A Message to Our Community
The Women’s Conference team would like to extend our apologies again for the technical issue experienced during registration last Wednesday. We understand how disappointed and frustrated many of you are with the process.
We’ve investigated the problem and wanted to make sure we fully understood what happened. After reviewing our server records, we've discovered that the technical problems resulted when thousands of users continually refreshed their browsers. When registration began, we had about 10,000 unique users produce approximately 500,000 requests to the server. Because this same problem occurred during registration last year, causing the site to crash, we posted a warning about it last Wednesday on the homepage of the registration site informing people not to refresh more than once and to use only one browser. We now realize that the warning was not enough as our servers could not handle the load. We’re confident that this problem will be addressed and resolved so that, in the future, the entire process can accommodate the overwhelming demand by our community.
We pride ourselves on creating empowering experiences for our audience and this has clearly fallen short of that. For many years, The Women’s Conference was a one-day event. Because of popular demand, we have continued to expand it over recent years so that more and more women could attend. Now, in 2010, the conference includes three days of six amazing events with top level speakers and authors. While the Main Event is currently sold out -- and there are simply not enough tickets for everyone who wanted one -- tickets do still remain for several of our other extraordinary conference events.
A note to our Women’s Conference Facebook community -- You are part of an important forum to help us better understand what’s on your mind. The complaints and posts during the registration process were very valuable to us and, as you may have seen that day, many of the posters were contacted directly by the registration team. By Friday, we felt it was important to use our Wall to promote the other events that were available for attendees. We received calls in the office from many people unaware that these events were still open and we wanted to get that information out via Facebook without confusion. The intention was never to censor any of your posts. If you have something to say – we want to hear it.
Again, we are truly sorry about the problems encountered last week. We hope that you will consider joining the 30,000 attendees for a life-changing experience in Long Beach in October.
We’ve investigated the problem and wanted to make sure we fully understood what happened. After reviewing our server records, we've discovered that the technical problems resulted when thousands of users continually refreshed their browsers. When registration began, we had about 10,000 unique users produce approximately 500,000 requests to the server. Because this same problem occurred during registration last year, causing the site to crash, we posted a warning about it last Wednesday on the homepage of the registration site informing people not to refresh more than once and to use only one browser. We now realize that the warning was not enough as our servers could not handle the load. We’re confident that this problem will be addressed and resolved so that, in the future, the entire process can accommodate the overwhelming demand by our community.
We pride ourselves on creating empowering experiences for our audience and this has clearly fallen short of that. For many years, The Women’s Conference was a one-day event. Because of popular demand, we have continued to expand it over recent years so that more and more women could attend. Now, in 2010, the conference includes three days of six amazing events with top level speakers and authors. While the Main Event is currently sold out -- and there are simply not enough tickets for everyone who wanted one -- tickets do still remain for several of our other extraordinary conference events.
A note to our Women’s Conference Facebook community -- You are part of an important forum to help us better understand what’s on your mind. The complaints and posts during the registration process were very valuable to us and, as you may have seen that day, many of the posters were contacted directly by the registration team. By Friday, we felt it was important to use our Wall to promote the other events that were available for attendees. We received calls in the office from many people unaware that these events were still open and we wanted to get that information out via Facebook without confusion. The intention was never to censor any of your posts. If you have something to say – we want to hear it.
Again, we are truly sorry about the problems encountered last week. We hope that you will consider joining the 30,000 attendees for a life-changing experience in Long Beach in October.