Ticket tips and Tricks for 2025 festival

[dotdash79]

4 minutes ago, Suprefan said:

youre also giving this more to younger punters cause older attendees arent always the most trch savvy. Who says theer wont be a giant glitch that gives a ton of errors on verifying and youve got a giant swath of people on the outside while the ones who avoided it are holding tickets. And youre going to make See have to send verifications to global phone numbers? Like the person in Nepal has to get an sms. Think about it.

 

Verification on registration then a personalised queue link for the sale. Only one link per registration, would help limit the number of connections.

 

I think it's the first time Glastonbury would have any idea how many sessions were trying to connect, taking that down to the registration level would give an idea of the numbers actually trying.

[Crazyfool01]

1 minute ago, Skip997 said:

Thanks for the clarification. 
 

Cameras or facial recognition it’s all OTT surveillance. Any way it’s possible to avoid the one on the self serve tills 

dont disagree on that 

[dotdash79]

14 minutes ago, Suprefan said:

Like the person in Nepal has to get an sms

Nepal has some of the best mobile coverage in the world, just an FYI.

[Suprefan]

12 minutes ago, dotdash79 said:

 

Verification on registration then a personalised queue link for the sale. Only one link per registration, would help limit the number of connections.

 

I think it's the first time Glastonbury would have any idea how many sessions were trying to connect, taking that down to the registration level would give an idea of the numbers actually trying.

 

it still wont matter. You are severely underestimating how ahead the other side is. Unless you think like them, you wont have a leg up. Theyre really only concerned about resale security. Other than that they just want to sell all their tickets one way or another. Why dont they do something about the free labor. Oh right, they know thats how they stay afloat, so they let an extra 50,000 people onsite to make it happen for the rest who paid.

[justanotheronethen]

34 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

f**kface 

Morning

☕️

[Suprefan]

14 minutes ago, dotdash79 said:

Nepal has some of the best mobile coverage in the world, just an FYI.

 Just saying. You still have to have the infrastructure to send out the messages everywhere, regardless of coverage. If that fails then you got issues. Everyone now wants to add more layers to this and you have a larger margin for errors to arise.

[codeblue]

10 hours ago, WobblyPants said:

Not necessarily hackers. 
 

these links are acquired by making thousands of requests to the waiting room, harvesting queue ids and then polling queue it with the IDs. You then pluck out the ‘direct link’ for the IDs which are at the front of the queue. 
 

They’re legitimate unique queue sessions obtained by a bot. 
 

Some bot owners will then sell these, but this person obviously had their fill and decided to dump them all on Reddit for anyone to use (you can only use each one once). I suspect they wanted to make a point about how easy this new system is to game for bot owners/developers who want to crack it. 
 

This system was particularly weak. 

Was this on the main glasto subreddit? I'm on there a lot and didn't come across this at all.

[GlastoEls]

13 hours ago, Pipine said:

Sounds like it wasn’t as smooth technically as Thursdays sale.. people being routed to random pages, access denied in submission a lot.. spurious sold out messages.

Now that the dust has settled, it’s still really weird I got the front of the queue and was directed to a random “Local tickets have now sold out” message, which I first thought meant I was too late, but then saw g19 in the URL and it wasn’t the current type pages.

Thank goodness - after a bit of backwards (to the queue) and forwards (which took me back to g19) a big deep breath and entering “Glastonbury.seetickets.com” (removing the g19 event stuff) took me to the expected deposit screen (so clearly I was in an active session) and it was easy from there. 

Strange.

Edited November 17 by GlastoEls

[Flighty Zoo]

Still bummed out about not getting tickets. Have had a rough year.

 

could anyone explain why my chrome was progressing so much quicker (I was only a few bars away from getting through at 9.30!) than my Safari browser on laptop connected to WIFI, and my Microsoft edge and opera browser on my phone and iPad (connected to 4G respectively)? Partner was on same WIFI on their laptop and had one browser and told them to shut theirs down when it looked like I was progressing rather smoothly (they were only on two bars the whole time). Was I just put in the close, but no cigar section of the queue for that specific Queue-it ID? Would love to know theories, thoughts, speculations ahead of resale. 
 

Only thing I could think of is that *just before* the timer hit zero on Chrome, I hit refresh… and sporadically refreshed out of impatience (F5 trigger was kicking in from last four sales that I’ve gotten tickets). 
 

well done to those who got tickets and are returning, and for all the newcomers too. It’s not down and out for me yet but the anecdotal evidence from online and from friends of friends of friends etc of people who could backspace and get multiple tickets is just making me deflate like Michael Eavis watching Chris Martin yet again. It feels like 2019 and 2022 ticket days were relatively easy compared to the horror of last year and the admittedly more stable but equally frustrating process today. 

Edited November 18 by Flighty Zoo

[bob323]

1 minute ago, Flighty Zoo said:

Still bummed out about not getting tickets. Have had a rough year.

 

could anyone explain why my chrome was progressing so much quicker (I was only a few bars away from getting through at 9.30!) than my Safari browser and my Microsoft edge and opera browser on my phone and iPad (connected to 4G respectively)? Partner was on same WIFI on laptop and had one browser and told them to shut theirs down when it looked like I was progressing rather smoothly. Was I just put in the close, but no cigar section of the queue for that specific Queue-it ID? Would love to know ahead of resale. 
 

Only thing I could think of is that *just before* the timer hit zero on Chrome, I hit refresh… and sporadically refreshed out of impatience (F5 trigger was kicking in from last four sales that I’ve gotten tickets). 
 

well done to those who got tickets and are returning, and for all the newcomers too. It’s not down and out for me yet but the anecdotal evidence from online and from friends of friends of friends etc of people who could backspace and get multiple tickets is just making me deflate like Michael Eavis watching Chris Martin yet again. It feels like 2019 and 2022 ticket days were relatively easy compared to the horror of last year and the admittedly more stable but equally frustrating process today. 

I luckly got in twice on two separate PCs, the back button trick to get multiple ticket for me did not work, and i tried it quickly. no idea why that rumour exists

 

every session or queue id had a random chance of getting in sooner or later - the browser was not a factor. pressing F5 when i pressed it didn't do much. although i got a bad IP error message when i got frustrated and press it too much - which was game over for that session

 

the shutting down, no idea, that sounds like a operating system thing, nothing to do with seetickets

 

 

[Fieldrunner]

2 hours ago, codeblue said:

Was this on the main glasto subreddit? I'm on there a lot and didn't come across this at all.

Yes, it was:  I know this because I successfully used one of the links about a minute after the thread was created.  Within minutes it was flooded with users and no one else I know who saw it successfully used it.  I suspect the link was also very quickly removed by the mods, but the Google Sheets doc still existed earlier when I looked.

[Alvoram]

38 minutes ago, bob323 said:

the back button trick to get multiple ticket for me did not work, and i tried it quickly. no idea why that rumour exists

 

 

Because there's many many more people who claim it worked for them. 54 people on one spreadsheet got tickets from 2 session tokens. There were countless other examples out there after this morning. 

It was suggested long ago that it was going to work, when the CDN was analyzed before the sale, due to the way it works. Instead of completely killing the session upon a succesful sale, it relied solely on a timer (which seemingly didn't work perfectly either!)  

Don't know why it didn't work for you, did you refresh as well, after hitting back? Did you go all the way back to the queue? Regardless, there are an overwhelming amount of people who claim that this is exactly how they secured so many groups on their spreadsheets, people I'd trust too.

It should be an easy fix, shouldn't have been left that way in the first place, and hopefully it will be sorted. But I tend to believe the huge number who claim they used it, purely due to the sheer number of them. 

[Flighty Zoo]

1 hour ago, bob323 said:

I luckly got in twice on two separate PCs, the back button trick to get multiple ticket for me did not work, and i tried it quickly. no idea why that rumour exists

 

every session or queue id had a random chance of getting in sooner or later - the browser was not a factor. pressing F5 when i pressed it didn't do much. although i got a bad IP error message when i got frustrated and press it too much - which was game over for that session

 

the shutting down, no idea, that sounds like a operating system thing, nothing to do with seetickets

 

 

Believe wording of my original post wasn’t clear. Website didn’t shut down my partner, we both mutually agreed that they’d shut their session and computer down so that it was just the one laptop (mine) on the WI-FI while phone and iPad stayed connected to 4G as I was progressing pretty smoothly. This was on Chrome. Other browsers/sessions barely got to four bars. 
 

The thing that’s making me scratch my head a bit is whether it’s a sheer coincidence that refreshing the chrome session just before the timer hit zero meant that I got a better place in the queue, as I’d left the others alone (no refreshes). My phone and iPad on 4G didn’t get beyond 4 whereas my Chrome session hit 30 bars (I recounted my screenshot and I initially thought it was 27 but it’s actually 30). 
 

Also it’s definitely not a rumour about the backspacing. I was being facetious when I said it was a friend of a friend etc but it’s someone I know and trust, and their friend managed to get three groups tickets by backspacing. That’s one individual who managed to get 18 tickets from one session. Lots of evidence here of the same and on Reddit and so on. 
 

It’s a ridiculous loophole and kind of beggars belief that See have somehow managed to implement a much better system and yet it’s still hobbled because of an oversight which meant that other people weren’t in with a chance even if they were literally right at point of getting through. They need to enforce some kind of system that takes successful buyers to another landing page where it isn’t possible to backspace at all or it invalidates the cookies from being able to access the queue again. Of course, this is more technically tricky but is there not a way of them seeing SESSION=CONFIRMED TICKET PURCHASES - MOVE THEM TO NEW PAGE. 
 

I’ve done everything right in terms of being organised with my group and there’s three groups we agreed to help out if one of us were lucky and others still waiting in queue, but it does feel like a kick in the teeth that one individual potentially managed to buy up all the Greggs sausage rolls (figuratively speaking) in the one go whilst everyone else in the queue behind them are just like “You greedy pig.”

 

not saying at all that we’re not all hypocrites and would probably do something similar but at the very least remove from the equation what we all know to be true of ourselves - we can be greedy in very specific circumstances. 

Edited November 18 by Flighty Zoo

[Titters]

16 minutes ago, Flighty Zoo said:

The thing that’s making me scratch my head a bit is whether it’s a sheer coincidence that refreshing the chrome session just before the timer hit zero meant that I got a better place in the queue, as I’d left the others alone (no refreshes). My phone and iPad on 4G didn’t get beyond 4 whereas my Chrome session hit 30 bars (I recounted my screenshot and I initially thought it was 27 but it’s actually 30). 

 

Based on a sample size of 1, I think it's coincidence. I did the same thing and got nowhere. 

 

[Alvoram]

42 minutes ago, Flighty Zoo said:

Believe wording of my original post wasn’t clear. Website didn’t shut down my partner, we both mutually agreed that they’d shut their session and computer down so that it was just the one laptop (mine) on the WI-FI while phone and iPad stayed connected to 4G as I was progressing pretty smoothly. This was on Chrome. Other browsers/sessions barely got to four bars. 
 

The thing that’s making me scratch my head a bit is whether it’s a sheer coincidence that refreshing the chrome session just before the timer hit zero meant that I got a better place in the queue, as I’d left the others alone (no refreshes). My phone and iPad on 4G didn’t get beyond 4 whereas my Chrome session hit 30 bars (I recounted my screenshot and I initially thought it was 27 but it’s actually 30). 
 

Also it’s definitely not a rumour about the backspacing. I was being facetious when I said it was a friend of a friend etc but it’s someone I know and trust, and their friend managed to get three groups tickets by backspacing. That’s one individual who managed to get 18 tickets from one session. Lots of evidence here of the same and on Reddit and so on. 
 

It’s a ridiculous loophole and kind of beggars belief that See have somehow managed to implement a much better system and yet it’s still hobbled because of an oversight which meant that other people weren’t in with a chance even if they were literally right at point of getting through. They need to enforce some kind of system that takes successful buyers to another landing page where it isn’t possible to backspace at all or it invalidates the cookies from being able to access the queue again. Of course, this is more technically tricky but is there not a way of them seeing SESSION=CONFIRMED TICKET PURCHASES - MOVE THEM TO NEW PAGE. 
 

I’ve done everything right in terms of being organised with my group and there’s three groups we agreed to help out if one of us were lucky and others still waiting in queue, but it does feel like a kick in the teeth that one individual potentially managed to buy up all the Greggs sausage rolls (figuratively speaking) in the one go whilst everyone else in the queue behind them are just like “You greedy pig.”

 

not saying at all that we’re not all hypocrites and would probably do something similar but at the very least remove from the equation what we all know to be true of ourselves - we can be greedy in very specific circumstances. 

I'm no expert on these things, I've not been involved in web development for a long long time. (I'm going back to days of every site being built on HTML, PHP, MySQL and hosted on an Apache server. Alarmingly close to 20 years ago! 🤣) But even at the most basic level, It should be child's play to have the purchase confirmation screen either edit a cookie or write a cookie that can be checked before allowing another purchase. This wouldn't be full proof, can easily be overcome, but it would prevent a lot of the non-techie, casual, backspacers. 

Really though, and I admit, I'm not fully up to date on all of this, but I would think the queue-it session token needs deleting / invalidating entirely upon a successful purchase, both locally and, more importantly, on the CDN servers. It seems to me, like they've only implemented a time based expiry, and that's what causes the issue. 

Edited November 18 by Alvoram

[codeblue]

1 hour ago, Fieldrunner said:

Yes, it was:  I know this because I successfully used one of the links about a minute after the thread was created.  Within minutes it was flooded with users and no one else I know who saw it successfully used it.  I suspect the link was also very quickly removed by the mods, but the Google Sheets doc still existed earlier when I looked.

Lucky you! For some reason I was refusing to watch the forum action during purchase... Coordinating between people buying for us was all I did. Annoyingly I was like three bars from being allowed in before the sold out message happened. So disappointing.

[MilkyJoe]

2 hours ago, Flighty Zoo said:

The thing that’s making me scratch my head a bit is whether it’s a sheer coincidence that refreshing the chrome session just before the timer hit zero meant that I got a better place in the queue, as I’d left the others alone (no refreshes). My phone and iPad on 4G didn’t get beyond 4 whereas my Chrome session hit 30 bars (I recounted my screenshot and I initially thought it was 27 but it’s actually 30). 
 

 

 

It's coincidence. I out of interest I staggered the log on of my devices from the start of the countdown until 13 seconds before the end of it and there was zero pattern of which ones got furthest. The one that progressed the most for me was a logon somewhere in the middle. 

[The other Bellboy]

14 hours ago, phillyfaddle said:

Same for our Group 2. Emails now received (6 hours after payment went thru), but not appearing yet in See’s Order Tracker. Just taking a while for servers to update. 

Its strange how their system works, my orders were available to see straight away, but confirmation emails took over 12 hours to arrive.

[The other Bellboy]

6 hours ago, bob323 said:

I luckly got in twice on two separate PCs, the back button trick to get multiple ticket for me did not work, and i tried it quickly. no idea why that rumour exists

 

every session or queue id had a random chance of getting in sooner or later - the browser was not a factor. pressing F5 when i pressed it didn't do much. although i got a bad IP error message when i got frustrated and press it too much - which was game over for that session

 

the shutting down, no idea, that sounds like a operating system thing, nothing to do with seetickets

 

 

Its not a rumour, it did happen.

[phillyfaddle]

2 hours ago, The other Bellboy said:

Its strange how their system works, my orders were available to see straight away, but confirmation emails took over 12 hours to arrive.

#ThereIsNoPattern

[Nduja]

Didn't use any bots but by mobilising friends and family and every device I could lay my hand on, managed 1 golden session out of around 50 or 60.

 

I work in systems development and did contemplate introducing some automation to increase the scale but felt it wasn't right or necessary to do so. 

 

The scale required to be able to guarantee tickets must be at least 10 times that. I think Queue it handles the gateway to the ticket site far better than the old method of everyone just hammering requests but the fact that it's the industry standard method now is a big problem because commercial interests far bigger than the Glasto eco system are invested in cracking it and it means the Glasto system is vulnerable to them in a way it wasn't previously.

 

I do think there is a distinction between manual and automated methods fundamentally, so I'm not sure there is equivalence between ticket syndicates and bot farms. Bot farms look like an attack on the system, overwhelmingly tilting the odds towards them in a way that humans couldn't replicate.

[Ben7amin_]

3 hours ago, The other Bellboy said:

Its strange how their system works, my orders were available to see straight away, but confirmation emails took over 12 hours to arrive.

 

Just like a server handling web traffic, email clients can not handle sending all the emails at once instantly - It makes sense that they are sent in batches over a longer period of time. They also probably do not start the process until all the orders are consolidated.   

 

You will find with any email you receive in a massive bulk that not everyone receiving gets it at the same time. 

[NotAnInsider]

I had far too much faith that they would have at least tried to do a decent job of it. Some of the vulnerabilities we've seen are so basic they haven't bothered - being able to share tokens in a link ffs. Once we realised what was happening we spun up 150 odd Firefox containers per machine and just manually culled those on two bars. Ironically that would have been much more difficult to monitor on the old system of having to auto refresh - the new system made it much, much easier.

 

The biggest problem is the disconnect between the festivals comms and what really happened - they said they would detect multiple devices etc etc. People who were scared of using more than one device on their home internet connection incase they got detected as a bot, but actually it was easy enough to game without resorting to any automation - and it was easily avoidable.

[SecretFish]

23 hours ago, GlastoEls said:

 

Exactly this. My wife and I had laptop and phone each - one laptop quickly moved to five bars (perhaps before 9:10) and it moved consistently from there (ultimately getting in). 

 

One quirk I had: when getting in I got a "local tickets have sold out" message with a g19 in the URL! Very strange. Clicked back (which took to the queue) and forward (back to the g19 URL).  

 

Eventually took a deep breath and removed the g19 from the URL (back to glastonbury.seetickets.com) and it took me to the booking page, and plain sailing from there, thank goodness (cc @SecretFish @Dillyblue @blobm).

 

 

Excellent work!  Again!

[Flighty Zoo]

What exactly are “containers”?