SU issues changes to ticket purchasing system

Warwick Students’ Union (SU) has announced changes to its ticketing system in light of purchasing errors that left many students disappointed during the sales of Freshers and Pop! tickets.

The SU has highlighted the re-occurrence of website failures during the launch of Term 2 event sales prior to Christmas as a key reason for implementing the changes. The new system was also implemented in order to correct ticketing issues before highly sought after Sports Ball tickets go on sale.

Four steps have been taken to improve the ticketing system; most significantly, a new operating system and a brand new virtual server have been introduced, with the sole purpose of hosting the SU website. The SU have said that this will increase processing and memory capacity of the ticketing system some 16 times.

Meanwhile, the network connection has also been upgraded, providing ten times the bandwidth of before. It is hoped that these measures will help to reinforce the website when it experiences high customer traffic, and avoid lengthy loading times and crashes.

The SU has also introduced a stand-alone webpage to be used during busy periods; they say that this offers a “no frills” page, with the intention of offsetting excessive traffic and speeding up the purchasing process.

Thirdly, the relay from SagePay has been moved to this server, reducing the chance of ‘timing out’ during the payment process.

This problem was the cause of much confusion during the Freshers events sales. Some believed that they had purchased tickets only to be informed later that their transaction had not been completed, meaning purchases had to be finalised over the phone or at SU headquarters.

Lastly, the SU has taken on board student feedback to introduce phased, or ‘staggered’ sales of popular events, helping to reduce customer traffic.

The SU also moved to stamp out fears that problems may reoccur once more, even in spite of these changes, by saying in their official statement: “We tested the new system when Pop! tickets went back up on sale recently, and it held up well with no problems.” They added that they “just want it to work properly”.

Alex Humfryes, a first-year German and Business student has welcomed the changes after previously being left frustrated when attempting to purchase freshers tickets for Term 1.

He said: “I’m glad they’ve made changes, it sounds like they should work. Hopefully it will stop it happening again before Sports Ball, because last time, the website crashed before I could buy my tickets, which meant I had to sit at my laptop for three hours, which was ridiculous really”.

The SU has once more apologised for the inconvenience that the website crashes had caused.
Isaac Leigh, SU societies officer said: “We appreciate that these improvements are long overdue, and can only apologise for the problems experienced previously.”

Mr Leigh also highlighted that the changes “won’t stop events selling out quickly due to high demand”. He added: “hopefully they will prevent future ‘crashes’ which slow the website down and create additional frustration or disappointment.”​