Hi friends, for any number of reasons, yesterday was a pretty rough day. Above and beyond anything pinball related, our hearts absolutely break for the community in Lewiston Maine with the ongoing situation happening there. I have family up in that area, and I know some of you live up in that area as well. The words fail me and it’s hard to do anything but think and hope for that community right now.
With regards to the website: unfortunately we had a few issues at the worst possible time in regards to registration yesterday. To keep things at a high level, the scheduled page publish with the registration form caused a cascading series of errors leading to the databases going down, and unable to start back up due to space issues. The root cause has been identified, and mitigated. I feel confident that we won’t have that particular issue again. I apologize to everyone who tried to register and was greeted with an error. While these things do happen, it takes a bit of the bloom off the rose a bit and we have to work harder to earn back that trust. I will do so.
In the intervening moments, we posted the link to Facebook, which many people were able to access and register on. Not everyone’s on facebook however, which meant some folks gave up at 6 pm and didn’t see the post, or when the site came back at 7:30 last night. This resulted in some poeple registering and hitting a waitlist, or others checking the page and seeing it was already full and instead just sending an e-mail. While I agree with the feedback, there’s not much that I can do at this point other than improve our process going forward. I will remove myself from the tournament to the bottom of our waitlist, and move the next eligible player up on the waitlist. Our tournaments generally have about 4-5 waitlist activations on average, so please register if you’re interested and I’ll keep you informed of the situation.
Going forward, any tournament registrations will be handled thusly:
- At the time of registration, we will post the link to the website. Again, we feel confident that this will work going forward.
- At the same time, we will schedule an e-mail to our event notification list to go out with an additional e-mail direct to the registration for that tournament. If there are issues with the website, this will be our backup.
- If and only if the website is having issues will we post the registration links to Facebook.
Again, I’d like to apologize for the issues yesterday and especially to the players who were impacted by not being able to register in time. I’m incredibly grateful that we have this issue of “too many folks wanting to join us and play” on a regular basis — it’s a great problem to have and I’ll continuously work to make sure The Lower Playfield is worth your time, energy, and commute to play at.
Please keep the Lewiston community in your thoughts.
-Derek