2023 - hopefully not as busy as 2022?

[fred quimby]

16 hours ago, stuie said:

It was planned for 2020 so maybe this year it will be. 

 

That’s the problem they are trying to solve.  There should be no such thing as a spare pass out! It enables wristbands to be slipped off and taken out of the festival to get extra people in.

 

[fred quimby]

How odd. I can quote but then no write anything underneath. Keyboard just disappears, and highlights the quote.

Anyway

I was given 2 passouts on one day, so does happen in error. Kept it to add to Glasto collection. Years ago there maybe been scanners and printers on site to reproduce them

 

 

 

[p.pete]

1 hour ago, kalifire said:

I've also heard that the pandemic saw a certain degree of staff churn mid-festival and the incoming ones weren't terribly competent.

Has this been mainly said around security staff being available to help the flow of people / manage areas?  Your post above, in the context of food vendors, definitely makes sense in terms of how long it takes to get served if the people behind the counter are still trying to figure out what they're doing.  Slow service would lead to longer queues.

Weather being less perfect would help the site feel less busy too.  Baking hot and nobody wants to move, muddy and everyone struggles to move - sweet spot of overcast and dry and everyone runs round the place non-stop.

[Crazyfool01]

1 hour ago, fred quimby said:

How odd. I can quote but then no write anything underneath. Keyboard just disappears, and highlights the quote.

Anyway

I was given 2 passouts on one day, so does happen in error. Kept it to add to Glasto collection. Years ago there maybe been scanners and printers on site to reproduce them

 

 

 

Quote test … seems ok ? Anyone else experienced issues ? 

[BlueDaze]

5 minutes ago, Crazyfool01 said:

Quote test … seems ok ? Anyone else experienced issues ? 

All good here!

[IceCreamVan]

18 hours ago, stuie said:

It was planned for 2020 so maybe this year it will be. 

 

That’s the problem they are trying to solve.  There should be no such thing as a spare pass out! It enables wristbands to be slipped off and taken out of the festival to get extra people in.

I know for a fact this happened. Met someone who volunteered for Oxfam last year who boasted about doing this...

[stuie]

1 hour ago, IceCreamVan said:

I know for a fact this happened. Met someone who volunteered for Oxfam last year who boasted about doing this...

Yes, entirely possible on a small scale.  I had half a dozen or so that were found on the floor last festival so there is always potential for misuse. 

We'll just have to wait and see what happens this year.  The gates have had the EPO scan for the last two festivals, so the system has been tested and I'm not aware of any problems.  To scale up, they'd need more hand held scanners but I don't see why that would be an issue. 

 

[Leyrulion]

5 hours ago, kalifire said:

That's interesting - was there a known shortage of food vendors last year? I tend to avoid the worst of the queues by buying my food at 'off peak' times, and I don't drink coffee so I avoid some of the worst queues at the few venues which actually sell a decent brew.

I've also heard that the pandemic saw a certain degree of staff churn mid-festival and the incoming ones weren't terribly competent.

Sounds to me like a perfect storm of being out of practice (both the fest and the punters), a moderate increase in ticket numbers, a desire to experience absolutely everything, and poor stage placements for several acts.

Hopefully next year we can all just caaaaaaalm dooooooown. We've all had a Covid.

Some smaller outfits sat out a year/moved on. It's a big expense to do without having a festival season under your belt to pay for it.  It was also harder to get staff so where someone might have had 2 people doing orders and 3 cooking it could have just been 1 orders and 3 cooking. 

Mostly anecdotal, I don't think I've seen anyone actually crunch the numbers. 

Yeah a lot of little things amounting up is what I think. 

[Supernintendo Chalmers]

3 hours ago, fred quimby said:

How odd. I can quote but then no write anything underneath. Keyboard just disappears, and highlights the quote.

Anyway

I was given 2 passouts on one day, so does happen in error. Kept it to add to Glasto collection. Years ago there maybe been scanners and printers on site to reproduce them

 

 

 

I have more than one pass out from the last five or six festivals in my memorabilia collection. It's a very flawed system, open to human error and manipulation. As I've said before, it's 2023, a festival of this size and structure should have a more automated means of controlling ins and outs. 

With the well-documented issues over recent months inside and outside of the festival, I'm amazed that such an antiquated system is in place for something so important.

[fred quimby]

1 hour ago, Supernintendo Chalmers said:

I have more than one pass out from the last five or six festivals in my memorabilia collection. It's a very flawed system, open to human error and manipulation. As I've said before, it's 2023, a festival of this size and structure should have a more automated means of controlling ins and outs. 

With the well-documented issues over recent months inside and outside of the festival, I'm amazed that such an antiquated system is in place for something so important.

Hippies the lot of them. But yes surely fairly straight forward. 

[EFC1996]

Last year I felt like S.E corner was gridlocked even walking through one side to the other and I can’t recall it ever being like that. Did they close it like they usually do? 

[marathonsteve]

6 hours ago, dondo said:

Last year recycling crew didn't get the EPO ones which meant that if you wanted to go outside the fence you needed your ticket and a pass out.

In previous years we've had QR codes but was never aware of them being scanned.  That said as I camp inside the fence I don't normally go back out once I'm in.

The post recycling crew had them including myself.

[gfa]

3 hours ago, EFC1996 said:

Last year I felt like S.E corner was gridlocked even walking through one side to the other and I can’t recall it ever being like that. Did they close it like they usually do? 

never saw anyone report it was shut but yeah was absolutely heaving on saturday night

[Wherethewildthingsare]

I was amazed by how busy the Wednesday night was. Couldn’t get near the stone circle field and made it as far as the Park which was rammed. Is this because more people arrive on Wednesday now than previously? 

[Crazyfool01]

5 minutes ago, Wherethewildthingsare said:

I was amazed by how busy the Wednesday night was. Couldn’t get near the stone circle field and made it as far as the Park which was rammed. Is this because more people arrive on Wednesday now than previously? 

some of it was affected by train strikes so more people were definitely onsite early 

[marathonsteve]

32 minutes ago, Wherethewildthingsare said:

I was amazed by how busy the Wednesday night was. Couldn’t get near the stone circle field and made it as far as the Park which was rammed. Is this because more people arrive on Wednesday now than previously? 

Was Wednesday firework night maybe

 

[Skip997]

48 minutes ago, marathonsteve said:

Was Wednesday firework night maybe

 

Yes

The Stone circle field is always totally rammed on the Wednesday evening. Some of our crew help out with stewarding every year. Last year wasn't that different from previous years.

[Wherethewildthingsare]

2 minutes ago, Skip997 said:

Yes

The Stone circle field is always totally rammed on the Wednesday evening. Some of our crew help out with stewarding every year. Last year wasn't that different from previous years.

Personally I think it was a lot busier, we normally make it to the field even at 10pm before the fireworks start and find a spot to sit and chill. Last year we arrived much earlier and couldn’t get near the field. 

[Crazyfool01]

11 minutes ago, Wherethewildthingsare said:

Personally I think it was a lot busier, we normally make it to the field even at 10pm before the fireworks start and find a spot to sit and chill. Last year we arrived much earlier and couldn’t get near the field. 

They also shut the entrance at the glade cross roads 

[marathonsteve]

I seem to remember there were three separate burnings at the same time spread out so no need to go for the crush at the stone circle 

[clarkete]

8 hours ago, Supernintendo Chalmers said:

I have more than one pass out from the last five or six festivals in my memorabilia collection. It's a very flawed system, open to human error and manipulation. As I've said before, it's 2023, a festival of this size and structure should have a more automated means of controlling ins and outs. 

With the well-documented issues over recent months inside and outside of the festival, I'm amazed that such an antiquated system is in place for something so important.

There are always folks who suggest it, but the question is can you think of an event of the same scale which operates for a short term in a rural area that's tested the concept and proven it? 

Examples tend to be either far smaller or urban - which aren't the same challenge. 

This year I went to stalls where I needed to use cash for whatever reason - clearly you can't risk a gate with a technical issue. 

[Leyrulion]

51 minutes ago, clarkete said:

There are always folks who suggest it, but the question is can you think of an event of the same scale which operates for a short term in a rural area that's tested the concept and proven it? 

Examples tend to be either far smaller or urban - which aren't the same challenge. 

This year I went to stalls where I needed to use cash for whatever reason - clearly you can't risk a gate with a technical issue. 

BoomTown is the closest- 80k, same distance from Winchester as Pyramid is from Shepton Mallet. (3 miles ish). Geography is worse as being in a deep bowl makes it much harder for traditional signal to get to and has fewer permanent phone masts near by, admittedly not as big.  

The thing is the latest technology doesn't actually need good consistent WiFi/4g/3g to work. As long as there's an intermittent signal the "transaction" is made between the customer and hand held device instantly, it then logs everything back with the central server when there's an availability gap. So you're not waiting for the 30 or 40 seconds for it to sync. It does that after the fact. 

So a lot of the reliability issues that were around 3 or 4 years ago aren't really a thing now.  

 

Glastonbury themselves will be looking at it, their own main bars couldn't accept card after Friday. (Someone told us they'd need to turn off an entire stage to reset the WiFi for the bars, not sure how true that is...) But they will have lost out on literally thousands of income there. It's a pretty strong incentive to fix.

 

 

 

 

[philipsteak]

20 hours ago, kalifire said:

That's interesting - was there a known shortage of food vendors last year? I tend to avoid the worst of the queues by buying my food at 'off peak' times, and I don't drink coffee so I avoid some of the worst queues at the few venues which actually sell a decent brew.

I've also heard that the pandemic saw a certain degree of staff churn mid-festival and the incoming ones weren't terribly competent.

Sounds to me like a perfect storm of being out of practice (both the fest and the punters), a moderate increase in ticket numbers, a desire to experience absolutely everything, and poor stage placements for several acts.

Hopefully next year we can all just caaaaaaalm dooooooown. We've all had a Covid.

 

You live in Melbourne and don't drink coffee? Is that even allowed?

[clarkete]

8 hours ago, Leyrulion said:

BoomTown is the closest- 80k, same distance from Winchester as Pyramid is from Shepton Mallet. (3 miles ish). Geography is worse as being in a deep bowl makes it much harder for traditional signal to get to and has fewer permanent phone masts near by, admittedly not as big.  

The thing is the latest technology doesn't actually need good consistent WiFi/4g/3g to work. As long as there's an intermittent signal the "transaction" is made between the customer and hand held device instantly, it then logs everything back with the central server when there's an availability gap. So you're not waiting for the 30 or 40 seconds for it to sync. It does that after the fact. 

So a lot of the reliability issues that were around 3 or 4 years ago aren't really a thing now.  

 

Glastonbury themselves will be looking at it, their own main bars couldn't accept card after Friday. (Someone told us they'd need to turn off an entire stage to reset the WiFi for the bars, not sure how true that is...) But they will have lost out on literally thousands of income there. It's a pretty strong incentive to fix.

 

 

 

 

Good to know thanks. 

I was thinking of the Euros being a good example that the latest technology can be defeated by shambolic security, although I guess there's an advantage of being in a rural area - that there's no chance these days of any storming of the gates like they did occasionally get before the superfence. 

 

[Gnomicide]

Maybe cutting down on staff numbers?