Business News Live Business

CrowdSurge says modifications to e-ticket system preceded Bloc

By | Published on Monday 16 July 2012

CrowdSurge

CrowdSurge, the company that provided the ticketing technology for this month’s Bloc Festival, which was prematurely shutdown because of crowd management issues, has issued a statement clarifying a point made last week regarding the way in which it generates barcodes for its client’s e-tickets.

As previously reported, allegations have been made that crowd management issues at the Bloc event were down to far too many people gaining access to the site, and some audience members chattering online have suggested this may have been as a result of people exploiting CrowdSurge’s ticketing system to create forged e-tickets.

But CrowdSurge insists that it would have been much more difficult for people to fake barcoded tickets than many online commentators have suggested, and that even if they had, only one ticket with any one barcode would have got through its ticket scanning system, thus not resulting in overcrowding across the festival site. CrowdSurge also says there were no problems with its scanning technology on the night, although promoters chose to stop using it just before 9.30pm.

The company also added that, because “confidence in fans purchasing tickets through the CrowdSurge system and defence against an unscrupulous operator is of paramount importance to us”, it had modified its methodology of barcode generation.

It was easy to infer from that statement that the modification had been introduced as a direct result of the Bloc incident (though, true, that would have required a rapid turnaround), but the ticketing technology firm says that changes in its barcode generation system “commenced being phased into events and corporate clients” three months ago as part of ongoing refinements, and had nothing to do with the Bloc event.

As previously reported, the Bloc company went into administration last week following the shutdown incident, and its administrators are now investigating the circumstances that caused the crowd control issues.



READ MORE ABOUT: |