2024 Ticket Buying Tips

[Nduja]

No hosts file here but I noticed that prior to the sale my work laptop had made it onto a different page compared to my phone and tablet. When the sale started I got that deposit splash page but it instantly failed over (Possibly due to autorefresh)

Eventually this was the device that got into the payment page whilst there wasn't a sniff on other devices. It certainly seemed to be the best performing device in our household but no idea why.

There's got to be something load balancing related to that but it didn't prove to be the golden ticket that others described where you can go forwards and backwards through the screens at will.

[SighMo]

2 hours ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

I can't see how it could be worse

Thousands of tickets today clearly went via this quick access, while everyone else basically queued for nothing (and again this will be biased to large buying groups as they are more likely to find this out)

I think the system is terrible, successful or not, and every year say it should be a ballot.

Personally I think groups of up to six should have to pre-register and be linked together. That evens the playing field for everyone again.

 

How can you be sure it would be thousands? The majority including myself would have no idea how to do this even when handed the instructions. 

Edited November 19, 2023 by SighMo
Typo

[svphie]

Can someone please explain why deleting seetickets cookies beforehand is a good tip? I don’t really understand that kind of thing.

i did it for the first time at 8:57am today because i saw it on here (successfully got through at like 9:02)

[airwaves]

6 minutes ago, svphie said:

Can someone please explain why deleting seetickets cookies beforehand is a good tip? I don’t really understand that kind of thing.

i did it for the first time at 8:57am today because i saw it on here (successfully got through at like 9:02)

I use FireFox as my browser, and that doesn't save cookies when I switch off.

Got tickets for 5 at around 9:25

[WobblyPants]

It’s perfectly possible there was an alternative link shared privately by See which directed users to a server which was not included in the pool served by the usual web address, and this was a designed situation. Others found the address for this server and accessed via the usual sub domain by changing their hosts file. 
 

It’s also possible these servers were not meant to be handling any requests for Glastonbury sales. 
 

Users who tried to buy tickets from the ‘normal’ website did not have less of a chance of getting a session per request. If anything the other server took some of the load away, and these requests would otherwise have been on the public server pool. 
 

The impact of this exploit effectively reduces the number of tickets available, but otherwise doesn’t negatively effect the possibility of ‘getting through’. 
 

We have no idea how many tickets were sold on the other server but it is probably insignificant vs the public servers. If it was handling anything like the same amount of requests as the public servers it would not have been an advantage.

 

The ticket sale took an hour. This is above average suggesting that the impact of some being able to buy tickets easily was minimal.

 

There is evidence that this situation has occurred several times in the past. 
 

There is no evidence that this weakness was exploited for commercial/personal gain/profit  

 

See tickets system held up very well to thousands of payments. At some point there were some issues which were rectified within 15 minutes (this probably explains the longer sell out time)
 

Whatever system is used there will always be a weakness. Some people will always maximise their opportunities and exploit any weaknesses that exist. 

I expect See will address this exploit govern its widespread discussion today, but there will be another weakness. There is always a way to gain an advantage.

At the end of the day, in my opinion See do a great job of handling the sale these days. There are very few technical issues and mostly everyone has a similar probability of securing a ticket. 
Weaknesses exist but they’re limited and can’t easily be exploited for profit. 

Those who are unlucky will often look for a reason/convincing story as to why they were unlucky or something was unfair. 

Links and ‘hacks’ have been shared on this forum in the past allowing its users to buy tickets easily (Freya link in 2004 or IP address typo in 2013).  Very few complain when they have benefited.

If you missed out, good luck in the resale. And if you succeeded, then congratulations. 
 

 

 

[TheGoodWillOut]

6 minutes ago, WobblyPants said:

It’s perfectly possible there was an alternative link shared privately by See which directed users to a server which was not included in the pool served by the usual web address, and this was a designed situation. Others found the address for this server and accessed via the usual sub domain by changing their hosts file. 
 

It’s also possible these servers were not meant to be handling any requests for Glastonbury sales. 
 

Users who tried to buy tickets from the ‘normal’ website did not have less of a chance of getting a session per request. If anything the other server took some of the load away, and these requests would otherwise have been on the public server pool. 
 

The impact of this exploit effectively reduces the number of tickets available, but otherwise doesn’t negatively effect the possibility of ‘getting through’. 
 

We have no idea how many tickets were sold on the other server but it is probably insignificant vs the public servers. If it was handling anything like the same amount of requests as the public servers it would not have been an advantage.

 

The ticket sale took an hour. This is above average suggesting that the impact of some being able to buy tickets easily was minimal.

 

There is evidence that this situation has occurred several times in the past. 
 

There is no evidence that this weakness was exploited for commercial/personal gain/profit  

 

See tickets system held up very well to thousands of payments. At some point there were some issues which were rectified within 15 minutes (this probably explains the longer sell out time)
 

Whatever system is used there will always be a weakness. Some people will always maximise their opportunities and exploit any weaknesses that exist. 

I expect See will address this exploit govern its widespread discussion today, but there will be another weakness. There is always a way to gain an advantage.

At the end of the day, in my opinion See do a great job of handling the sale these days. There are very few technical issues and mostly everyone has a similar probability of securing a ticket. 
Weaknesses exist but they’re limited and can’t easily be exploited for profit. 

Those who are unlucky will often look for a reason/convincing story as to why they were unlucky or something was unfair. 

Links and ‘hacks’ have been shared on this forum in the past allowing its users to buy tickets easily (Freya link in 2004 or IP address typo in 2013).  Very few complain when they have benefited.

If you missed out, good luck in the resale. And if you succeeded, then congratulations. 
 

 

 

Good post, are you involved with see/glasto with you knowing about the issue with payments? 

[BBC7BBCHEAVEN]

53 minutes ago, SighMo said:

How can you be sure it would be thousands? The majority including myself would have no idea how to do this even when handed the instructions. 

Well noone can say for sure that's the problem. 

Could have been 80% or tickets sold, could have been 8%

I would imagine the majority could follow the instructions they're fairly simple

It was clearly doing the rounds on WhatsApp/Reddit/Discord, so all you needed was one person in a big buying block to understand it and that's their entire group sorted.

Even in a small group, if one of the six can work it out, they're sorted.

 

Regardless - the point is that it simply shouldn't be possible to get tickets in this way, and if it is, the system isn't suitable.

[SighMo]

1 minute ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

Well noone can say for sure that's the problem. 

Could have been 80% or tickets sold, could have been 8%

I would imagine the majority could follow the instructions they're fairly simple

It was clearly doing the rounds on WhatsApp/Reddit/Discord, so all you needed was one person in a big buying block to understand it and that's their entire group sorted.

Even in a small group, if one of the six can work it out, they're sorted.

 

Regardless - the point is that it simply shouldn't be possible to get tickets in this way, and if it is, the system isn't suitable.

8% would be a massive amount. Have a read of WobblyPants post above. It kinda makes sense to me and may make you feel better.

[Suprefan]

2 hours ago, gordong said:

Still find it weird that no one has actually came forward to confirm this hosts file hack worked today. Very much “my friend” or “my friend’s friend”. Suppose you probably wouldn’t want to be too forthcoming with it. 

Why would anyone ever admit it. The elephant is in the room and its not going away anytime soon. Everyone can simply say the same line of "used my auto refreshers and got in on my laptop from 2004" and nobody will raise an eyebrow. Theres no way there isnt a decent amount of people who use bots and hacks to get tickets now. If theres an exploit, it will be used until it doesnt exist. The Host file of 10 years ago was a boon and i saw lots of people on here jump for joy cause they figured it out. Time changes people and theyll be willing to be a little evil to get a ticket. And theres people who pay somebody to get them their tickets. Its worth an extra £200 to guarantee your ticket.

[assorted]

2 hours ago, gordong said:

Still find it weird that no one has actually came forward to confirm this hosts file hack worked today. Very much “my friend” or “my friend’s friend”. Suppose you probably wouldn’t want to be too forthcoming with it. 

I was like you doubting it until I saw some more info and it’s real. Also, over on the Glastonbury discord all the mods admitted to using it while banning the words “DNS” and “HOSTS” in the chat so regular users couldn’t even mention it to teach others so only the mods and their friends could use the hack. It’s a pretty funny drama happening there but also it confirms it worked - the mods have an open letter confessing to using it.

I got in legitimately today and the total cheat tickets are probably a drop in the bucket but I also agree that I hope See fixes this for the resale. 

If you want See to fix it the best you can do is publish all the details here and on Reddit, Facebook, etc so that everyone can do it. With enough sunlight they will have to deal with it.

[clarkete]

15 hours ago, Tr234 said:

Got to be a better method than have everyone waste an hour of their morning constantly refreshing.

Queue system would probably work better

Blooming hell, you're gonna make me go all Four Yorkshiremen now. 

An hour! 

When I were a lad (well fifteen to twenty years ago but tbh I was probably about thirty) when t'internet was woeful in most homes I spent 16 hours solidly trying both online and calling the box office (which was an option then). 

I didn't even succeed, someone mentioned to a friend and she popped online from her house and bought in five minutes. 

[Memory Man]

Its definitely going to be in the thousands of tickets sold this way

say for example 2k tickets went this way:

2000 / 6 = 333 orders

how many ppl have heard of those using the backdoor getting 4, 5 or 6 groups? I have.

conservative estimate 3 or 4 groups per “hacker” = 333 / 3 or 4 so 83 to 111 people total doing it.

you cant convince me only 90 or so people did it. Its got to be more given how widespread the info is.

i am not well connected and know at least the discord mods and another acquantaince who had someone buy a ticket for him this way. Also the video doing the rounds on twitter.

my educated guess is anything up to 5k or even more sold like this

not wanting to single them out but for example how is crazyfool’s syndicate reporting 100% success on 15 groups? Someone has clearly gone in like this if you ask me.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Memory Man

[TheDayman]

My fear now is that, even if the host file exploit was a small percentage of the general sale, is it going to make it even more difficult for those not using something like this in the resale?

[Paul ™]

59 minutes ago, Memory Man said:

not wanting to single them out but for example how is crazyfool’s syndicate reporting 100% success on 15 groups? Someone has clearly gone in like this if you ask me.

I wondered that too, @Crazyfool01 What was the technique yesterday?

[Memory Man]

CF didnt buy their own ticket, said on social media

with these group spreadsheets only 1 person in say 100 needs to know the hosts file trick 

 

[Thunderstruck]

3 minutes ago, Memory Man said:

CF didnt buy their own ticket, said on social media

with these group spreadsheets only 1 person in say 100 needs to know the hosts file trick 

 

I thought this trick was dead. My first ever Glastonbury I used the same trick but I thought they had stopped it somehow.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Thunderstruck

[Memory Man]

19 minutes ago, Thunderstruck said:

I thought this trick was dead. My first ever Glastonbury I used the same trick but I thought they had stopped it somehow.

Its back big time this year. All cloak and dagger behind the scenes but seen enough to know its been used reasonably significantly.

Sadly it just adds to the disappointment and frustration.

[Simsy]

51 minutes ago, Memory Man said:

CF didnt buy their own ticket, said on social media

with these group spreadsheets only 1 person in say 100 needs to know the hosts file trick 

 

I bought crazyfool's ticket the old-fashioned way, no host file hack, just f5ing.

[Rex2]

The percentage of groups successful thread suggests it's even more prominent. Think it was 50 percent of groups had 100 percent success rate which you'd assume the hack was used for. The only fair thing to do is trace these tickets and put them back in the pot 

[CaledonianGonzo]

Plenty of people were still able to buy without the host files hack. Our tickets were bought by the least technical member of our team.

[Lubic]

3 hours ago, Memory Man said:

Its definitely going to be in the thousands of tickets sold this way

say for example 2k tickets went this way:

2000 / 6 = 333 orders

how many ppl have heard of those using the backdoor getting 4, 5 or 6 groups? I have.

conservative estimate 3 or 4 groups per “hacker” = 333 / 3 or 4 so 83 to 111 people total doing it.

you cant convince me only 90 or so people did it. Its got to be more given how widespread the info is.

i am not well connected and know at least the discord mods and another acquantaince who had someone buy a ticket for him this way. Also the video doing the rounds on twitter.

my educated guess is anything up to 5k or even more sold like this

not wanting to single them out but for example how is crazyfool’s syndicate reporting 100% success on 15 groups? Someone has clearly gone in like this if you ask me.

I'm surprised how many on here are ok with this and seemingly accepting of it. This is a big issue and clearly will have allowed large groups to block buy tickets for entire spreadsheet groups. There were links and instructions going round on whatsapp, discord, reddit etc.

No that doesn't mean we would otherwise have been guaranteed a ticket, but I do find it odd that I don't know a single person irl, across a number of groups, that got beyond a holding page this year.

If the festival truly believes in fairness (as stated 2 weeks ago when they postponed the sale), all tickets bought on the spare server should be traced and cancelled. But they won't because they just want the tickets sold as fast as possible and See don't want the negative fallout.

[2019]

10 hours ago, svphie said:

Can someone please explain why deleting seetickets cookies beforehand is a good tip? I don’t really understand that kind of thing.

i did it for the first time at 8:57am today because i saw it on here (successfully got through at like 9:02)

i think cookies contain session persistence info, which makes your connection sticky to a particular ticket server. maybe if you use the hack, you need to clear your cookies to force a connection to the unloaded ticket servers. perhaps someone who worked for see tickets has figured this out. 

[Suprefan]

11 minutes ago, Lubic said:

I'm surprised how many on here are ok with this and seemingly accepting of it. This is a big issue and clearly will have allowed large groups to block buy tickets for entire spreadsheet groups. There were links and instructions going round on whatsapp, discord, reddit etc.

No that doesn't mean we would otherwise have been guaranteed a ticket, but I do find it odd that I don't know a single person irl, across a number of groups, that got beyond a holding page this year.

If the festival truly believes in fairness (as stated 2 weeks ago when they postponed the sale), all tickets bought on the spare server should be traced and cancelled. But they won't because they just want the tickets sold as fast as possible and See don't want the negative fallout.

Except if they explain why it was done then nobody is going to call them the bad guy. This happens all the time with major onsales anyway. They go back and review any suspicious purchases and cancel orders. So if they cancelled say 10,000 tickets bought via an exploit and they clearly figured out why/how it was done then they can admit they had a gap in security but also the resolve to take action if you try such a thing. Then theres precedence in the future that if you try this sort of thing youre going to lost your ticket. Who cares about the money, theyll get it one way or another. Again, most people on here arent going cry foul with all this cause they mightve done it themselves. 

[dulcificum]

10 hours ago, WobblyPants said:

Freya link in 2004 or IP address typo in 2013

Can you give more details on these? I thought there was hosts file ip address stuff in 2013, I can't see how a typo would help? 

[gooner1990]

10 hours ago, WobblyPants said:

It’s perfectly possible there was an alternative link shared privately by See which directed users to a server which was not included in the pool served by the usual web address, and this was a designed situation. Others found the address for this server and accessed via the usual sub domain by changing their hosts file. 
 

It’s also possible these servers were not meant to be handling any requests for Glastonbury sales. 
 

Users who tried to buy tickets from the ‘normal’ website did not have less of a chance of getting a session per request. If anything the other server took some of the load away, and these requests would otherwise have been on the public server pool. 
 

The impact of this exploit effectively reduces the number of tickets available, but otherwise doesn’t negatively effect the possibility of ‘getting through’. 
 

We have no idea how many tickets were sold on the other server but it is probably insignificant vs the public servers. If it was handling anything like the same amount of requests as the public servers it would not have been an advantage.

 

The ticket sale took an hour. This is above average suggesting that the impact of some being able to buy tickets easily was minimal.

 

There is evidence that this situation has occurred several times in the past. 
 

There is no evidence that this weakness was exploited for commercial/personal gain/profit  

 

See tickets system held up very well to thousands of payments. At some point there were some issues which were rectified within 15 minutes (this probably explains the longer sell out time)
 

Whatever system is used there will always be a weakness. Some people will always maximise their opportunities and exploit any weaknesses that exist. 

I expect See will address this exploit govern its widespread discussion today, but there will be another weakness. There is always a way to gain an advantage.

At the end of the day, in my opinion See do a great job of handling the sale these days. There are very few technical issues and mostly everyone has a similar probability of securing a ticket. 
Weaknesses exist but they’re limited and can’t easily be exploited for profit. 

Those who are unlucky will often look for a reason/convincing story as to why they were unlucky or something was unfair. 

Links and ‘hacks’ have been shared on this forum in the past allowing its users to buy tickets easily (Freya link in 2004 or IP address typo in 2013).  Very few complain when they have benefited.

If you missed out, good luck in the resale. And if you succeeded, then congratulations. 
 

 

 

I got mine through the Freya link in 2004....which I got from this forum!