James Pulley’s Post

Many of you have read about the problems being experienced by Ticketmaster as a part of Taylor Swift's latest concert tour. Ticketmaster's challenge with a ticketing spot sale should be highlighting the issue of automated agents and their impact on site performance for every public-facing application. A few stats. 1.5 Million Taylor Swift verified fans were invited to a select opening for tickets. 14 Million hosts showed up. So, either every one of those fans had nine machines running, or something else was afoot. That something else was a smattering of friends that verified fans shared with and an enormous load of robots trying to lock up the tickets for resale. How did this happen? Some 'bot owners were verified fans to start. Other 'bot owners sought to take advantage of exploits identified during verified fan sales for other artists. But, at the root of this is an escalating conflict going on for the better part of a decade between ticket bots and actual site users. The #swifties are just the latest victims in this war. Now that the politicians are involved, they want to further shoot at Ticketmaster instead of impacting the bot and bot network owners. The ticket bot/spot sale problem is complex, and it will take professionals from the performance and security groups working together to solve it. #Marketing, and the artists, will need to accept that some gates designed to foil bots will also frustrate users: A frustrated but successful ticket purchaser is still better than a frustrated and bot-denied attempted purchase. This problem is not unique to the ticketing industry. If you have ever tried to purchase one of the 500 pairs of shoes offered on Nike's website on Saturday morning, you have also had to compete with bots for the purchase. Wherever a limited quantity of a popular product appears for sale, you will likely be competing with a 'bot for purchase. If you have an #eCommerce site, now is a great time to sit down with your performance and security teams to understand how they identify bot activity on your site and how they are hardening your site against their actions. If you need help with this conversation, my team at QA Consultants  is happy to assist. Drop me a note, James Pulley, Chief Performance Officer #performanceengineering #blackfridaysale