I see that the FIRST events page hasn’t been updated to show how many teams are registered for each regional; I can’t get in touch with our team contact to see if we registered since Martin County schools are still closed from the hurricane.
Has anyone registered? Today is the first day of registration, right? I don’t see it listed in CD’s upcoming events banner.
It seems everyone is desperately hitting the refresh button and the site will be down for a while.
:rolleyes:
The newest one is
This service is temporarily unavailable. Please do not call FIRST. Please try again later. (TIMS)
Oh well.
So let’s try to help them and stop reloading… And hope we don’t miss our spot 
Was up for about 30 seconds then went back down. I really like hitting F5 though
I got in for about 5 seconds but when I clicked add regional it kicked me off. The disappointment! :ahh:
The one newer than that is
“This service is temporarily unavailable. Please DO NOT CALL FIRST. Please try again later. (TIMS)”
I think maybe they are just a tad irritated with the phone calls? So let’s stop calling them and bogging things down by clicking “Proceed” 30 times a minute - they obviously know that people are having trouble registering, so perhaps we should all be PATIENT, go take a little break, and give FIRST time to get everything in order?
I can’t believe it’s been overloaded! There are what, about 1200 teams? So at most one person from each team is trying to get in. They can’t design a system that can handle 1200 requests at once? Seems ridiculous… They seem to have this capacity problem every year…
<edit> got to the Payment info page… and it’s all last year’s info.
If we miss out registering for our first pick, because of their server capacity problems, we’ll be very upset…
I finally got thru, and signed up for an event. Interestingly, the invoice lists last year’s info: $5000 for first event, due December 1 2003.
Took a while but 123 is signed up for Detroit complete with e-mail confirmation from FIRST 
The TIMS system was very slow this morning as we were trying to update our information from last year… and we kept getting kicked out. I have tried every 5 minutes or so since then to register and either cannot get into the system, or get kicked out at various steps. It’s frustrating but there’s not much you can do; sicne I work in an IT department I am sympathizing for the folks that are working on the system.
Very frustrating. I keep getting closer and closer to the finish. Then I get an “invalid session ID” error and have to start again.
I’m in IT too, and I built a website that was able to handle more than 3500 users at a time.
Yay… finally, as I was typing this I got my confirmation page. We’re registered for Manchester!
Very few database systems can handle 1200 updates/sec. Yes it’s possible, but it takes a well designed system. Would you pay an extra $1000 registration fee for a database engineer and serious hardware?
I beleive it was 2 years ago, FIRST had a license for filemaker that allowed 10 concurrent connections. Knowing they would be in trouble if they let everyone directly connect, they implemented another computer as a proxy that would only let 10 people through to the database server at a time. However, the number of connections swampped the proxy and nobody could get through to anything.
EDIT: Since you’re in IT, and in the general proximity of Manchester, would you consider volunteering to help them with their capacity issues?
If we miss out registering for our first pick, because of their server capacity problems, we’ll be very upset…
Last year, no regional filled up after the first set of registrations. You may have to worry about your second choice in a few weeks, but you should be set now.
This is actually helpful… (working on it as I type this)… The first time I got an error message & tried restarting which sent me back to the beginning… Now, every time I try to go to the next page I get an error… I give it the old F5 & retry to load the page & so for it is working. Slow process but it is some progress…
Until I got this
Authentication Error
Error: Invalid Session ID
Tips:
Don’t double-click on buttons, tabs, or links. Click once, then wait for the page to refresh.
Don’t use the Back or Refresh buttons in your web browser. Only use the navigation buttons in the Team Information Management System interface.
Bookmarked links to the system don’t work because the Session ID is changed each time you logon.
When you logon, any other sessions you have open will be logged off. Simultaneous access to your account from multiple computers and/or browser windows is not allowed.
Guess I’ll try again…
Went back in & it has us registered…
Yay! Team 1504 is official out of MSU and going to the West Michigan Regional! 
Team 1038 is going to the Boilermaker Regional!
Does anyone know when they will start updating how many spots for each are left or even better what teams are going to each one?
thanks
Rumor has it 33 signed up for Detroit
This isn’t official by any means, but I’m guessing that due to the overload on TIMS, they temporarily shut off the updates to the public page, since that draws from the same database. To be honest, I’m surprised the stats page is still working, with the other issues that the TIMS system is having…once the initial rush goes away, I’m sure we will see those numbers changing…
RAGE is officially in at UTC Regional.