ticktackticket.com and U2 are a bunch of suckers

15/02/2005 05:51 | Categories: News, Music | 4 Comments 

I was really happy when U2 confirmed the dates of the Vertigo tour 2005 and that they were stopping by in Barcelona on the 7th of August. I was also looking forward to getting my hands on a few tickets... What I didn't think is that it was going to be a nightmare and that it would make me hate anything related to U2. Forever.

It all started when I was told that by joining U2.com, I would have access to the pre-sale where each member was given a unique 6-digit code that would allow to purchase up to 6 tickets per person before they were available to everybody else. I happily gave them my credit card and joined the club, only to realize later on that I should have joined U2.com not later than the 24th of January in order to get access to the pre-sale (I joined on the 31st) The bastards did not have any warning anywhere to be easily seen in U2.com so here I was, with 40$ less in my account, full access to a lousy site for U2 fanboys and without my pre-sales code.

In the meantime, I must have not been the one who was bitten by this because all the U2 fan forum in the net were ablaze with comments from very unhappy fans about this policy, and about how badly ticketmaster.com had dealt with the pre-sale (see for your yourselves) Ticketmaster.com was the on-line ticket seller chosen by U2 to take care of selling the tickets and organizing the pre-sale rounds but it was really, really pathetic. Many fans who had correct pre-sale tickets could not get their tickets because their system kept saying that the pre-sale ticket had already been used, others couldn't even reach the site and lost the pre-sale, etc. Word reached U2 and Larry Mullen sent an open letter to all the U2.com members "basically" apologizing for this cock-up and even offering a full refund of the U2.com membership to all of us who signed up too late for the pre-sale. I say "basically apologizing" because the bastard, always so nice to the fans who have made U2 what they are nowadays (a bunch of greedy assholes), had the bollocks to say this:

By the way, a note to those so-called U2 fans who are quick to accuse U2 of unseemly behaviour, I've only got two words for you...

How dares he? This last sentence was clearly uncalled for and they absolutely deserve all the criticism they've got.

But so far, I kept thinking that I would probably be able to get a few tickets through ticktackticket.com, the Spanish site choosen by U2 and ticketmaster.com to sell tickets for the Spanish performances. How little did I know! These guys turned out to be even worse than ticketmaster.com and proved themselves completely uncapable of running an event this big.

The sale started on the 10th of February at 10:00 Spanish time but the site had already been pretty much unreachable for hours before that. After about 20 minutes of clicking the "refresh" button from my browser, I managed to reach a page where I was allowed to choose the kind of ticket I wanted and type my credit card number. Once ready, I clicked the "Submit" button but that was the end of it... I spent about 45 more minutes trying to refresh the page (who knows, maybe that was going to be my lucky day after all!) but nothing happened. The result is that I lost over an hour of work because of this shit. And top of all that, I still had no tickets (and I wasn't going to get them at all anyway) I knew that there were going to be some hiccups because this is the event of the year in Spain but I didn't think it was going to be impossible.

Since I didn't know what to do, I spent some of my time analyzing the web page that customers were greeted upon being lucky enough to reach the first step of the ticket purchasing process. For starters, it didn't work with anything else other than Internet Exploiter. Second, the size of the page altogether was 25Kb!!! (I will upload it here tomorrow, it's not accessible anymore but I kept a copy in my work laptop) This is a clear hint that people at ticktackticket.com do not know jack from shit when it comes to designing small pages to be served as fast as possible. If you're getting 1000 hits per second (assuming that your fat pipe can take that much) we're talking here about 25Mb per second (!!), and the page did not really have too much meaningful content. It was full of non-accessible content and a lot of javascript code for validation. I haven't had time to work on it but I'm guessing that the following ideas would have helped:

• If the page had been fully XHTML compliant plus using an external CSS file, it would have been a lot lighter to download since XHTML generates smaller markup ("
  ...
  " is much smaller than "

  ...

  ")
• The CSS should have been put in its own file. The reason behind this is that most customers would have already visited the main page of the service at some point in the days prior to the sale, so most likely they would have already had a cached version of it that would not be needed to download.
• The page had a lot of smaller icons and images (like a stupid icon pointing to a "Secured by Thawte" logo -- what the f*ck was that doing there?) that made the page download even more slowly. It seemed to me that Internet Explorer was waiting for all the little icons and images to download before showing the page so it made the whole thing feel even slower. Plus, most of these images were part of the navigation of the page so turning images off made the page completely unusable and was not possible to proceed.
• The page had a crapload of Javascript code that I suppose was there for validation. If really needed, the same solution suggested for the CSS code could have been used here. If not possible, I am sure that the size of the code could have been reduced a lot.
• All the blank spaces from the page could have been easily removed (that's no rocket science) and I am sure that --even though I haven't tried it myself-- the overall size of the page could have been reduced by 10-15% which is already a lot considering the insane amount of traffic that they were getting.

So in my opinion, the page should have been almost text-only and using pure XHTML markup, with as little javascript code as needed in order to run the credit card validations and so on. Just for the fun of it, I am going to recreate the same page trying to make it as small as possible and see how far I can get. And I think it's not going to be too difficult...

I'd love to comment on the next step of the process but you know what? I never got that far. As far as I could see, the next step consisted in sending all the information to a servlet which apparently processed your data and assigned you some tickets. The only thing that stinks here is that it looks like the servlet was running in a Linux machine... What the hell, if you're going to run this kind of high-demand applications in Java (which is a very suitable language and platform, btw) why don't you shell out for a nice Sun server with either 4 or 8 processors (at least!) running the latest version of Java where Sun has already done a great job to optimize the VM for multi-processor systems?

The problem is that the less-than-capable people behind ticktackticket.com couldn't care less. They knew that they were going to sell all the tickets in one way or another so the reliability and availability of their web site was probably the least of their concerns. In the meantime, many Spanish fans are not happy.

And before anybody tells me that this isn't U2's fault, let me tell you something: it is. Bono and co. might not know much about high availability systems but they've got advisors and people who know so I'm going to blame them for being so badly-advised, for pretending that nothing's happening and for on top of all that, reminding us that they've got two words for us.

What a coincidence, I've also got two words for you...

UPDATE:this is my local copy of ticktackticket.com's page that I saved in my work laptop. Look at the size of the javascript code or at the amount of useless markup and judge for yourself how inept and uncapable these guys are.

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