On Wednesday, some students received false confirmation of floor passes for the Spring Fling concert, resulting from a technical issue. At 10 a.m., the Social Planning and Events Committee posted the Spring Fling floor pass sale form on its Facebook event page but mistakenly sent out confirmation emails to some students, saying that they had won floor passes even though they were not among the first 50 to fill out the form and win.
SPEC has been posting floor pass forms every day this week. For the past three days, tickets have sold out almost immediately upon release.
This morning, however, many excited students received confirmation emails saying that they had won floor passes only to receive an email later saying that “unfortunately, we had some technical difficulties with the floor pass form.”
College junior and SPEC Concerts Co-Director Paul DiNapoli wrote in the to students email that, despite the confirmation email, these students had not actually won because the Google Forms did not close immediately after receiving the first 50 responses. SPEC Concerts had switched from using SurveyMonkey to Google Forms today, hoping that this would prevent people from creating bots to fill out the forms.
“We want to combat people who are writing scripts and creating bots to fill the form out ... we deal with these problems every year, and we were trying to stay ahead of it this year,” DiNapoli said. “Unfortunately, it went live, and by the time I clicked over to the response form, we already had more than 50 responses, so I had to manually close the script.”
Upon receiving the email, College senior Sarah Murayama commented on the Facebook event page that “the high you get when the congrats message pops up is nothing compared to the low you hit when you find out the Google form was messed up and you didn’t really win.”
Other students also took to Facebook to question the transparency of the situation, since the form closed a minute after release at 10:01 a.m. Wharton and Engineering sophomore Robert Dowling commented, saying “I think SPEC should be transparent and release the form entry names and time stamps for validation of that email.”
Two hours later, Dowling commented saying that he had received an email from SPEC with a screenshot of his line entry on the Google sheet. “Update: SPEC was transparent. I was 132nd. Well played,” he posted.
“SPEC is really sorry this happened, but unfortunately the script didn’t work, and ultimately it was not on us. We would love to give everyone a floor pass, but logistically we just can’t do that,” DiNapoli said.
SPEC will continue to sell floor passes on Thursday, March 24, at 4:30 p.m., and on Friday, March 25, at 2:00 p.m.
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