Note: This is taken from an email to ticket purchasers sent this morning, which we’re posting here for visibility.

Hi everyone,

We wanted to shoot an email to you all to say thank you for bearing with us yesterday for what I’d imagine was a frustrating experience and a drain on your sunny Saturday. The great news is you all got there in the end and are joining us in June :).

The problems stemmed from us picking a ticketing platform that we felt had the right features for what we could afford (and for various reasons we couldn’t use Eventbrite or similar), which when it came down to it couldn’t handle so many people trying to buy so many tickets at once. There was no real way to test for this, so we’ve just chalked it down to a learning experience for next time. We’re working on bumping the server to deal with the pressure for this year, so fingers crossed things stay stable from now on and next time we’ll probably look at a different solution for tickets.

Yesterday Dan was up until the wee hours of the morning, checking orders to make sure they were okay, looking for duplicates and resending confirmation emails. We know a few people ended up with duplicate orders where the site gave them an error message on completion so tried to purchase again – we’ve been in touch with everyone where we can see that that’s happened to and initiated a refund, but please have a check of your accounts on the site and keep an eye on your bank statement in case that’s happened to you and get in touch.

The other issue we had is users not receiving their tickets and order confirmation. This mostly affected Microsoft users (so outlook, hotmail and live addresses) and we resent confirmation once a fix was in to stop those email domains rejecting the email. Please make sure you have your tickets, they’re in an email with QR codes and a voucher for BLOC hotels – they may be in your spam. If you haven’t, drop us an email and we’ll get it sorted for you.

Once again thank you for supporting the festival. We’ve got loads more events and goodies to announce including more talks, workshops, screenings and a £5 festival pack filled with BDF treats. We’ll be doing updates on social media and the blog when we have new bits in the calendar – these simply haven’t been announced yet due to time / logistics.

Speak soon and see you in June!

The BDF team x