A group of York students has won the opportunity to have their very own I-phone application developed after winning The App Challenge final, held at the Ron Cooke Hub on Wednesday, January 18.
YUSU Welfare officer Bob Hughes has warned students to be vigilant after a student loans phishing scam has been revealed.
Her Majesty the Queen will be visiting York on Maundy Thursday, 5th April, as part of the 800th anniversary of York’s Charter for the traditional “Royal Maundy” ceremony.
A flood caused by a heating system “failure” forced the university IT services to shut down many essential systems on Sunday night, causing problems for many students on the eve of their exams and assignment due-dates.
Many people were caught up in the frustration of SinneD’s ticket sales last Friday. Tickets for the annual Big D event, which is due to take place on Thursday week 10 in Derwent and Langwith, went on sale at 12pm on the YUSU website, but within a minute the system crashed, unable to cope with the high volumes of people and continued to show the message “shop capacity exceeded” or “internal server error”, much to my frustration and the annoyance of several thousand students.
The crash initially affected the YUSU by-elections which were due to close on that day. They were then extended by a day. The system break down also caused difficulties for other societies selling event tickets through the website.
To try and cut down on the number of people constantly pressing refresh, YUSU issued a statement on their website saying “If you are trying to purchase Big D tickets, please be patient. Repeatedly reloading our website only compounds the problem, and forces us to sell the tickets much more slowly.”
YUSU Democracy and Services Officer, Lewis Bretts, said that changes to the YUSU website had been made to try and deal with the influx of people buying tickets, as they also had similar problems last year. He criticised the Big D committee for falsely advertising that last year tickets sold out within 45 minutes, and that servers of the University of York, which hosts their website, could not cope with the high volumes of people. He added, “historically Big D organisers have been quite happy when the website runs into problems on ticket sale day, and I haven’t received any complaints from this year’s Big D team.” He had no further comment to make to the Yorker, in response to Nouse’s article.
Tim Ngwena, YUSU President, expressed his annoyance on the SinneD events page that people seemed to be considering that the only purpose for the YUSU website was for Big D. “What about Society Re-Ratifications, Elections for Rag, YUSU Volunteering & 21 Plus Committee?” He said, “servers that can support 1500 secure encrypted transactions in 1 hour cost the sky for just 1 time in the year, YUSU is a charity!”
Derwent Vice-Chairs Emma Warren and Felicity Saunders tried to reassure people on Friday that they would be able to sell tickets, but as it got to 11pm when the last ticket went, many people who had being trying to get tickets all day missed out. They wrote on the Facebook group that because of the confusion, the name on the ticket would not matter, as many people buying multiple tickets were not receiving purchase order receipts by email. Saunders also said she had removed 100 tickets from the website because they considered the ‘pot luck’ of people’s refresher buttons working as being ‘unacceptable’ and that the rest of the tickets ‘would be sold at a later date’. She apologised for what had happened, saying, “we are genuinely sorry that this has happened as we wanted this to run as seamlessly as possible to ensure satisfaction.”
Although they sold the first 100 tickets at a launch party in the Pitcher and Piano on Thursday night, the organisers have come under some criticism for selling most of the tickets online and falsely advertising, directly causing YUSU’s website to freeze. Saunders said that they had decided to sell tickets online because ‘it seemed the fairest way’, stating that because the website did not break down last year, they did not think it would be so much of a problem. She added, “we carefully discussed the best way of selling tickets and decided this was the best way. We did consider staggering ticket sales but there would still be the same demand and we were worried it would be confusing.”
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