re Proms Planner 2012

[NickWraight]

The RAH website Proms Planner seems not to be working at present! Anyone else having trouble...?

[Flay]

Working fine now, Nick. But thanks for the prompt - I discovered that I had missed checking the "or best available" box for Bruckner 9th

[Resurrection Man]

Well Saturday is almost upon us and so all I can say is to everyone trying for tickets...good luck!

I hope the RAH waiting room is better than the ROH one. When the Box Office opened for Bayadere I logged in to be told "You are 1967th in the waiting room..please wait".

So I waited. "You are now 1024th in the waiting room...please wait"

All the way down to "You are now 4th in the waiting room...please wait" after about 40 minutes or so.

Then it kicked me off

[Dave2002]

Wish I'd not been so busy lately and missed the point of this. Last night finally noticed the midnight deadline, and logged in. I was about 550 in the "waiting room". Finally got to zero by midnight at which point I think it closed.

Today I've tried again to book on the web site. Started off at around 2700 IIRC - now down to about 600 after several hours. This has to be a barking mad web site. I can't believe there isn't a better way, e.g using some form of offline processing, AJAX or "whatever". I haven't even got as far as logging in yet. Totally ridiculous- very, very, poor. What kind of IT developers get deployed on this?

Maybe they got paid in peanuts.

Sadly the BPO concert has now sold out, though the first to reach this state was Wallace and Grommit!

[Petrushka]

Wish I'd not been so busy lately and missed the point of this. Last night finally noticed the midnight deadline, and logged in. I was about 550 in the "waiting room". Finally got to zero by midnight at which point I think it closed.

Today I've tried again to book on the web site. Started off at around 2700 IIRC - now down to about 600 after several hours. This has to be a barking mad web site. I can't believe there isn't a better way, e.g using some form of offline processing, AJAX or "whatever". I haven't even got as far as logging in yet. Totally ridiculous- very, very, poor. What kind of IT developers get deployed on this?

Maybe they got paid in peanuts.

Sadly the BPO concert has now sold out, though the first to reach this state was Wallace and Grommit!

I actually logged on at about 00.45 this morning as an experiment and there must have been people still tinkering with their Proms Planners because it was open (I went in). Don't know when it finally shut.

Regarding the website we've been having our say on the 'Preferred Seating at the RAH' thread. I had no problems and was very pleased with the outcome.

[Dave2002]

I actually logged on at about 00.45 this morning as an experiment and there must have been people still tinkering with their Proms Planners because it was open (I went in). Don't know when it finally shut.

Regarding the website we've been having our say on the 'Preferred Seating at the RAH' thread. I had no problems and was very pleased with the outcome.

Drat! Maybe I could have sorted things out during the night then, but it was highly non obvious to me what I was/should have been looking for. I was half dead anyway from getting up early so I gave up.

I'm still hoping to get on tonight, but am still over 200.

I do work in IT related fields, and even code very occasionally, and I still think that site is very poor. I'm glad that you got a result though.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I forgot about the Proms tickets this morning, but remembered this evening. I missed out on the seats I wanted, but managed to book cheaper tickets - just. Quite a number of Proms have sold out already.

[Dave2002]

I forgot about the Proms tickets this morning, but remembered this evening. I missed out on the seats I wanted, but managed to book cheaper tickets - just. Quite a number of Proms have sold out already.

A couple I really wanted to go to have now sold out. After waiting most of the day I got on. Then the *** web site locked up/crashed. Great!

[Resurrection Man]

Why do you blame the site for what appears to be your own mistake?

With the exception of the issue where some people in the queue get dropped (and the RAH is not alone in this as it happened to me at the ROH...which makes me wonder if it is the same company that they outsource to or who develops the software) the whole concept especially with the waiting room is superb. By having the waiting room, you decouple all the CPU activity needed to book people's tickets ( ie where the real horsepower is needed) from simply monitoring the queue. By opening the proms booking a couple of weeks later, it gives everyone a level playing field when trying to get tickets. Provided, of course, that they prepare a Proms Planner...and they have several weeks to do that.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I don't think Dave2002 was blaming the site for his own mistake. He was merely highlighting ceratin shortcomings. I was the one who missed out on my preferred seats as a result of being too slow, but that was my fault.

[Dave2002]

Why do you blame the site for what appears to be your own mistake?

With the exception of the issue where some people in the queue get dropped (and the RAH is not alone in this as it happened to me at the ROH...which makes me wonder if it is the same company that they outsource to or who develops the software) the whole concept especially with the waiting room is superb. By having the waiting room, you decouple all the CPU activity needed to book people's tickets ( ie where the real horsepower is needed) from simply monitoring the queue. By opening the proms booking a couple of weeks later, it gives everyone a level playing field when trying to get tickets. Provided, of course, that they prepare a Proms Planner...and they have several weeks to do that.

What mistake am I supposed to have made? Perhaps you mean logging off what might have been a working site because I was by then too tired. As far as I could see, the site did become irresponsive, though I was uncertain. The information provided did suggest that the site would only work up to midnight anyway. A good user interface will generally generally give clues as to whether a site is working or not. It's not just about basic functionality, or a pretty site. The fact that handling so many bookings is a difficult problem is of little concern to me - the IT firm could have done a better job.

All the evidence I have from repeated attempts to access the site yesterday is that it is a poorly set up site. It took three of us multiple attempts using five different computers and two different broadband lines most of the day - up to 10 pm - to get tickets for five concerts. A further attempt did succeed in getting a couple of tickets for the BPO Brahms/Lutoslwaski concert - though we really wanted the other one. We had several crashes and non recoverable errors even after having gone through the queue.

I had no idea how ticket sales were going to be organised in advance this year. The BBC spends a lot of time on R3 trailing all sorts of things, which seems to annoy others, and there have been threads on this from time to time. A few mentions on R3 or R4 of how the advance bookings for this BBC related series of concerts were going to work would have helped me considerably, and may also have helped others.

I agree that having a system were one can make requests for tickets before booking opens is a good idea, and clearly there is a high volume of on line requests. I'm not sure whether access is easier days before the booking opens, but immediately before and afterwards it becomes very difficult.

I am sticking by my assertion that it is poorly handled, even though we eventually got an acceptable, though not optimal, result. I don't know how easy it would have been to have booked in person at the Box Office, which for me would have taken about 3-4 hours round trip time, but may have been considerably less stressful, and also slightly cheaper even allowing for the train fare and parking costs. The weather was pleasant, and it might have been an acceptable experience.

I do remember days when I simply wrote in ahead of time using snail mail. It worked, and was considerably less frustrating.

At several points yesterday I even considered boycotting the concerts this year, which is obviously about as pointless as a friend of mine who boycotts Tesco because of some fairly well publicised dodgy dealings by someone who is/was connected with Tesco quite a few years ago. I did boycott Shell for years beacause of their involvement with certain African countries, and the unfortunate execution of a well known writer - Ken Saro-Wiwa (for which Shell was not responsible, but they had dealings with the Nigerian government), but I don't suppose they noticed either.

[Resurrection Man]

Here "Wish I'd not been so busy lately and missed the point of this. Last night finally noticed the midnight deadline, and logged in."

In your last reply, you also imply that there was no information about how to book, no trails etc on Radio 3 etc. Viz..."I had no idea how ticket sales were going to be organised in advance this year. "

However, all the information has been available since April 19 on the Proms website...under the tab 'Tickets' 'How to Book'

Apart from the occasional dumping from the queue (and which I referred to in my earlier reply) their website seems to have worked exceedingly well. Just think how many thousands and thousands of people were trying to get tickets. If the site was as bad as you say then there would be an uproar. But there hasn't been. We only hear about the people who have problems (relatively few on this forum) and not from the thousands who got their tickets without any hassle.

[teamsaint]

I would imagine that plenty of people didn't even bother, due to the delays or complexity, or gave up due to their broadband dropping out, and having to go to the back of the queue.

I certainly decided that I would just prom, instead of spending half of saturday waiting around.
But I am happy to Prom, so I am OK.

Do you have evidence that "Thousands ..got their tickets without hassle"? Perhaps thousands got their tickets after a lot of hassle.I don't know.

[Petrushka]

According to the BBC, 100,000 tickets were sold on the first day of booking exceeding last year's total. Agree with RM that if there had been major problems with the online booking system then uproar would indeed have ensued. Sorry to have to mention this again but you have to wonder at the all-singing, all-dancing, sooper-dooper computer systems some people were using and failed to get the tickets they wanted while I, on my very, very slow, completely knackered laptop found the whole thing a doddle.

It's difficult not to sound smug and patronising if I say that most of it is down to preperation. My Proms Planner was completed and ready by Friday. I guessed that there would be lots of last minute planner tinkerers and sure enough when I went on the site as an experiment near to midnight on Friday I was put in the waiting room with an astonishing 500 odd in the queue. To my surprise when I had another look some 45 minutes later I could still get in.

Again, preperation: if you really want those tickets, get a good night's sleep, turn the rubbish laptop on an hour before it's needed, make sure it works (I went on the Racing Post site to check the day's runners), then on the dot of 09.00 get on the RAH site straight away. Yes, it is stressful for a while but with the numbers going down at the rate of 1 per second it didn't take an Einstein to calculate the approximate time I'd be allowed in. In my case, it was some 45 minutes from entering the waiting room to having the e-mail order confirmation for all the tickets I wanted in the area I wanted with my exact seat number shown. I did not need to 'spend half of Saturday waiting around'. I am a hopeless technophobe but even so how can snail-mail compare with this? And how can anyone expect to get the tickets they want if they leave it until Saturday afternoon?

One of the best maxims around is the old military one: 'Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted'.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I did not need to 'spend half of Saturday waiting around'.

When I logged on (rather late), I was at the end of a queue of over 300, but within under 15 minutes, the queue was down to zero. I though that was quite impressive.