One change I'd make to the festival is....

[gigpusher]

Just now, gooner1990 said:

Or you could just put all the money onto one card and then refund everyone if you don't get a ticket?

Yes but that involves a lot of trust especially if like our resale group you are organising with a lot of people you don't know. Also from a technical point of view on ticket sale day payment gateway issues are the biggest issue. You can scale the other stuff quite easily but payment gateways are unreliable and it's a bit harsh if you get on straightaway but have a payment gateway issue and then someone else gets on and effectively steals your spot. 

Eliminating the need to pay immediately would be the biggest leveller that they could do. You could still pay as a group or individually. 

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

12 minutes ago, gigpusher said:

The key thing I would change would be to guarantee myself a ticket which wouldn't be fair but it would mean I'd always have a ticket 😄 

On a serious note regarding tickets I would ditch the paying at the same time. You should just reserve your ticket and then have 48 hours to pay your deposit or in the resale your full ticket price. This would naturally make it fairer for everyone as not every person going to Glastonbury has a spare £1200 on their card. If you could reserve for people and then have them pay their own deposits etc it would be much easier for people to group up. 

It’s only £300 in the main sale. When it comes to the resale, especially when it’s in April, they don’t want tyre kickers and then the hassle of another resale for those who don’t pay, they need/want the cash and the certainty of selling them all there and then.

[gooner1990]

I think like a couple of others say the only issue I have is the payment page crashing when you get through...surely now after 20+ years of websites being around we can design a system that's robust enough to handle the payment process cleanly. 

Edited March 22, 2022 by gooner1990

[Smeble]

14 hours ago, Leyrulion said:

The festival is noticeably particularly white in terms of attendees but I'm still not entirely sure what the problem with that is which needs to be "solved" by ring fencing a set number of tickets.

For me the issue is around music and music festivals potentially becoming exclusive in terms of attendees but I'm really not convinced giving discounted tickets to one specific festival is how you solve that. 

Glastonbury and other festivals putting effort into campaigning to allow other communities to be able to organise their own events through removing inbuilt discrimination that still exists to stop those events happening would be the logical thing for me. A good example is the successful scrapping of the 696 form but there will be other things like that which still exist which need to be removed.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/form-696-scrapped-racist-police-paperwork-claims-london-mcs-djs-grime-garage-a8048821.html?

It’s a festival in rural Somerset in a country that’s 87% white, of course most of the attendees are white. Skin colour of attendees is an irrelevance.

Edited March 22, 2022 by Smeble

[gazzared]

57 minutes ago, Rose-Colored Boy said:

But the current system doesn’t benefit those who are more organised. Currently you can boot up the computer at 9:15am and have basically the same chance of success as someone who has been hitting F5 constantly since 08:59:59. A virtual queue where you just wait for your turn to (hopefully) come up would solve that, and not be a massive tweak either. 

A queueing system would just benefit those who have the most devices and using vpns.

[Rose-Colored Boy]

2 minutes ago, gazzared said:

A queueing system would just benefit those who have the most devices and using vpns.

I don’t see how it would benefit those people more than the current system does tbh. But clearly this is not a popular idea so I’ll say no more about it and move on with my day 🥲

[gazzared]

3 minutes ago, Rose-Colored Boy said:

I don’t see how it would benefit those people more than the current system does tbh. But clearly this is not a popular idea so I’ll say no more about it and move on with my day 🥲

it's the system Liverpool use for their general sales, the more devices you have on the queing page the more chance I have of getting tickets. I use 6 devices, 1 home computer on ethernet, 2 laptops on vpns, 1 tablet on wi-fi and 2 mobile phones, come sale day i just log on at the time and sit back and see which device gets the best que position and then use that device. So if glastonbury used this system I think it would get abused.

something deffo needs changing on the payment screen as me and my friends all got kick out whilst trying to pay.

[gigpusher]

22 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

It’s only £300 in the main sale. When it comes to the resale, especially when it’s in April, they don’t want tyre kickers and then the hassle of another resale for those who don’t pay, they need/want the cash and the certainty of selling them all there and then.

If you gave only 48 hours to pay it wouldn't be a big deal and would be a way of removing very legitimate complaints that someone didn't get a ticket owing to See Tickets infrastructure must cause every year. I'd imagine the percentage of people who wouldn't pay would be negligible. I certainly think it's worth a try. 

[dogeggs]

I’d try more Thursday evening secret slots. Maybe on John Peel or Acoustic as well as Williams Green

[gigpusher]

36 minutes ago, gooner1990 said:

I think like a couple of others say the only issue I have is the payment page crashing when you get through...surely now after 20+ years of websites being around we can design a system that's robust enough to handle the payment process cleanly. 

My solution solves that. Unfortunately payment gateways are notoriously tricky and not owned by See tickets. My favourite online record store uses the solution I described for Record Store Day and it worked flawlessly. As opposed to various other record stores that got hammered on Twitter for payment gateway issues that they sadly can't control. 

[clarkete]

36 minutes ago, gooner1990 said:

I think like a couple of others say the only issue I have is the payment page crashing when you get through...surely now after 20+ years of websites being around we can design a system that's robust enough to handle the payment process cleanly. 

I believe there were 2.4m people registered for tickets.  That's a hell of a lot of transactions to process without issue - particularly considering those issues could be at any point from the client through the host to the credit/debit card company.

[gooner1990]

1 minute ago, clarkete said:

I believe there were 2.4m people registered for tickets.  That's a hell of a lot of transactions to process without issue - particularly considering those issues could be at any point from the client through the host to the credit/debit card company.

Is there any indication as to how many people actually try to get tickets each time?

[Rose-Colored Boy]

18 minutes ago, dogeggs said:

I’d try more Thursday evening secret slots. Maybe on John Peel or Acoustic as well as Williams Green

They could deffo just announce who’s playing in WG on the Thursday by this point. Most people who care about the band/singer in question will find out via Twitter or word of mouth that they’re on, so officially announcing it would just stop people who don’t know from pointlessly hogging up the tent and then trying to barge their way out as soon as the music starts. 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Rose-Colored Boy

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

10 minutes ago, clarkete said:

I believe there were 2.4m people registered for tickets.  That's a hell of a lot of transactions to process without issue - particularly considering those issues could be at any point from the client through the host to the credit/debit card company.

There are probably only at max, about 40k payment transactions that have to go through though, and these are all spread over about 30 minutes. It doesn’t really matter how many are trying as there are only so many tickets that can be bought. I’m not any sort of techie, but the 2.4m (or whatever it actually is) only really has a bearing on payments failing if the traffic trying to hit a booking page directly affects the payment window. I’ve no idea if it does or doesn’t. 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Deaf Nobby Burton

[clarkete]

10 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

There are probably only at max, about 40k payment transactions that have to go through though, and these are all spread over about 30 minutes. It doesn’t really matter how many are trying as there are only so many tickets that can be bought. I’m not any sort of techie, but the 2.4m (or whatever it actually is) only really has a bearing on payments failing if the traffic trying to hit a booking page directly affects the payment window. I’ve no idea if it does or doesn’t. 

Why do you think as few as 40k, because the others are being held back by the finger in the dyke?  

[incident]

Just now, clarkete said:

Why do you think as few as 40k, because the others are being held back by the finger in the dyke?  

~110k tickets in the main general sale. 40k would be an average slightly lower than 3 per order.

[gooner1990]

3 minutes ago, clarkete said:

Why do you think as few as 40k, because the others are being held back by the finger in the dyke?  

It could actually be as low as 18.3k !

Edited March 22, 2022 by gooner1990

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

1 minute ago, clarkete said:

Why do you think as few as 40k, because the others are being held back by the finger in the dyke?  

No, because most people will buy more than one ticket, if you work on the basis the average amount of tickets people buy is 3 (I think it would be more than that, but thats probably close enough) then 135,000/3 = 45K payment transactions, spread over about 30 minutes, so roughly about 25 per second.

[Old_Johno]

Unfortunately there’s zero incentive to change the payment/ ticketing system. Makes headlines and trends on social media every year. 

[clarkete]

3 minutes ago, incident said:

~110k tickets in the main general sale. 40k would be an average slightly lower than 3 per order.

Isn't the opposite true these days?

Wherever you look in the last few years, metro the link below, the feed thing etc they all say something like "There are no official rules against everyone in your Glastonbury group trying to get tickets. So it makes absolute sense for you all to try."

Plus many of those same tips will recommend multiple devices, so it's possible it could be many hundreds of thousands - how many of us have multiple devices each quite often multiplied by each person who wants a ticket?

https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/see-tickets-glastonbury-resale-2022-6840779 

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

1 minute ago, clarkete said:

Isn't the opposite true these days?

Wherever you look in the last few years, metro the link below, the feed thing etc they all say something like "There are no official rules against everyone in your Glastonbury group trying to get tickets. So it makes absolute sense for you all to try."

Plus many of those same tips will recommend multiple devices, so it's possible it could be many hundreds of thousands - how many of us have multiple devices each quite often multiplied by each person who wants a ticket?

https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/whats-on/whats-on-news/see-tickets-glastonbury-resale-2022-6840779 

But we’re talking about payments failing, of which there are only a certain amount that will need to be processed.

[clarkete]

1 minute ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

But we’re talking about payments failing, of which there are only a certain amount that will need to be processed.

But your sums are based on the number of successful payments aren't they?

Surely you need to consider the total number attempting to assess the size of the problem?

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

2 minutes ago, clarkete said:

But your sums are based on the number of successful payments aren't they?

Surely you need to consider the total number attempting to assess the size of the problem?

But if you haven’t got a booking screen and successfully filled out your details, then you don’t have anything to pay for? 2.4m people aren’t all trying to enter their payment details at the same time are they? Because at most there will only ever be about 40K payments to process? 

Edited March 22, 2022 by Deaf Nobby Burton

[Leyrulion]

1 hour ago, Smeble said:

It’s a festival in rural Somerset in a country that’s 87% white, of course most of the attendees are white. Skin colour of attendees is an irrelevance.

I'm not sure you read the rest of that post?

[Hotchilidog]

12 minutes ago, Old_Johno said:

Unfortunately there’s zero incentive to change the payment/ ticketing system. Makes headlines and trends on social media every year. 

Also given how demand outstrips supply it is about as fair as it can be. I both hate and love the ticketing system that Glastonbury uses.