2024 Ticket Buying Tips

[Nick_]

8 minutes ago, The Nal said:

F5

A lot of people seem to log on at 9am and when they dont have a ticket by 9.05 they're on Twitter telling Seetickets that their son is crying. 

So by "graft" you just mean being patient to wait in the queue?

[The Nal]

1 minute ago, Nick_ said:

So by "graft" you just mean being patient to wait in the queue?

Hitting F5 every second or so for 50 minutes. Thats about 3000 F5s.

[DeanoL]

3 minutes ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

That's not strictly true though is it?

If you've got the same people repeatedly going straight through and buying tickets (some claimed to have bought hundreds), then there might only be for example 100 people accessing that server but buying thousands of tickets without issue (while hundreds of thousands of people try and access the "normal" server)

Right, but if the servers don't bump you to a holding page if there's only 100 people on them (because those people are getting right through on the dodgy server) then the main server must also have at least 100 people on it who are "through" at any point in time too.

You could maybe argue that those on the dodgy server would be doing their transactions more quickly? Because of familiarity etc? In which case yeah you might have a point and it might throw it off slightly. Or it was biased towards bigger groups. I'm assuming even distribution of group size and average purchase time, but it's not going to have a major impact either way.

[Nick_]

3 minutes ago, The Nal said:

Hitting F5 every second or so for 50 minutes. Thats about 3000 F5s.

I think I don't understand that.

[gfa]

36 minutes ago, NotAnInsider said:

You can mitigate that one pretty easily. Registrations are manually approved as it is, so it's not a challenge to pull up all existing registrations at that address and see if they are the same person. Sure there are fringe cases like twins, people with multiple address but they can be dealt with (such as forcing tickets to go the registered address with a long drawn out system to change it after allocation). Won't be perfect but there are huge flaws with the current system too.

Perhaps all we really need is a pre-batching of registrations before the current refresh fest, but only allowing one session per group. 

You are very optimistic

Where there is a will there is a way. Companies such as Nike and Adidas spend millions every year to try and make their raffles fair and they aren't even close to cracking it.

What you have described sounds like arduous work for the people checking them (who at present definitely just press yes on basically everyone without even looking at details as long as the photos are decent - and that's if its even done manually!)

[DeanoL]

1 hour ago, BBC7BBCHEAVEN said:

It's draining to see people who get tickets every year accepting a flawed system.

I've been in the double digits now, and to be honest wasn't bothered yesterday at missing out, but to lose out unfairly is annoying.

Every year regardless of success I will call out a blatantly biased and crap system. It doesn't "reward persistence" as people love to claim, it rewards being in a massive spreadsheet

A ballot which allowed selected registrations to buy tickets for five other preallocated friends regs would be an actual fair system, but people don't want that because they'd rather a chance to game the system than a fair chance for everyone 

It rewards having other people try for you. Know what's better than a spreadsheet of 10 groups of six people each, all of whom try for the next group should they get theirs? One group of six people, and 54 mates who are willing to help you out. Or failing mates, people you're paying. Or failing people, robots. 

The issue is Glastonbury eliminated touting by not allowing tickets to be resold, but all the tricks touts use to secure tickets still work if they know in advance who they are buying for. As someone said before, it's just moved the problem upstream. And to be fair to Glasto, it's taken over a decade for us to end up here, so what they did worked for a long time. But we might be approaching the end of the road with it.

Next year I expect to see a couple of things:

1) A lot more services offering to secure you a ticket for £50 or £100, money back if they fail. Completely legit, just relying on bots or cheap labour pools in eg. China.
2) Some solid scams taking advantage of the hosts trick to get people to enter their details on a fake site.

[Joey Peeps]

There is no good system for an oversubscribed event but this is the least worst.

We're in a fairly small group and have been successful four of the last six attempts. No doubt there are large organised groups but I would guess the vast majority of successful applications are in the four to six range.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Joey Peeps

[DeanoL]

Multiple registrations don't need to be a blocker for the ballot system. You could drop the refund option on the deposit for those who are successful so it means you can enter multiple times if you want, but if you enter ten times that'll cost you £75 and if all your numbers come up, that's £750 you're out.

There are ways to make a ballot system fairer than the current system. It's never going to be 100% but it doesn't need to be - and if you can shift it to where getting an advantage requires people risking money, there's an inevitable cap as if you're willing to pay a few thousand you can get tickets anyway.

[DeanoL]

(Not saying we *should* have a ballot system, just disagreeing that it's impossible or unworkable. Whether it's desirable or not is an entirely different question I have mixed feelings on)

[stuartasmith85]

4 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

2) Some solid scams taking advantage of the hosts trick to get people to enter their details on a fake site.

Suspect this is going to be a real thing. I'm guessing that the majority of people who were sent WhatsApps about this followed the instructions without really knowing what they were being told to do, and how/why it might work - meaning they'd be very susceptible to being given a bogus link.

[snoelb]

11 hours ago, assorted said:

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.

Can you post a screenshot of this open letter? And the drama?

[Leyrulion]

5 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Multiple registrations don't need to be a blocker for the ballot system. You could drop the refund option on the deposit for those who are successful so it means you can enter multiple times if you want, but if you enter ten times that'll cost you £75 and if all your numbers come up, that's £750 you're out.

There are ways to make a ballot system fairer than the current system. It's never going to be 100% but it doesn't need to be - and if you can shift it to where getting an advantage requires people risking money, there's an inevitable cap as if you're willing to pay a few thousand you can get tickets anyway.

Would you not just pay for the tickets and sell them on. "Male, 30s brown hair" etc 

[NotAnInsider]

2 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Next year I expect to see a couple of things:

1) A lot more services offering to secure you a ticket for £50 or £100, money back if they fail. Completely legit, just relying on bots or cheap labour pools in eg. China.
2) Some solid scams taking advantage of the hosts trick to get people to enter their details on a fake site.

I mean it's pretty much guaranteed now?

There are plenty of people out there saying they got tickets by paying someone £50 and that's a whole new thing. The genie is out of the bottle and it's now a known thing that you can pay a few quid and get a ticket. Even when this particular exploit is patched the nature of the current system does make it brute forcible and now you'll have people willing to do just that, either being successful or getting scammed.

It's bad for everyone - if this happens your big syndicate isn't getting in either.

[mjfromthelane]

12 minutes ago, Nick_ said:

I think I don't understand that.

On the ticket holding page yesterday were you allowing the 20 seconds countdown to reach 0 each time and auto refresh?

The overwhelming majority of people manually hit refresh on the page (also known as F5) every few seconds to increase the chance of it reloading onto the ticket purchasing page. If each refresh is a ticket to the raffle, most people think refreshing as many times possible is the best way to win.

[snoelb]

1 hour ago, gfa said:

This is horrendous

gfa 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on will all be entering said ballot

won't work - a ballot is stupid easy to exploit

they will sort this out and the resale will likely go smooth

Is it that easy? Beyond entering the ballot multiple times, that is?

[Beerqueen]

1 hour ago, incident said:

Yes, that's approximately what happened with us. We got 100%, but only after starting very slowly.

I don't *think* anyone in the group used this exploit - certainly nobody has admitted to it, and no one person got through enough times (more than twice) to raise any questions.

Exactly the same for our group.

[Chef]

I don't really understand the techy stuff being talked about here but anecdotally there does seem to be an advantage if you get in once, to be able to get more after. Out of the 8 times I have been to the festival I have got through twice personally and both times I got back in quickly to buy for another group. The other 6 times were people trying for me a second time after they secured tickets for themselves first. 

Out of 36 people I knew of trying yesterday 1 person successfully got tickets and 1 person got kicked out at the payment pager. Other 34, not even close. 

Statistically that doesn't add up against people getting in multiple times. 

 

 

[gfa]

23 minutes ago, snoelb said:

Is it that easy? Beyond entering the ballot multiple times, that is?

Yeah definitely - its very hard to combat people who put their mind to doing it.

[Jack.194]

Some of these comments are astonishing, and would almost certainly not be made had the person making them been successful with tickets.

I don’t see an issue with people using the DNS thing for personal tickets, however I do see a huge problem with people charging for this as a service, which is essentially disguised touting. However, all accounts of which have been purely annecdotal by the way, seems a bit like chinese whispers to me. Everybody seems so frantic about the issue.

And to those calling for a ballot/lottery, it essentially is that already, you’re either lucky enough to get through, or you’re not. There’s very little that can be done to raise your chances of getting tickets other than joining a syndicate, which seems pretty morally neutral to me.

None of us are owed tickets, regardless of how long we’ve been going, how much we love the festival, or even how much effort we put in.

[assorted]

1 hour ago, briddj said:

It was for me. Clicked back, entered a second set of reg, submit, back in queue, never saw another booking page. 

This was me as well. We got 2/3 group and are quite upset for our 3rd group that missed out. It does feel like the system this year rewarded people once they got in once to a degree, which i feel mucks up understanding how many used the HOSTS hack versus people like me and you that simply got in once and then got in again.

53 minutes ago, incident said:

Yep. If they desire to do so, then they could reliably and easily identify every single transaction affected.

They probably will do as well, albeit just for their own information. Don't expect them to start cancelling tickets as that'd shine more of a light on something that is - at least in large part - their own fault.

I’m confused still and am hoping you could help me. This Reddit post infers it was not an unused server like you are saying but instead just contacting one of the 5 servers directly: 

What happened on Sunday, is that See Tickets DNS was only giving out a small number of their webservers/load balancers for Glastonbury ticket sales.

❯ dig glastonbury.seetickets.com @8.8.8.8

;; ANSWER SECTION:
glastonbury.seetickets.com. 94  IN      CNAME   hosting.seetickets.com.
hosting.seetickets.com. 94      IN      A       13.87.94.169

This returned a single IP address 13.87.94.169 , which was probably getting hammered by 99% of the traffic. Everyone's queuing.

If we lookup a non-existent See Tickets website, what we get to see are the other IP addresses which could maybe serve the See Tickets pages

❯ dig notglastonbury.seetickets.com @8.8.8.8

;; ANSWER SECTION:
notglastonbury.seetickets.com. 600 IN   CNAME   seetickets.com.
seetickets.com.         180     IN      A       31.221.2.88
seetickets.com.         180     IN      A       31.221.2.92
seetickets.com.         180     IN      A       31.221.2.90
seetickets.com.         180     IN      A       31.221.2.89
seetickets.com.         180     IN      A       31.221.2.91

Now, we have 5 different webservers which might serve us a Glastonbury booking page, if our computer could use those IP addresses instead of the one officially provided.

If we think about this in a traditional way, it's like everyone calling the official phone number to try and book tickets and get the engaged tone, vs having 5+ phone numbers to try which are much likely to be less busy, as nobody/not many people know about them.

We can then tell our PC to use the new IP address by editing our hosts file

31.221.2.88 glastonbury.seetickets.com

And then close/open our browser and see if we have any better results. Which, for many people, they did. The booking page loaded within a couple of minutes and they were able to quickly complete the journey without being kicked from the payment page.

From - https://www.reddit.com/r/glastonbury_festival/s/H85lJlqc0C

also, earlier in this thread someone quotes Mac instructions that have a very different IP address - 

- Add this line at the bottom of the file: 167.98.233.90  glastonbury.seetickets.com

Which is the correct IP address that was used?

The best way to get a company to fix a hack or exploit is to make it as public as possible.

9 minutes ago, snoelb said:

Can you post a screenshot of this open letter? And the drama?

I can’t. I nuked my Discord account last night as I just used it for that place and I’m done with them. But it was a PDF written by a mod there and it was on an open channel about ticket tricks (so like this thread) so I’m not sharing secrets anyone can go and see it. It just kind of summarized everything wrong with that community - it’s a few mods and their friends with some snippets of insider information trading in jokes while creating this kind cringe hierarchical community where they think very highly of themselves. As much as people have had complaints at times of moderation here (just, IMO), there’s never been something as bad here as using a ticket hack just for the mods while banning mention of it in the forum itself. They do the same thing with secret sets during glasto, gatekeeping it to private channels. Again, it kind of summarizes everything wrong with the place.

[Nick_]

31 minutes ago, mjfromthelane said:

On the ticket holding page yesterday were you allowing the 20 seconds countdown to reach 0 each time and auto refresh?

The overwhelming majority of people manually hit refresh on the page (also known as F5) every few seconds to increase the chance of it reloading onto the ticket purchasing page. If each refresh is a ticket to the raffle, most people think refreshing as many times possible is the best way to win.

Thanks for the clear and patient explanation @mjfromthelane - much appreciated.

Wow.  I had no idea that's what one was meant to - I assumed you got in, and either there was a queue or some kind of random selection process.  This does feel either pointless or immoral, though.  Is there any evidence it does actually increase your chances?  If it does, presumably it is at the expense of people who don't know you are meant to be doing this, or (like nuclear weapons) everyone feels they need to do it because everyone else does.

Either way, if there are people who feel you only "deserve" tickets if you do this, I can't agree with that.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Nick_
.

[Simsy]

52 minutes ago, DeanoL said:

Wonder if there's a difference between clicking back and chopping off the end of the URL? The latter seems to have worked where the former didn't. But I don't know if that's technically possible.

Does anyone know anybody who got tickets by chopping off the end of the URL? I know there's that video on twitter, but it doesn't actually show them being able to proceed once they're back on the reg page.

[idb]

2 hours ago, Crazyfool01 said:

Didn’t even see a booking page in either sale this year which is pretty unheard of for me 

Me neither. Had a good run of getting tickets for a few years now. It had to end sometime ☹️

[CaledonianGonzo]

After being the man of the moment in both the 2022 resale and the 2023 main sale I also got nowhere on Thursday / Sunday.

[Nick_]

4 minutes ago, Jack.194 said:

Some of these comments are astonishing, and would almost certainly not be made had the person making them been successful with tickets.

I don’t see an issue with people using the DNS thing for personal tickets, however I do see a huge problem with people charging for this as a service, which is essentially disguised touting. However, all accounts of which have been purely annecdotal by the way, seems a bit like chinese whispers to me. Everybody seems so frantic about the issue.

And to those calling for a ballot/lottery, it essentially is that already, you’re either lucky enough to get through, or you’re not. There’s very little that can be done to raise your chances of getting tickets other than joining a syndicate, which seems pretty morally neutral to me.

None of us are owed tickets, regardless of how long we’ve been going, how much we love the festival, or even how much effort we put in.

It's OK to nick someone's telly if it's for your own use, but not if you fence it down the market? 😉