Hello
Like a lot of people I had the U75 boards Glastonbury thread open whilst trying to get Glasto tickets on the morning of Sunday 1st April.
Whilst it was enjoyable to see the discussion of who got tickets and who didn't, I found that a there seemed to be a little confusion and a lack of help from some posters as to the best way of getting tickets. A lot of questions were being thrown around from frustrated posters like "does having multiple windows open help?" , "Is it a complete lottery?" and "I'm refreshing the page and nothing is happening - what am I doing wrong?" - with no really clear answers.
Myself and my friends were able to get 12 tickets by 9:30am - simply by doing some simple tricks and a little understanding of how websites work. So thought I would write this little guide to getting tickets on the 22nd April when the next batch of tickets go on sale. (Please note this guide just deals with the tickets bought on the web. You should obviously be trying any phone options you have as well.)
In answer to the main question about trying to get through to an overloaded website - "Is it a lottery who gets through?" - the answer is "Yes. Kind of." However there a a few simple things you can do to vastly increase your chances of getting through:
Websites work on requests. When they get a request they try to send the page to the requester. An overloaded website finds it hard to send the requests and if it takes to long doing it the requesters internet browser gets fed up and times out. What you need to do get through is massively increase the amount of your requests and have an internet browser that handles time-outs better. Sitting there and pressing refresh is not going to cut it.
So here we go:
1. Right - the 1st thing is that everything is subject to change. The date of the 22nd may change and so might the below link. Be warned.
2. Get as many people doing this as possible. It doesn't matter if you are all sharing the same internet connection.
3. Internet explorer is crap. Use the Firefox Browser. Its better than Internet Explorer for 100 different reasons but the main ones are that it handles slow websites much better and has tabbed browsing. Download Firefox here: http://www.getfirefox.com
4. OK so its 8:55am am on the 22nd. Click this link with the middle mouse button:
http://www.seetickets.com/g2007/
This will open it in a new tab. Now click that link a whole bunch of times. Stab stab stab. Click click click. Like 30-40 times. Remember with the middle mouse button. There is no limit to how many tabs you can have open - but your computer will start to run slowly after a certain amount. Do whatever works for you. We now have 30ish page requests to the site all open in different tabs.
5. To the right of the rightmost tab there is a little down arrow. Clicking this will show you an overview list of all your open tabs. After a while almost all will say "Service Unavailable" or "Operation timed out" etc etc. However if you're lucky one will say "SeeTickets Glastonbury" and you are through.
6. If they all say "Service Unavailable" then close Firefox and try again.
7. Rinse & Repeat.
8. With 3 Friends and 3 Laptops doing this with 30-40 tabs open each and you have over 100 requests every 3 minutes or so. 1 will get through and you will go to the ball.
There you go.
-Tigermilk
Like a lot of people I had the U75 boards Glastonbury thread open whilst trying to get Glasto tickets on the morning of Sunday 1st April.
Whilst it was enjoyable to see the discussion of who got tickets and who didn't, I found that a there seemed to be a little confusion and a lack of help from some posters as to the best way of getting tickets. A lot of questions were being thrown around from frustrated posters like "does having multiple windows open help?" , "Is it a complete lottery?" and "I'm refreshing the page and nothing is happening - what am I doing wrong?" - with no really clear answers.
Myself and my friends were able to get 12 tickets by 9:30am - simply by doing some simple tricks and a little understanding of how websites work. So thought I would write this little guide to getting tickets on the 22nd April when the next batch of tickets go on sale. (Please note this guide just deals with the tickets bought on the web. You should obviously be trying any phone options you have as well.)
In answer to the main question about trying to get through to an overloaded website - "Is it a lottery who gets through?" - the answer is "Yes. Kind of." However there a a few simple things you can do to vastly increase your chances of getting through:
Websites work on requests. When they get a request they try to send the page to the requester. An overloaded website finds it hard to send the requests and if it takes to long doing it the requesters internet browser gets fed up and times out. What you need to do get through is massively increase the amount of your requests and have an internet browser that handles time-outs better. Sitting there and pressing refresh is not going to cut it.
So here we go:
1. Right - the 1st thing is that everything is subject to change. The date of the 22nd may change and so might the below link. Be warned.
2. Get as many people doing this as possible. It doesn't matter if you are all sharing the same internet connection.
3. Internet explorer is crap. Use the Firefox Browser. Its better than Internet Explorer for 100 different reasons but the main ones are that it handles slow websites much better and has tabbed browsing. Download Firefox here: http://www.getfirefox.com
4. OK so its 8:55am am on the 22nd. Click this link with the middle mouse button:
http://www.seetickets.com/g2007/
This will open it in a new tab. Now click that link a whole bunch of times. Stab stab stab. Click click click. Like 30-40 times. Remember with the middle mouse button. There is no limit to how many tabs you can have open - but your computer will start to run slowly after a certain amount. Do whatever works for you. We now have 30ish page requests to the site all open in different tabs.
5. To the right of the rightmost tab there is a little down arrow. Clicking this will show you an overview list of all your open tabs. After a while almost all will say "Service Unavailable" or "Operation timed out" etc etc. However if you're lucky one will say "SeeTickets Glastonbury" and you are through.
6. If they all say "Service Unavailable" then close Firefox and try again.
7. Rinse & Repeat.
8. With 3 Friends and 3 Laptops doing this with 30-40 tabs open each and you have over 100 requests every 3 minutes or so. 1 will get through and you will go to the ball.
There you go.
-Tigermilk
