600 tickets were released this round.
All tickets were held in 1 minute 49 seconds.
The waitlist filled 5 seconds after that.
So in other words we sold out in 1 minute 54 seconds.
First reservation was completed 5 seconds after registration officially opened.
All reservations were complete in 12 minutes and 7 seconds.
That initial time seems high, you say? Indeed. Here’s what we’ve been able to figure out.
There have been a few changes this year to the ticket sales process, the biggest being where we are hosting the website. Apparently our hosting provider’s backend took a while to propagate the changes to the registration page to all clients, so individuals saw the registration link at different times. We’re not quite sure what the pattern was as 2 computers in the Potter house saw the link immediately and one didn’t see it for a couple of minutes – all with several browsers going.
Obviously this is not ideal and we apologize for the problem. We’ll likely be switching hosting providers and discriminating based on the ability to do realtime updates so we don’t have this issue again. We’ll provide updates on when the migration happens and include the results of our testing.
Ignoring the above for just a moment, the round otherwise went as expected. We are receiving a few emails asking if the server crashed at the end due to our rather not pretty way of ending sales (once the last reservation goes through we effectively just turn off the server). This isn’t a new process, but it’s caused some confusion this round and we’ll try to clean that up before round 2 with the goal being that everyone sees a sold out message.
Congrats to those who did get tickets. You will be receiving an email with payment instructions later this afternoon. Also consider entering the Barcode Shmarcode contest or attending ShmooCon Labs. For everyone else, round two is on December 1st ideally minus the caching problem.