There has been some sort of communication about the status of the BotCon 2010 registration on the club forums. Brian has responded there to questions about when registration will be ready, and it was communicated that there is complicated code going into place to allow online registration and that they want to make sure it is ready.
What was revealed is the following:
*There will be one tour on Wednesday to Kennedy Space Center with no limit as to number of people going.
*There will be Wednesday and Thursday customizing classes limited to 25 people each.
*There will be no Thursday tours so people can enjoy the Orlando Parks.
We have been told that we will see the brochure very soon but open registration is still TBD.
Beastbot X
It's centER. When you're in America, you gotta spell it the right way!
G.B. Blackrock
But (at the risk of repeating myself), this would require that the brochure can't tell you how to register, which is actually fairly common for brochures to have. They probably couldn't even tell you how much to expect to pay….
Groundsplitter
I can imagine that the demand for an online registration system is as much Fun Publications' own desire as anyone else's. Asking people to write their information by hand on a printout from a PDF file is to ask for problems, in my opinion. Even if people send their registrations by regular post instead of faxing them, there's still the problem that the quality of people's handwriting differs a lot, and even one misinterpreted figure makes the e-mail address or the credit card number fail.
BotCon.com usually has a note that "if your paperwork has mistakes or is incomplete, we will put it at the bottom of the stack and come back to you after we have finished processing the correct forms". And I can imagine that it must have happened a lot. It's well worth investing some time in developing an online registration system just to get rid of those problems. Not as much as 4 months though, but considering BotCon's size I would say it's definitely worth a couple of weeks at least. After a few years it will have paid off.
Bogatan
Its taken me up to 5 hours I think one year to get my fax through. Also I think up until last year when I could type the information on to the pdf there has been difficulties reading the information I provided. One time it was my email, another my credit card number and something else. I think that had more to do with the way the jpg was converted to fit the fax, but as thats the only way I could possibly send the fax in the evening/middle of the night over here I didn't have much choice.
So it wan't a perfect system. But we'll see what problems online registration creates, beore deciding which is better.
Coinhound
If I recall almost everyone wanted online registration for years now. Personally Im sick of faxing it in and sitting there for three hours for it to go through and sometimes Ive heard some have had real problems of eleven hours of faxing to get it to go through. I welcome online reg and only thing to contend with is plainly overload on servers which might hold you up an hour at most if its seamless in operation. Only one time was it with eleven attempts it went through with faxing it.
videriant
Do you care about the customizing class or the 1st 100 pin? If not, then it doesn't really matter when you fax. In 08, I got rejected about 10-11 times before my fax went through and I was 2nd or 3rd on the Wednesday customizing class.
stad
I still don't understand the frustration with the fax system. In all the years of doing Joe Convention and BotCon, I've never had to resend more than once due to a busy signal. True, I have a fax machine and most people don't, I understand that. But FedEx Kinko's are in most larger cities, and nearly all businesses, especially those with an office of any sort, have a fax machine. That pretty much only excludes people that are self-employed or unemployed, and don't have vehicle access. Most people bemoaning the fax system still seem to find a way to fax it in, it's really NOT that much effort.
All that said, I don't disagree that they should have and should've had an online registration system well before now.
stad
Is that what you really think, seriously? Do you honestly believe they are NOT in a hurry to get your money?
Aaron
Dittoz. I just wonder what the expense will be and if the already booked airline tickets can be bumped back a day.
HeroicBlitzwing
Thanks Brian, Pete and everyone else involved in getting this done for us (I figure since not a lot of people are actually doing this ).
xZAOx
As a software developer, I can easily see how 1 guy doing their registration system could take a long time.
There's a lot more to it than "lawl I installed an open source php cart system". We have NO idea of the scope or features of forth-coming system, so any opinions on "how long" it should take are null and void.
If it arrives and it's EXACTLY the adobe form, but with checkboxes for what you want, and it just sends an automated email underneath…then yeah, that took way too long.
But the brochure itself is pretty complicated – many options are only available depending on other options you may have opted in/out of. It also could be launching with a whole new website. There is likely to be a database underneath, have administrative modules that the public won't see, a series of customized reports, processes built in to help deal with cancellations, alterations, and other errors, payment processing, dealing with the "limited stock" of tours, pins, attendee package limits, overall package limits, PLUS have it all tied into their current system (which is running ColdFusion, and is liable to be a nightmare) which will have to check for membership status (or make them a member when registering) – and integrating with another system is ALWAYS a pain in the ass.
Plus of course, they need to do lots of stress testing. So yeah – this could definitely be complex.
clonemanager
I think… they do want to keep the cost down. So getting a well known online site to host the service would not be a good option as they charge a huge commission mostly…
But it is really hard to have just a PC box to hold secured web service when hundreds or about a thousand requests online being done around the same time…. Anyway I can foresee this online matter will be as frustrated as doing it by fax. Will see…. he he he…
Wajo357
exactly… For all I care, the brochure can be out a year in advance…
G.B. Blackrock
I don't really disagree with this. Past precedent is that they don't release the brochure until a few days before pre-registration opens up. I assume that this is because they want to be able to say (on the brochure) how pre-registration will be done. And since they're still not quite ready for pre-registration to start, that affects the brochures.
But that doesn't mean that it couldn't be done differently.
Wajo357
I mostly understand their issue with the registration, but I personally believe they should have put up the brochures a while ago. Granted a lot of ppl are dying to register ASAP, but a lot of ppl also want information about the tours to determine their schedule, flights and their own personal itinerary before Botcon. Leaving it to a post on their forum 2 months before the convention isn't the best way to do it.
G.B. Blackrock
I don't know all of what FP is thinking, but they've made it explicitly clear that they don't consider PayPal an option. If I recall, they didn't want to deal with PayPal's fee structure. That's probably the case for any "free" software provided, as well (that is to say, the software is free, but they take a percentage of each transaction. That's what PayPal does, anyway). Anything that costs them more (per transaction, apparently, given that they MUST be paying the folks who ARE providing the software) to handle is something they're just apparently not going to do.
G.B. Blackrock
If it was, would that be such a problem? Seems reasonable to me that people would want to know if they are eligible to take the class before committing to the expenses of an extra day of travel.
RoboticPlanet
That's more dependent on the server, not as much the registration software. A server dedicated Botcon registration is less likely to crash than one hosting other websites. Basically that part of it comes down to how much money FP will throw at server costs.
Sol Fury
Kennedy Space Centre, that's truly excellent! I'll have to go on that one for sure.
Human Beastbox
Exactly. I can understand the delay somewhat, but I still wish it were up and running by now.
But whatever, I'm probably going "Protoform" package anyways.