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Alstom derby great gathering 1st-3rd August 2025

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Calamity James

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To anyone who managed to checkout with PayPal and had money taken but got no order confirmation (like myself), I've just had this from Greatest Gathering via Messenger:

Everyone who has paid by PayPal has tickets and they have the data to sort that out and issue tickets. PayPal issue is happening because the user, when requesting this payment option, is directed off the site and then returns to the back of the queue. The option will be removed for future buyers to avoid issue.
Click to expand...

Mortons themselves were less than useless. I rang them this morning to ask the same question and they told me they weren't involved in any way with this event, despite my PayPal payment being sent to "Mortons Media Group Ltd".
 
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MrJeeves

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Calamity James said:
To anyone who managed to checkout with PayPal and had money taken but got no order confirmation (like myself), I've just had this from Greatest Gathering via Messenger:

Mortons themselves were less than useless. I rang them this morning to ask the same question and they told me they weren't involved in any way with this event, despite my PayPal payment being sent to "Mortons Media Group Ltd".
Click to expand...
I called a couple of hours ago (4pm-ish) and they told me that the PayPal confirmation was enough.

About 30 mins ago I received a real confirmation directly from Morton, and the order is showing properly in my account too.

I certainly didn't get sent to the back of the queue after payment -- I just got a screen that showed my order number with no items, no cost and no information other than it was "successful". Wasn't very convincing!
 
LittleRedTrain

LittleRedTrain

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Calamity James said:
To anyone who managed to checkout with PayPal and had money taken but got no order confirmation (like myself), I've just had this from Greatest Gathering via Messenger:

"Everyone who has paid by PayPal has tickets and they have the data to sort that out and issue tickets. PayPal issue is happening because the user, when requesting this payment option, is directed off the site and then returns to the back of the queue. The option will be removed for future buyers to avoid issue."
Click to expand...

I was in this position, and ended up re-submitting the order from the Basket before receiving the above message. The second time it worked properly and I got the confirmation e-mail and saw the order appear in my Mortons account.
Have been advised by messenger that I'll need to contact Mortons for a refund of the duplicate payment.
At least with Paypal, there's always the option to raise a dispute.
 
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Trainman40083

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Blimey . People seem to be having fun... It wasn't like this at the Carriage and Wagon Open Days in 1978/1979.
 
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nuneatonmark

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Wasted hours today trying to buy one ticket. What a complete and total shambles, Mortons IT infrastructure is clearly not up to it, this is from someone with 38 years IT infrastructure experience. It was only 30k tickets!
 
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Calamity James

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nuneatonmark said:
Wasted hours today trying to buy one ticket. What a complete and total shambles, Mortons IT infrastructure is clearly not up to it, this is from someone with 38 years IT infrastructure experience. It was only 30k tickets!
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I was thinking the same thing. It was running on AWS so you'd think they'd have anticipated demand and upped the resources to load balance a bit more
 
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800001

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nuneatonmark said:
Wasted hours today trying to buy one ticket. What a complete and total shambles, Mortons IT infrastructure is clearly not up to it, this is from someone with 38 years IT infrastructure experience. It was only 30k tickets!
Click to expand...
Probably set up based on one person a week making a magazine order
 
birchesgreen

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Yes no excuse these days, its not like you have to buy more servers and get them in which takes time, you can just change a setting in your AWS control panel.
 
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MrJeeves

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That implies the application is scalable, though! I have personal projects running on various cloud providers, but none of my applications are inherently scalably just by moving a slider -- I'd only introduce more problems...
 
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StephenHunter

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birchesgreen said:
Yes no excuse these days, its not like you have to buy more servers and get them in which takes time, you can just change a setting in your AWS control panel.
Click to expand...
So, the flower is green instead of yellow?

This might explain some of the problems with the Aventra...
 
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Tallguy

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I got my confirmation e mail about 1 minute after finishing the transaction. I also took a screen shot. Payment has gone through my card so hopefully I’m all set. See you on the Saturday.
 
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Calamity James

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MrJeeves said:
That implies the application is scalable, though! I have personal projects running on various cloud providers, but none of my applications are inherently scalably just by moving a slider -- I'd only introduce more problems...
Click to expand...
True, although I also have some cloud projects where you can literally just throw more resources at it.

In the end their recourse was to put it behind a Cloudflare queue system - which I've never seen before and seemed to perform about as well as the Windows file copy estimate...

estimation.png
 
Trainguy34

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Looks like it's taking longer then expected to fix, the estimate on the websites gone from early next week to just next week. Hopefully they will say when it goes as I'll be annoyed after spending 6 hours in a virtual queue.
 
Travelmonkey

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Calamity James said:
True, although I also have some cloud projects where you can literally just throw more resources at it.

In the end their recourse was to put it behind a Cloudflare queue system - which I've never seen before and seemed to perform about as well as the Windows file copy estimate...

estimation.png
Click to expand...
Nah that's just taking a trip up the M6,
 
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kentrailman

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Perhaps they should have done a "soft launch" quietly releasing tickets a week or so before what seems to have been a media and publicity blitz instead of doing it all on the same day. ( although see my earlier post on page 2, they unofficially accidentally sort of did this !)
 
james60059

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The way things are going with the tickets, it looks like I'll be setting up camp on the London Road Bridge with my 600mm lens instead :lol:
 
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800001

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Alstom have tonight tweeted the following:-

x.com

x.com x.com

Due to overwhelming demand, our previous provider couldn’t cope, and we had to pause sales for #TheGreatestGathering.

We're now onboarding a new provider to handle the demand.
Click to expand...
 
DanNCL

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Alstom are replacing Mortons as the ticketing provider. Tickets sold by Mortons will still be valid.
 
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800001

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SansHache said:
Just when I thought things could not get any worse the verb "to onboard" makes an appearance! I suspect that means I was "offboarded" when I retired.
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That’s the words of the modern day, we don’t have inductions anymore where I worked it’s all ‘onboarding’.
 
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