In your opinion, What is an appropriate Web order lock timeout? Ours is currently set at 7 hours but I think that is too much. How long do you wait to determine a session is abandoned?
Thanks,
Marty
Ours is set to 30 minutes. Might seem like a really short amount of time compared to your 7 hours, but we don't have any problems with this and find that it's better for our Box Office staff as the tickets are released fairly quickly allowing them to sell them on (especially if we have a big onsale)
Hi,
Our Web Order llock Time out is set to 20 minutes, again we don't have any problems with this. It makes it a lot easier during high profile event pn sales as we are not waiting for longer than 20 minutes for tickets to become available.
In your opinion, What is an appropriate Web order lock timeout? Ours is currently set at 7 hours but I think that is too much. How long do you wait to determine a session is abandoned? Thanks, Marty -- View this message online at: http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/forums/p/149/450.aspx#450 Catherine Goodwin Ticket Operations Harbourfront Centre 235 Queens Quay West Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8 Office: (416) 973-4000 x 4850 Fax: (416) 954-0366 cgoodwin@harbourfrontcentre.com www.harbourfrontcentre.com heart of toronto's waterfront Harbourfront Centre A 10-acre public trust powered by the creative cultures of Canada and the world.
Thank you all for the responses, I though we were a little off base.
From: Tessitura Ticketing Forum [mailto:forums-ticketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Catherine Goodwin Sent: Wednesday, April 08, 2009 1:13 PM To: Martin A. Jones Subject: Re: [Tessitura Ticketing Forum] Web Order Lock Timeout
We have it set for 15 minutes, and bump it up to 30 minutes when packages go on sale. This works most of the time, but we struggle with the few high-profile, fast on-sales we have. We have tried decreasing the time to 5 minutes for just one day, but still find that these on-sales are hard to manage. Web customers immediately grab all of the seats and then don't buy them all, while phone customers get seats at a slower pace and then find that better seats are released and become available a few minutes later. This would not be a problem (we could, for example, hold an allocation of seats to be sold only on phones), but we find some particularly rabid fans compare notes with each other about what exact seats they got and at what exact time. We end up fielding a few complaints each time - all about fairness and equal access to seats. If anyone has any creative solutions to the busy on-sale issue, I'd love to hear them. Thanks - Catherine Marty Jones wrote:
-- View this message online at: http://www.tessituranetwork.com/COMMUNITY/forums/p/149/450.aspx#450 Catherine Goodwin Ticket Operations Harbourfront Centre 235 Queens Quay West Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8 Office: (416) 973-4000 x 4850 Fax: (416) 954-0366 cgoodwin@harbourfrontcentre.com www.harbourfrontcentre.com
heart of toronto's waterfront Harbourfront Centre A 10-acre public trust powered by the creative cultures of Canada and the world.
Ours is 14 minutes, but the original plan was 8, which was ultimately deemed unkind to those patrons less comfortable with the internet.
Ours are also set to 30 minutes; we feel that changing this time depending on whether membership sales or general public sales are open would aggravate our customers (who are a littel resistant to change) and so we decided on 30 mins as a happy medium.
Also, many of our customers book more than one performance at a time (searching for specific seats); and so we felt that 30 minutes would give them enough time to do this.
I just wanted to point out that you can now deal with this programatically, with the new v8.0 AlterTicketExpiration method. This method allows you to extend (or shorten) the time left on the current connection. So, for example, you could set your global timeout setting to 10 minutes and then extend each session by 5 minutes whenever something is added to the cart. That way you don't have to start with a long timeout period but the timeout gets extended every time a shopping action is taken.
Actually, I think there's a bit of confusion in this thread. The "Order Lock Timeout" setting in T_defaults, which Marty's original question was about, I think, is not the setting that controls how long seats are held in a web shopping cart before they time out
That one, which is the one that Chuck's helpful note is about, is the seat server .config setting:
SessionTimeoutMinutes ="20"
in TessituraSeatServerService80.exe.config.
The "Order Lock Timeout" setting in T_defaults is a bit more obscure, and has to do with locking Orders, not Seats - according to the t_defaults notes it does this:
"When an existing order is loaded into a web cart (typically for a subscription renewal), the order must locked. To avoid having these orders locked indefinitely (which would happen if the web session was abandoned), this setting allows the order to be loaded again if the original locking web session is over n minutes old. This setting determines that amount of time. The default is 720 minutes."
I have a feeling that distinction confuses people - it certainly confused me initially.
Ken McSwain
How this file can be accessed to change the setting?
This is not a setting in a file that you alter--this is a method that allows you to programatically alter the timeout from your web application. Just like you call web methods to control other aspects of your application.
Our website designed and managed by Datacom. Does that mean this method can be accessed and modified by them only.
The default settings for all sessions is stored in the Seat Server configuration file under the key SessionTimeoutMinutes. So you can change that setting if you want to affect all web settings. Please go ahead and open a support ticket if you need more detailed information.
Thanks.