

I still can't believe it...

[eFestivals]

I got through to the payment screen 3 times. Each time I entered my details and pressed Confirm only for it to timeout each time! I never saw the confirmation screen : (

 

I still can't believe it...

that happened with me too.

[bennyhana22]

that happened with me too.

Neil, there is no list of people who will receive masses of help in getting a ticket in the resale.

 

That wouldn't be fair.

 

And on this list that doesn't exist, your name is at the top. Of the list. That doesn't exist.

 

Ben

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

we all know that there kind of is a list.

 

Ben

[seanybiz1]

that happened with me too.

 

In a way it's worse than not getting on at all!

 

Ah well bring on the resale... Positive thinking n all that!

[Cheesey]

I got through to the payment screen 3 times. Each time I entered my details and pressed Confirm only for it to timeout each time! I never saw the confirmation screen : (

I managed to get tickets but I had two failed attempts at payment first. The third went through after a long wait, and five minutes later they'd sold out. The payment part seemed very flakey this year.

[Pinhead]

Yeah its a possibility that one of the back end (behind load balancer) servers hung and had to be restarted. The load balancer should pick this up normally - I reckon most default configurations for any load balancer would be set to filter out any unresponsive servers behind them  - that's one of their primary purposes. Sometimes load balancers have been configured however to just look to see if a server is responding rather than processing - the ticket processing web app could have failed but the server was still otherwise responding for example.

 

As for the public DNS records - these are the records for the IP's of the load balancers, behind which sit any number of actual ticket app servers on reserved private IP ranges. It would not be the job of a load balancer to change public DNS records (which is undesirable in the middle of a ticket sale for all the reasons already suggested in this thread). One of the reasons for using them is to avoid such a scenario. Consequently, I doubt if there was any issues with public DNS this time around, but quite possibly clients were being directed to an unresponsive server for a while?

[BeddyDriver]

Not sure how it can be anything but luck..

 

I was the lucky sod who got through instantly it opened, and had my ticket email confirmation by 9:02 !

 

I had my ipad on wifi extender , my laptop on WAN, and other halfs IPAD on WIFI, and both my IPAD and Laptop opened the booking page immediately at 9.00 am at exactly the same time, as i hit refresh simultaneously....

 

Entered my details on my laptop, and everything straight through without a hitch.. Then entered friends group on my ipad, slow for a few seconds until the confirmation appeared...but all good.

 

The got a shout from downstairs where my other half had got through too, so ran down there, and entered another group of tickets.... pressed proceed, and got tickets already bought message..... so hit back entered another group of tickets ....this time timout out on the payment details, but just hit back, re-entered the security code, and bingo....

 

After that I went back upstairs, and just kept getting a mix of not being able to get on the page at all, or the holding page, but no more booking pages...

 

Other half meanwhile go tthrough to the booking page twice more on her Ipad.....

 

 

Now i cant work out any kind of pattern to any of this.....surely it has to be pot luck.....although we have had this luck and bought multiple tickets for the last 3 years..... Maybe something to do with where we live perhaps......well no...we moved house about 6 weeks before sale date, and were actually bricking it that we might have lost our magic touch.

 

So all in all, change of adress made no difference, device type made no difference, connection type made no difference...

 

Has to be luck....

[siweltrebor]

For all the good things I heard using Opera on either my mac or tablet got nowhere and often the page just shut down completely.

Chrome was very patchy in terms of even getting to the booking page.

Safari seemed to tick on over nicely without getting a breakthrough.

Firefox worked perfectly, 20 second countdown, got to the booking page through that one, but then for the first time I've ever encountered of it, i put in all the details, pressed proceed/confirm and it sent me straight back to the countdown page instead of the payment page, no one else in my group at that point had got through so i had a chance to book 6 tickets and the system failed me, i made no errors over input as i manually copied them over from a whats app group chat on my phone, so frustrating, even worse than not getting through at all.

 

no one has tickets out of the 11 of us who tried to get tickets independently. Lots of success spotted on facebook through other friends though outside of the camp.

[LRW]

I didnt ever get past the holding page. All I had at my disposal was an iPhone and my parents wifi.

 

This was the first time in 7 years I have put any real effort into trying for tickets, due to just being fed up of the whole ticket buying process. Im going to try again in April - but my confidence is already low. 

[parsonjack]

The good thing to come out of this is that (hopefully) See are aware of whatever the issue was, and will take steps to prevent it re-occurring.

Yes the tickets all sold out as usual so their incentive to fix it may be somewhat diminished, but GFL remain an important Customer to them and bad press generated in threads such as this will not go un-noticed.

We don't mind it being bloody difficult to get a ticket, but we do mind when flaky technology makes it randomly impossible for some.

[Cheesey]

We don't mind it being bloody difficult to get a ticket, but we do mind when flaky technology makes it randomly impossible for some.

 

That's exactly it. I don't mind having a small chance of getting a ticket. But it's got to be fair, and the site's got to work properly.

[hfuhruhurr]

8 of us trying for 6 tickets - all in different locations. My mate who has always got through didn't even get the holding page for the entire session. Daughter on phone got through, entered the numbers and then phone lost signal. I then got through (virgin, chrome, one tab, F5x1000) and all went well. Even got back to a booking page on that machine to help others but they'd got through - then the sold out.

Out of 8 of us, only 3 saw the holding page (the rest blank), but it seems if you're on a lucky device, it keeps getting back in (daughter's phone got back in right at the end too).

It's almost as if the mighty IP selector says "It's you today".

[Pinhead]

"It's almost as if the mighty IP selector says "It's you today"

 

Also known as a reputation filter... 

[Mr.Tease]

I got through to the payment screen 3 times. Each time I entered my details and pressed Confirm only for it to timeout each time! I never saw the confirmation screen : (

I still can't believe it...

Mine hung on the screen before the payment screen for what was an agonising period of time- had given up hope, but then the payment screen popped up in badly loaded form (not properly formatted). Later I'm sure they changed the payment screen and had taken out a few of the sections (card start date), so I wonder if they had a few problems with it. Horrible to get that close and very annoying for you to then have it cock up.

For some reason I had no problem accessing the holding page- once it timed out but every other time it loaded fine (a few times it took a few seconds longer.

I did do a test run in the coach ticket sale- on the thursday- would that have helped things? Did the people who avoided the white page of doom do a test run in the coach sale?

[MrsRookin]

I have been consistently successful in every main sale and resale (for others) for the last five festivals. I also managed to get coach tickets on Thursday for a fiend with no trouble. Sunday morning however was horrific - I saw the holding page a few times, but mostly just the white screen of death. Fortunately a friend got through for us, but it was incredibly frustrating.

[midnight]

The good thing to come out of this is that (hopefully) See are aware of whatever the issue was, and will take steps to prevent it re-occurring.

Yes the tickets all sold out as usual so their incentive to fix it may be somewhat diminished, but GFL remain an important Customer to them and bad press generated in threads such as this will not go un-noticed.

We don't mind it being bloody difficult to get a ticket, but we do mind when flaky technology makes it randomly impossible for some.

 

Ah, I've found a man who understands me, after all!  

But does that really matter to the ticket sellers? It's a success for them to shift all the tics in a very short time, and many people would never get them anyway....

 

"It's almost as if the mighty IP selector says "It's you today"

 

Also known as a reputation filter... 

 

I was wondering about something like that, as I'm not the superstitious kind, and it seems odd to have such a stretch of bad luck, particularly seeing that quite a few others get through more than once in the same session?

 

Mine hung on the screen before the payment screen for what was an agonising period of time- had given up hope, but then the payment screen popped up in badly loaded form (not properly formatted). Later I'm sure they changed the payment screen and had taken out a few of the sections (card start date), so I wonder if they had a few problems with it. Horrible to get that close and very annoying for you to then have it cock up.

For some reason I had no problem accessing the holding page- once it timed out but every other time it loaded fine (a few times it took a few seconds longer.

I did do a test run in the coach ticket sale- on the thursday- would that have helped things? Did the people who avoided the white page of doom do a test run in the coach sale?

 

Don't know what you mean by test run - as I said earlier, I was trying to get bus tickets on Thursday (same machine and location), does that count? I got through to the holding page on Thursday, but no further.

[frostypaw]

two things jump to mind, this joke:

HTTP runs over TCP/IP the web client asks, the server replies so the conversational seeming models are probably fairly accurate - such protocol handshakes make up most of the net's functionality.

they don't seem to give folk a persistent cookie on first arrival or they'd be running a neat consecutive queuing system so I think the suggestion that it's happening at the load balancing server makes all the sense, I too had a bad server for the first five minutes on one session while the other was fine on second refresh. We used to recommend CTRL-f5, does that make any difference on modern browsers/servers?

Then this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4

Have we seen enough to be sure it was a real pattern?

midnight tho - long time no see - shall try for yous if you're still wanting come resale

[DeanoL]

That's exactly it. I don't mind having a small chance of getting a ticket. But it's got to be fair, and the site's got to work properly.

 

I agree the site should be working properly.

 

On the other hand, it's not actually any less fair, assuming those that got the 'cookie of death' were random. If 3x as many people are after tickets as their are tickets, the system has to pick 33% of them and give them tickets, and turn the rest away.

 

It's meant to do that by letting everyone try until the tickets are all gone. But if it actually goes to a random 33% of people at the start "you can't come in", then sells tickets to half of the remaining group, your odds of getting a ticket stayed the same, the system wasn't actually any less fair.

 

(A 66% chance to get to the holding page, then a 50% chance once you're in there is 66%x50% = 33%)