[FRC BLOG] The Great Registration System Crash of 2016

[sanddrag]

I appreciate that FIRST is honest and open about it, and they made the right call to reschedule to next week. However, many of us waited an hour at our computers, in an ambiguous state not knowing if we were going to register today or not. I'm not sure they even realize how high the stakes are to get into certain events. Certain events literally fill within 120 seconds, or even less.

What FIRST really should have done was had a twitter announcement ready to fire out in the event that something like this happened, and a staff member assigned to do it. They should have seen that they had a problem that they could not resolve by 9:05 AM. They should have been ready to abort the process by 9:10 AM, and a Twitter announcement should have gone out no later than 9:15 AM at the latest, whether they had a statement prepared or not. It's not okay to make that many people wait as long as we did, when it's in the middle of the work day. The second they saw they had an issue that would take more than 1 minute to fix, they should have aborted the whole plan, and gone to the plan to release a statement regarding rescheduling of the registration date.

I agree, load was not the issue. I was getting consistent 5-second page refresh times from 8:45 AM PDT right up to 8:59:56 PDT when I did my last refresh. At 9:00:02 the page immediately loaded with a run-time error.

I appreciate them calling it off, but I just wish it had happened (via twitter, facebook, e-mail, etc) long before 10AM.

Let this be a lesson for FIRST not only in registration, but in the fact that they need to have plans and procedures in place to widely distribute information out to their teams in a more timely fashion than a 1-hour delay.