After much discussion, planning, configuring, and testing, we think we’re ready to go live again with ticket sales. We’re going to combine round 2 and 3 in to one final round set to go live at noon EST Saturday December 12th. Things are going to be a bit different for this round than in rounds past.

The big change is we will NOT be posting the link to ticket reservations here on the main ShmooCon website. One of the big issues we’ve been working to overcome is how to squeeze enough performance out of our website while still have the website be a functional CMS for us. It turns out that “performance” and “CMS” are words that are diametrically opposed. So, the main website will remain a CMS and we’ll be posting the link to the reg server on a totally different system.

We’ll post the url of the new system on the Human Registration page tomorrow.  This gives you plenty of time to see what it is, without having to come here first on Saturday.  There is no reason for folks to slam our Human Registration page on Saturday, in fact if you do…you’ll bring it down.  We’ve back peddled the main site to smaller infrastructure and are asking you all to play nice with it.

A few specs on the new system…  We’re running a super lightweight web server on a pretty beefy instance in EC2. We’ve tested it, and it can handle at least 2x the peak load we saw last go round. But since the new website is much lighter weight with fewer elements, we expect much less traffic in general. In a nutshell, we don’t expect any problems with that intermediate server.

To be clear, this is the new process:

  • Go to Human Reg prior to sales to get url of new system.
  • Go to new url at noon.
  • Wait for link to ticket sales to appear.
  • Click through to reservation page.

The rest of the process is basically unchanged. We made some bug fixes to the registration code, tightened up the waitlist, and generally tested and retested to make sure things are going to go OK. The ticketing code has actually worked pretty well for the last few years without much hassle so we’re optimistic it will handle this year as well.

Again, the same caveat as before; there are some browser compatibility issues with the payment system, so please use Safari or Chrome. We had to prioritize bug squishing, and that’s one that didn’t make the cut. Please note that is ONLY for payment. For the main registration process, you can use any browser you want.

That’s the long and short of it. We’re looking forward to getting sales done and moving on to the rest of the con.