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Bruin Bash ticketing site crashes briefly due to overload of requests

By Andrew Warner

Sept. 13, 2017 8:33 p.m.

This article was updated Sept. 15 at 4:57 p.m.

Bruin Bash tickets were hard to come by once again.

The Bruin Bash website crashed Wednesday morning for almost an hour after thousands of students flooded the website in the hopes of getting floor tickets. Bruin Bash, which is put together by the Campus Events Commission and the Cultural Affairs Commission, is set to take place Sept. 25 in Pauley Pavilion.

In a post on Facebook, the CEC wrote that the system to register online for the Bruin Bash lottery received about 1,800 logon requests, along with 3,000 online users, resulting in the system crashing for 40 minutes.

Students Charlotte McGinn and Talla Khelghati both said they logged on to the Bruin Bash site to get their tickets right when the site opened, at 10 a.m.

“When I first tried to get it … I got all the way through to where I added it to my cart and everything. I kept on pressing ‘check out,’ and then it crashed,” said Khelghati, an incoming first-year economics student.

Khelghati said she spent about an hour and 10 minutes refreshing the page, only to receive error messages. By approximately 11:20 a.m., she said she finally got her floor tickets.

McGinn, a third-year computer science and engineering student, also said she waited more than an hour to get her tickets, but when she got through, she was unsure of whether she was assigned floor tickets or was put into the lottery. She said neither the ticketing website nor the confirmation email she received specified what her exact ticket status was.

Campus Events Commissioner Nedda Saidian, who was not available for comment until Thursday evening, said all tickets were labeled as “Lottery,” regardless of whether they were floor tickets, and that they did not foresee student confusion.

The language on the ticketing website that might have confused students as “Bruin Bash 2017 Lottery” didn’t refer to the 100/200 level lottery, but rather the system as a whole, she said. She added CEC had originally planned for students to receive a ticket status confirmation email.

The Central Ticketing Office is now directly emailing students their statuses.

Cultural Affairs Commissioner Malik D. Flournoy-Hooker declined to comment and added he already shared his thoughts on the ticketing system on the Bruin Bash 2017 Facebook page.

In his Facebook post, Flournoy-Hooker said the website’s crash was out of CAC’s control. He also apologized on behalf of CAC and CEC for the confusion surrounding whether students received floor tickets.

CEC also commented on the website crash in a Facebook post, which read, “if you’re freaking out, consider yourself part of a long tradition of scrambling to get Bruin Bash tickets.”

Khelghati said she was understanding of CEC and CAC’s difficulties but also feels their response in handling the situation was somewhat passive-aggressive.

“I don’t want to be too harsh, because I understand that there are limitations to their power, but I think some things were handled incorrectly,” she said. “I think the fact that the website crashed would have been okay if they were more sympathetic about it.”

Saidian said CEC markets itself as edgy and evocative, and the statuses on social media were intended to reflect that style. In an effort to maintain a sense of transparency, she said they edited posts that people were particularly upset about and left a disclaimer.

“In the heat of the moment, I think the people even who love us, may have been a little frustrated because they didn’t think it was funny, which I get,” she said.

McGinn said she thinks last year’s lottery system was probably the best way to go about assigning tickets. But she added that last year many people also felt the lottery was unfair, so she feels sympathetic to CAC and CEC’s efforts.

“I think they probably could have had a better implementation,” she said. “But I think they did have good intentions.”

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Andrew Warner | Daily Bruin senior staff
Andrew Warner is a Daily Bruin senior staff reporter. Warner was the editor of The Quad during the 2018-2019 school year and an assistant editor for the Music | Arts beat of Arts during the 2017-2018 school year. Before that, he was an Arts reporter during the 2016-2017 school year.
Andrew Warner is a Daily Bruin senior staff reporter. Warner was the editor of The Quad during the 2018-2019 school year and an assistant editor for the Music | Arts beat of Arts during the 2017-2018 school year. Before that, he was an Arts reporter during the 2016-2017 school year.
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