CodeMash v2.0.1.2 tickets went on sale this morning, 10/24/2011 at 10:24am. Over the weekend I made my usual CodeMash bet: If we sell out by Friday, Twitter can pick my hair color.
Why Friday? I thought last time we sold 900 tickets in 3.5 days. This year we were going to sell 1200 tickets (not counting speakers, staff, volunteers, and sponsors). So I scaled up the time.
Boy. Was I wrong.
The 1200 CodeMash tickets sold out in 20 minutes. So fast, that we brought Eventbrite (our ticket SaaS to their knees). I have received plenty of email from people that are concerned about their money or ticket.
So what happened?
0. EB lets you start checking out. They use a greedy allocation algorithm, locking those tickets for you for 15 minutes. This is normally enough time for most people to check out. This is a time challenge for people that are buying more than 10 tickets at a time however.
1. During checkout, backend messages are sent to PayPal to process the credit card. Once that is done, PP sends a message back to EB.
2. You receive your PP receipt.
3. Normally, EB receives the response from PP and commits the tickets to you. In this case, EB was swamped and couldn’t respond to the response from PP. Because of this….
4. Failing a response from PP in the 15 minute window EB releases your tickets, and marks your order as ‘abandoned’.
5. The ticket buyer does NOT receive an email from EB.
6. Ticket buyer gets confused and emails me.
7. Tickets are re-allocated to someone else trying to buy their tickets, which perpetuates the problem.
If you fell into this crack, HAVE NO FEAR. The PP messages are queued, and EB is working through them, assigning tickets to people as they go. Everyone who paid, WILL GET A TICKET. Do NOT worry. If you haven’t received an email from EB in a few days, please let me know through the CodeMash EB registration page. That goes direct to me.
We sold 1,200 in 20 minutes. There are about 175 tickets backlogged.
Wow. Can’t wait for CodeMash this year.