Botcon 2015 - Chicago June 18-21

[reillyd]

Is anyone else having it timeout? I've tried for the last five minutes to click the attending registration button, bupkus.

[griffin]

Aaaaand, it's been turned off again.

We have temporarily turned off the 2015 BotCon
Registration due to the load issue.
We are working with the service company
to correct this problem.

Sheesh, you'd think they'd test it before they start it... and if they do, then there must be something they aren't testing for this to keep happening.

And here I was thinking that it would be great to have a US morning registration, so that we get in before many of the Americans are up or aware of it starting.

[griffin]

Still could be soon... according to their facebook page... if "soon" has any meaning from them anymore.

Programmer said we were we good to go. Stand by.

[jop]

Rego is back up - but it's still taking forever to load

EDIT: and now it's down AGAIN. This is now kind of hilarious.

[griffin]

I just got the email they sent before they opened it up... 15 minutes after its sent time, and therefore after it was shut down.

We have now turned the registration system back on. We have been assured once again that it will work this time under load. It may take a few minutes for successive servers to spool up so I have made the time out 20 minutes. This will keep items in your cart until you finish or the registration times out.

Ah, and just as I was typing this, the followup email saying it is again closed has arrived.

The application has crashed after no registrations have been processed. We will go back to the programming serving company. We are very upset as well and will be taking action.

We will have registration. I know you are worried and we understand.

This would be so funny if it wasn't affecting us Transfans...

[reillyd]

I'm not getting any emails from them whatsoever, so perhaps their system is so overloaded its still sending them out in batches. But I'm not getting the FSS emails either, though its a verified email address I get emails without fail

Does anyone else think that it won't come on today?

[griffin]

I'm not getting any emails from them whatsoever, so perhaps their system is so overloaded its still sending them out in batches. But I'm not getting the FSS emails either, though its a verified email address I get emails without fail

Does anyone else think that it won't come on today?

Two of the emails yesterday ended up in my spam filter... so maybe they are on a blacklist somewhere on your system?

[griffin]

Does anyone else think that it won't come on today?

Yeah... it sounds like they are back to square one with their software, so I don't think it will be any time soon.

It is now just over 21 days on their countdown clock (which counts down to the Thursday evening 6pm "official" launch of the convention)... so if it gets any closer, I think they might resort to using the old system, as they did for this year's JoeCon. (they wanted that convention done through this new system as well, but couldn't get it to work... so I don't see why they are so surprised and upset at others about it not working)

The old system is one that might be more work for them, especially with the added Welker VIP pack option, but they just have to cut their losses for this year and fallback to that backup option, as they are doing more damage to their reputation (what's left of it) by prolonging this nightmare.

[griffin]

They appear to be giving it another try soon, but don't sound very confident.

I apologize for the errors our vendor continues to cause us. Since they are our vendor, we take complete responsibility. We are going to try one more time with this system. They are doubling the servers we will be starting with from the last round.

To lighten the load slightly, we will only start with Attending packages. We have Non-attending sets and loose sets set aside for you guys and will allow Non-attending registrations after the load is past for the attending items. The Non-attending packages are turned off so there is no way you can pick one. Please wait until we give you the go-ahead.

If for whatever reason this system fails again, we will do registration a completely different way which is a semi manual system.

Registration retry email coming in a bit.

[fatbot]

I hope it's soon, I've been awake for 25 hours now (damn you work!), I really would like to get some sleep