So today quite a few people got pissed of at the BarcampLondon4 organizers for royally screwing hem over. What happened? A few weeks ago during the registration for first batch of tickets the ticket registration “accidentally” opened an hour before it was supposed to, greatly disappointing me and a few others who set their timers for the supposed time. 

The Premise

Now what happened was that EventWax (the system used for signup) is a stupid-ass system that’s unable to “open” at a certain time. It can only open on a certain date. So by going to the right URL a few people managed to get their tickets before the official opening and spread the word to a few others. 

To solve the issue, the organizers released the 2nd batch of tickets at the official time, giving all the others including me the chance to fairly signup. So, when the 4th and final batch was released yesterday at 11am, I had set my timer to register a ticket for a good friend of me who I finally convinced to also come to his first Barcamp. I typed the URL I remembered in my browser and Safari autocompleted it for me as it remembered it from the history.

Safari didn’t send me to the official site though, but to the not-so-secret URL that allowed anyone to sign up before 11am. As the first batch of tickets quickly sold out to people who figured this out I quickly did the same and signed my friend up on his email address. 

Now comes the bad thing: I later found out that the Barcamp organizers had send an email to my friend’s email address stating:

Heya there,

I see that you’ve already booked a ticket to londonBarCamp4.

While (as you have seen) eventWax is allowing you to book we are only honouring registrations from 11am onwards when we post a link from the barCamp homepage to the registration page - it’s only fair.

I’m afraid I am going to have to cancel you ticket but please try to register again at 11am.

Follow the link from
http://barcampgcap.eventwax.com/barcamplondon4

Obviously I never got that email as it was send to my friend’s email address and I send a disgruntled email to the organizers afterwords. They send me an email back that they wanted to do things fair this time and that it wasn’t really their fault but the fact that EventWax had quite a whole in their signup.

Conclusion

The conclusions that I could take from this are numerous. First off EventWax is a shitty system that I will NEVER use as it is flawed. Secondly I learned that next time I sign up for someone else I should do it on a *@cristianobetta.com email address so that I get the confirmation and cancellation emails.

The GCap crew that is organizing the Barcamp though could have done their stuff better too. First of there was the problem which lead to me having to sign up for a friend: all the signups were at 11am. Not just he but quite a few others too had this issue. Take a look at the upcoming page and twitter (yes we are alowed to complain on twitter) for more details.

Secondly the organizers should have realized after the first fiasco that EventWax sucked and moved signup times to 12am as that would have solved all their issues and automated the process for them.

Let’s hope the rest of the organisation of the Barcamp will be much better and we’ll have a magnificent two days in central London. I haven’t given up yet.