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CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

behind.pretix.eu

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Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#81

Post by abduhl »

nextn wrote: post #73

An option I'd like to see implemented is to make the customer put down a bond. Besides charging the customer for the ticket, also charge them another higher amount that gets refunded x days after the concert. If the customer is found to be a scalper don't return the bond. Scalpers can't pay high bond amounts at scale combined with the risk of not having the bond returned.

How do you determine scalpers? I buy 6 tickets for me and my friends and we all get sick. Are we scalpers? I buy 1 ticket and a work trip gets foisted on me the next day so I try to resell. Am I a scalper?

Won’t everyone just charge the ticket buyer the price of the bond? So this still only harms the fans that want to see the show. The scalpers just need to have more up front capital in your system.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#82

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

sokoloff wrote: post #78
mystified5016 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more profitable and predictable for scalpers to immediately buy all tickets. The ticket seller doesn't care if the tickets are sold to fans that will attend, just that they're sold quickly and reliably and non-refundably. It's even better if tickets are sold to scalpers because some of those tickets might never be resold, which means the venue gets the ticket sale but pays none of the cost a real guest would inc…

Surely selling concessions, parking, and merch is a significant source of income for someone associated with the concert, game, or other event.

Not the ticketing company's problem.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#83

Post by koch »

What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites.

I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making a request over the internet. Why not? Why doesn't every http request have a corresponding price associated with it? You can access the resource if you pay. I imagine this would be a minuscule amount ($0.00001 or less per request). Then, instead of trying to solve for monetizing eyeballs or personal data, these problems are solved with economics.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#84

Post by Retr0id »

sanity wrote: post #24

A few months back I built a cryptographic alternative to CAPTCHAs called Ghost Keys[1] that uses a small donation as proof-of-humanity. For donating you get an anonymous keypair that works across services without repeated CAPTCHAs. The economic friction doesn't scale for bot operators, and donations fund our non-profit[2]. [1] https://freenet.org/ghostkey/ [2] https://freenet.org/

In the event ticket situation, how does this change the economics compared to just adding $1 to the ticket price? (or whatever your minimum donation threshold is)

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#85

Post by LegionMammal978 »

koch wrote: post #83

What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites. I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making…

From TFA:

> If a spammer needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to access the site only to gain a marginal profit of 0.00005 €, they are losing money with every site access. However, if a ticket scalper needs to spend 0.0001 € in power to buy a ticket that they will later sell at a 200 € profit, this will not stop them.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#87

Post by dspillett »

nextn wrote: post #73

An option I'd like to see implemented is to make the customer put down a bond. Besides charging the customer for the ticket, also charge them another higher amount that gets refunded x days after the concert. If the customer is found to be a scalper don't return the bond. Scalpers can't pay high bond amounts at scale combined with the risk of not having the bond returned.

For popular acts, when scalpers are selling at 10x or more the base price, the bond would have to be pretty high to put the scalpers off, and that would be a problem for many genuine customers. Unless the bond is silly high, that being defined as high enough that it significantly messes with fans, it would still be worth it even if the scalper is noticed and the bond not returned.

> If the customer is found to be a scalper don't return the bond.

This is how most suggestions for solving the problem fall down: how do you, with any reliability, or at least reliably avoiding false positives, detect a scalper?

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#88

Post by harrall »

hackingonempty wrote: post #25

The reality now is the ticket sellers and bands are the main scalpers and everyone else are now secondary scalpers. Now that tickets are all electronic and the ticket sellers operate secondary markets there is no "face value" anymore and pricing is dynamic. Not all tickets are released at once and many are offered at "platinum" prices at first. All through the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's and 00's concert tickets were arou…

Most of my concert tickets are still priced around $40 inclusive, after taxes and fees, and from the likes of LiveNation, Etix, DICE, AXS, and so on.

All my friends that complain about the rising cost of concerts tickets don’t realize that they just see the same old bands year over year. These scrappy up and coming bands that they saw as a kid aren’t scrappy anymore. That’s why blink-182 can charge $700 for the pleasure and still sell out — because most of their fans are in their late 20s or 30s, have disposable income, and number in the millions.

Go to a $20 show for a band today and who knows, maybe they will charge you $700 in 20 years. Plus you can tell everyone that you saw them before it was cool. /s

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#89

Post by everfrustrated »

mqus wrote: post #69
Incipient wrote: post #55

This is a trivially solvable problem with essentially little friction for buyers. The industry doesn't WANT to solve this. I don't see why anyone believes or entertains the idea they are even trying.

The author builds a ticket system and says it's not trivially solveable. What's your trivial solution then?

Sell tickets using an auction to set the price.

Re: CAPTCHAs are over (in ticketing)

#90

Post by landl0rd »

koch wrote: post #83

What I don't quite understand is why we haven't merely come to the conclusion that, like everything else, the internet costs money. Running servers and services costs money, and by giving it away for "free" from the get-go encases certain types of problems in the platform itself. I'm not talking about paying your ISP, I'm talking about accessing websites. I guess what I'm getting at is that there is no cost to making…

This fixes indians in boilerrooms and nigerian spam emailers but specifically not ticket scalpers. The profit is too large.

Also because users don't actually control the number of HTTP requests they make. Think of sites that load individual icons rather than sprite sheets. Think of sites that fire off 1,000 tracking calls per minute. So respectfully screw that.

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