It sounds like I had a very similar experience to you. Still waiting for an email, and still hoping (against all logic) that I'll get the games I initially registered for, that I never received a confirmation for... in which case I'll have some duplicates and double-bookings because I didn't want to eventually find out I had nothing. Still looking forward to GC, but this has been an emotional rollercoaster... really looking forward to at least knowing what I did and didn't end up getting, so I can adjust my disappointment level accordingly.
So....another thought. While it's all well and good--and would be a really cool project--for some of us grognard geeks to write an open source ticket reservation system... If you're really trying to grow the convention--which is something I have mixed feelings about; if I want GenCon I know where to find it--then it might be worth finding out what an event management company would charge to do your ticketing. I mean, 1500 people isn't large on the scale of conferences, and unless this is all volunteer or at least mostly-labor-of-love labor, I can't imagine you are getting registration development work at a whole lot less than $100/hr (and if you ARE getting super-cheap or free labor, you're probably wearing out the goodwill of your volunteers, who almost certainly didn't realize they were signing up for _this_ ). It doesn't take much snafuing to get your costs well above what I think an event management firm would charge you to deal with the ticketing. It feels to me like it would be at least worth investigating.
Once we're sorted out, registration will re-open and remain open until the deadline to get paper tickets to the printer. We're working on extending what that date is.
Staff is 100% volunteer with day jobs and families. Gary Con is not a highly profitable enterprise. For now, we're just trying to grow into our new venue. We do not want to be GenCon.
Site is down by design while we sort out registration. To reiterate, 90% of the transactions were successful, it just doesn't look like that to any of the users. We're fixing that, it requires registration to be down, and it takes a while. We brought in some more help and are making good progress. Registration will reopen when it doesn't look so messy inside and we've been able to communicate to everyone what their registration results were.
Just rechecked...they wound up in my spam folder. For reasons unknown, I cannot get to said spam folder from my phone.
Good to know. I'll make the note on your ticket. Your My Account page will still need fixing, but your confirmation emails should accurately reflect your successful registrations. Whatever coin balance you have in your My Account page should also be accurate. As soon as we lift site maintenance and you can see it, that is.
Brendar, are we thinking at this point that that will still happen tonight, or more realistically tomorrow?
I'm not sure how upset people might be....but I'm wondering how it would play to say..."Surprise! That was a registration test! Good job, everyone...we're queued up to go next Saturday at 12 EST!" I suspect the only people that would be upset would by those who got exactly what they wanted. I wonder what percentage that is....
When I click on the Checkout button, I get the following error message: Error 404 - Page not found! The page you are trying to reach does not exist, or has been moved. Please use the menus or the search box to find what you are looking for.
The site is back up, though I have tickets via email that are not reflected under My Account. I am guessing all is not as well as they might think it is yet...
Not to start a flame war about ThisCon vs ThatCon, or promote one over the other...My point is that Gamehole has had similar attendance numbers and a very smooth registration, seemingly without growing pains. Not an indictment of Garycon (my favorite con!) in any way. It really doesnt matter, this is a redundant reply to your comment in that I am only re-affirming what I said in my original post. To further avoid any issues with hard feelings/misunderstandings, I wont reply to any further commentary about my points on this years registration. Game on!