Refreshinator

[Yoghurt on a Stick]

4 minutes ago, Quark said:

A tongue in cheek suggestion (I hesitate to use the word joke; Mrs Q can testify that most of my humour barely comes close to a joke) that having a dual registration was a shameful secret you've been harbouring Yog

And yes, classic tune!

Hello Quark. I thought as much but wasn't sure (that's paranoia for you). I have mentioned that I had two registrations before (as in way back). Until Zoo Music Girl's post I hadn't actually realised that there may be a benefit by having two registrations.

[Pinhead]

I see the point about See not really caring who buys the tickets as long as they sell them to someone. However, since they explicitly say they do not allow auto-refresh apps like this, then that's more than sufficient for me to steer clear of them alone. As for the idea of having to cancel tickets after the sale for those seen to have used one - it would never get that far in the first place - you would have been blocked at the front end. See that banner info posted above - all they have to do is cut and paste that into their front end 'reputation' filter and that client will cease to get though even to first base...

[musky]

There's been no mention of banning people or cancelling registrations, just of cancelling tickets. To do that they don't have to go through anything, they can just run a simple script which would flag up suspicious activity. It's extremely likely they have more sophisticated software they could run, as other companies such as ticketmaster are quite open about the steps they've taken against this type of software (the irony of a company in the business of touting acting to combat tours!). 

And as Pinhead says, that's if you get as far as buying a ticket anyway. The results from the http headers that Charm posted means that the app can be blocked extremely easily. 

[Keithy]

2 hours ago, Zoo Music Girl said:

I think a lot of people have more than one registration. I do too, I think because I wanted to update my photo a while back. (Well, I did - I deleted the old one the other day.) But this is a pretty well-known loophole and people are always asking if it's possible to buy tickets with both. The answer is often that you're not supposed to and GFL could invalidate both, but no one knows how they would do it. It's often raised as a possibility for getting coach tickets on Thursday, then getting coach tickets with another on Sunday and putting the former back in the pot. I think it's immoral but I don't know how they'd stop it. 

I'd have thought it would be very easy to spot duplicate references and cancel both. Very simply, query the database after the sale and export all the sales to Excel for example. All you need then is a common field to query against for duplicates:

You could query 'First Name, Last name' and export all the duplicates and then check that subsection with another query. Or just query all postcodes for duplicate and then run another duplicate query.

I have something similar in the NHS with Patient Hospital numbers. In theory every patient has a single unique ID. In practice, cock-ups happen and the same patient has two or more hospital numbers so you regularly query the patient database to find duplicate names, postcodes and merge their records. Obviously there are a few other checks you undertake but it's not that laborious. In See's case, rather than merge, they'd cancel. I'd be stunned if it took them more than a day to identify duplicates post sale - they only have a few fields to query - Reg Number, Names, Address, Postcode.

The only way around having more than one reference number is to have different registered addresses. They would still match 'First Name, Last Name' but unless they then look at the registered photo, they've no idea if the 2 Joe Bloggs are the same person.

[Pinhead]

Yeah, I can't see See going through an exercise to cancel tickets that they think were purchased using the auto-refresh app - I mean the'd have to log everything coming in which would require tons of storage to store the logfiles for those millions of hits and then all the metadata for the subsequent transaction... Nah, they'll block it at the door if they want to.

Duplicate registrations should be easy to query for. Duplicate names with different addresses - harder.

[Zoo Music Girl]

32 minutes ago, Keithy said:

I'd have thought it would be very easy to spot duplicate references and cancel both. Very simply, query the database after the sale and export all the sales to Excel for example. All you need then is a common field to query against for duplicates:

You could query 'First Name, Last name' and export all the duplicates and then check that subsection with another query. Or just query all postcodes for duplicate and then run another duplicate query.

I have something similar in the NHS with Patient Hospital numbers. In theory every patient has a single unique ID. In practice, cock-ups happen and the same patient has two or more hospital numbers so you regularly query the patient database to find duplicate names, postcodes and merge their records. Obviously there are a few other checks you undertake but it's not that laborious. In See's case, rather than merge, they'd cancel. I'd be stunned if it took them more than a day to identify duplicates post sale - they only have a few fields to query - Reg Number, Names, Address, Postcode.

The only way around having more than one reference number is to have different registered addresses. They would still match 'First Name, Last Name' but unless they then look at the registered photo, they've no idea if the 2 Joe Bloggs are the same person.

Oh yeah I get that it is possible to look for dupes. I don't know if they do though. I've never heard of anyone buying tickets with two registrations, only people mooting it is an idea... for good reason I guess they'd keep it on the downlow.

Ah, I see now - I said "no one knows how they would do it" when what I really meant was "no one knows if they would"

Edited October 4, 2016 by Zoo Music Girl

[Glasto peaches]

21 hours ago, BeddyDriver said:

I still dont get this app though...what the hell is the point ?........at busy times the booking pages can take upto 5 seconds+  to respond and load so why the hell would you want to refresh faster than once a second...Theres skill in timing your refresh just right I tell you  and that hasnt failed me since , christ I cant remember.....2005 I think.....havent missed one since then....... I just dont get it,its not for me    and on that basis Im out.......

Tell me about your skill timing

I still haven't decided what to do about this damn thing.

[FestiZebra]

Can anyone advise what the difference between the refreshinator app and the google chrome refresh extension is? I don't remember there being this much uproar over the browser extensions last year

[Alvarhanso]

28 minutes ago, FestiZebra said:

Can anyone advise what the difference between the refreshinator app and the google chrome refresh extension is? I don't remember there being this much uproar over the browser extensions last year

I think a lot of people don't have an issue with auto-referesh per se, its more the issue with somebody monetising it for their own gain.

[FestiZebra]

1 minute ago, Alvarhanso said:

I think a lot of people don't have an issue with auto-referesh per se, its more the issue with somebody monetising it for their own gain.

I see, thanks for clearing that up!

[Stu H]

Hi all,

I work for a major website dealing with millions of hits a day. We use a bot blocking solution which basically looks for non-human behaviour. That can include how quickly you click (set to milliseconds, obviously), using different browsers, web page flow etc.

See Tickets will be using something, but it will need to be set up enough to let the 'constant refreshers' e.g. humans in, yet block others.

Given See's reasonably poor IT setup of previous years, who knows whether they're going to block IP addresses. Possibly.

Is it worth a risk? I guess so! Do it on 4G on a mobile and don't wreck your home/work IP.

 

 

*actually, just checked their source code and they use CloudFront by AWS. So perhaps this year they have sorted their tech stack out and it's properly load balanced and scalable for the traffic on Sunday. It'll still be complete chaos getting onto the reg page, but *hopefully* once you're on, it won't crash.  (famous last words)

[Stu H]

Definitely using AWS this year. So the IP's will probably change.

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

8 minutes ago, Stu H said:

Hi all,

I work for a major website dealing with millions of hits a day. We use a bot blocking solution which basically looks for non-human behaviour. That can include how quickly you click (set to milliseconds, obviously), using different browsers, web page flow etc.

See Tickets will be using something, but it will need to be set up enough to let the 'constant refreshers' e.g. humans in, yet block others.

Given See's reasonably poor IT setup of previous years, who knows whether they're going to block IP addresses. Possibly.

Is it worth a risk? I guess so! Do it on 4G on a mobile and don't wreck your home/work IP.

 

 

*actually, just checked their source code and they use CloudFront by AWS. So perhaps this year they have sorted their tech stack out and it's properly load balanced and scalable for the traffic on Sunday. It'll still be complete chaos getting onto the reg page, but *hopefully* once you're on, it won't crash.  (famous last words)

Thank you, that's useful. In my experience of the last couple of years it has been perfectly stable once you get a booking page, as you say the issue is getting that far!

[Glasto peaches]

Please can someone advise me on which auto refresh thingy I should get, and how to set it up? Sorry about this and being rubbish.  I'm a nurse and good for medical things, but give me a computer and I'm a bit pants.

 

[gizmoman]

1 hour ago, Stu H said:

Definitely using AWS this year. So the IP's will probably change.

What makes you think they use AWS?

[Avalon_Fields]

1 hour ago, Glasto peaches said:

Please can someone advise me on which auto refresh thingy I should get, and how to set it up? Sorry about this and being rubbish.  I'm a nurse and good for medical things, but give me a computer and I'm a bit pants.

 

I think the general consensus here is manual F5 to refresh the page every time the page doesn't load - so as soon as it fails to load - is the best option above any automatic system. Repeat endlessly....

[musky]

3 hours ago, FestiZebra said:

Can anyone advise what the difference between the refreshinator app and the google chrome refresh extension is? I don't remember there being this much uproar over the browser extensions last year

Yes. A browser extension won't cost £1.49 and won't freeze your browser.

[musky]

6 hours ago, Pinhead said:

Yeah, I can't see See going through an exercise to cancel tickets that they think were purchased using the auto-refresh app - I mean the'd have to log everything coming in which would require tons of storage to store the logfiles for those millions of hits and then all the metadata for the subsequent transaction... Nah, they'll block it at the door if they want to.

Duplicate registrations should be easy to query for. Duplicate names with different addresses - harder.

A quick google reveals that the log files for 150,000,000 hits would be a bit over 40gb. Big but not really a worry for a major site used to huge volumes of traffic. Log rotation and archiving would reduce that figure, and it's quite likely they do log file analysis anyway.

Whether they want to check those files is a different matter. I doubt See could give a flying one, but the festival might. Possibly...

[parsonjack]

5 hours ago, Stu H said:

Definitely using AWS this year. So the IP's will probably change.

IP's changing?  Which IP's and why?

[Glasto peaches]

This thread has become very technical.   I am going to try for coach tix for the first time.  And will be using F5 with the refreshinator on my iPad just for back up...Would prefer to get through on Sunday so you can take more stuff but beggars and all that.  Good luck everyone 

 

[EamerRed]

I'd be amazed if this was the first year that SeeTickets were using CloudFront and/or any kind of load balancers. I don't see how anything has changed IT-wise this year in comparison to last year in all honesty. Though having said that, how would we know!

[Stu H]

14 hours ago, gizmoman said:

What makes you think they use AWS?

Because they're using CloudFront as their CDN.

Go onto their homepage and CTRL + U and you'll see it in the Source Code.

It's an AWS product:   https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ 

 

 

Loads of info here:   https://d3c3cq33003psk.cloudfront.net/opentag-138157-seetickets.js 

t.src="//s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/opentag/opentag

[Stu H]

35 minutes ago, EamerRed said:

I'd be amazed if this was the first year that SeeTickets were using CloudFront and/or any kind of load balancers. I don't see how anything has changed IT-wise this year in comparison to last year in all honesty. Though having said that, how would we know!

I can't say what the code was last year, but there's enough reference to AWS in the source code of their home page to suggest they are.

[EamerRed]

Yeah I don't doubt that. I'd just be very surprised if it was new that's all.

[Stu H]

45 minutes ago, EamerRed said:

Yeah I don't doubt that. I'd just be very surprised if it was new that's all.

that's true.

Although if they were using it last year, they didn't make a very good job of it!