WordCamp SF is less than 3 days away, wow! Seems like we’ve been waiting for this weekend forever, and excitement among the organizing team is at a peak.
We’ve made our lists and checked everything twice: badges, check. T-shirts, check. Lunch, check. But what we’ve also counted was over 50 unclaimed ticket purchases, yikes!
What’s an unclaimed ticket, you ask? Well, this year we introduced a registration flow that tied your WordCamp ticket purchase to wordpress.org profiles. It’s been so cool to see all the WordPress.org profiles showing who’s bought tickets to WordCamp SF! An unclaimed ticket is one that was purchased but left blank of any registration info like name, t-shirt size, meal preference, and wordpress.org username — in short, all the information we need to know that it’s a real person and not a ticket squatter. 🙂
We ended up with a lot more unclaimed tickets than we thought we would, even after we emailed people a bunch of times with requests to confirm their ticket purchases (like before we ordered event badges and t-shirts). Next year we’ll build in some kind of automatic notices and returns, but in the meantime, we have to call time on this year’s registration.
Because we’re not sure if the people holding tickets with the name “Unknown Attendee” plan to attend WordCamp SF or not, and because hunting down the purchasers of over 50 unclaimed tickets at registration is going to make registration for the other 1000ish attendees pretty painful, we’re now going to refund all of those unclaimed tickets, removing them from our registration lists.
To be clear, this only affects you if your name was never even on a ticket. Only tickets with the name “Unknown Attendee” will be cancelled and refunded.
If you have been holding on to an unclaimed ticket and you DO plan to attend WordCamp SF, don’t freak out! We’ll be selling walk-in tickets at the door (and hand-writing name badges), so you won’t miss out on all the fun.
Can’t wait to see you all on Saturday morning!
