jk80

I think voting that you "didn't like it" and approving of the way it was run are two different things. We had a great day and I'm glad we went, but that doesn't take away from some of the poorly run aspects of the event, and doesn't excuse them either.

I didn't find the entry queuing for the event itself to be at fault, it was the queuing for B stage tickets and main stage events that had a lot of issues, as is well documented in other posts on this forum and elsewhere.

There were loads of people videoing. The stewards were going round asking people to stop when they spotted them. Despite requests, there were also loads of people using flash photography. I get how flash photography can be annoying for the guests, but what's the problem with filming, really?

ha really, I didn't watch the vid.

Sounds like they may have been better devoting this space to more seating for Stage B or merchandise, with all due respect to the performers.

ah fair play!

Ah, I'd heard it was a hoax.

Ha yeah I think I saw her too, very nice!

Whether they are paid or not is of no concern to the customer. The customer just wants them to do the job right! One could easily interpret the fact that volunteers were used as a further penny-pinching, profit-maximising measure by those running the show, to be honest, although fair play to those people for doing their best for free that day.

Yes that's what I thought.

Reckon they're likely to come back, given the way it was run, would it have made no difference to them?

What did Avery Brooks say in the opening ceremony that summed it up?

Good luck to you. There was a talk involving Denise Crosy and a few others at about that time this morning and I believe it was mostly empty because people hadn't been able to get tickets yet and were still queuing. I'd get there as early as you can and pray they've upped their game.

Wow, hopefully tommorow things will be quieter, as I'm going tomorrow only. May not get there till about 0915 though so by the time I get in and then get to the free talks queue I could find myself waiting over an hour and end up finding out they ran out of talk tickets . If I am lucky enough to get there though with tickets still available, what do you generally do? Do you ask for the talks you wish to see, or do they just hand over something to you? I'd look at the timetable and plan out your day. If you've paid for other talks or photo ops then look at the B stage timetable and see which things you can and would like to see. Then when you get to the people handing out tickets you can just say eg, "two tickets for Michael Dorn and Brent Spiner please" or whatever. They'll give you the little blue tickets, they're nothing fancy. We were slightly concerned because we wanted three tickets for things and there were only two of us present because our third person was at another talk, but there didn't seem to be a problem with getting however many you wanted, within reason.

Yes, it's by the free talks stage, the B stage. Unless they have miraculously sorted it tomorrow I strongly advise anyone going to get in that queue as soon as you can if you want to see the free talks.

Well we've had a great day in the end but I have to say the process of distributing tickets for the free talks on the B stage was pretty awful. Basically no signage, nobody to ask what was going on, and once we discovered it, the mother of all queues to get these tickets. It snaked around and around and around and we were stood in it for an hour and a half, easy. What was at the end of the queue? Two people with a small portable table with a wedge of free tickets, tearing them off and handing them out as quickly as they could. There should have been more like a dozen people doing this. We were lucky, we got there about 0930 and joined the queue and in the end got tickets for the things we wanted to see, Brent Spiner, Michael Dorn and so on. But I pity people who joined the queue later and didn't get hold of these tickets, as they were limited in number. It surely would have been much better to have pre-distributed these tickets beforehand online, so you can make x number of reservations according to how many event tickets you've bought. I'm grateful to have seen these big stars without an extra charge, but in this case I think I would have paid a fiver for each one to just have a ticket sent in advance and to not have to stand in such a huge queue for so long, just because the organisers didn't assign more people to doling out the tickets. Even getting into these events was a bit of a nightmare. Two small entrances with hundreds of people trying to get in or out, it was just cramped and chaotic. Some people queueing for tickets, some queueing to get into one talk, some for another and so on, with no proper organisation of queueing lanes, signage and so on.

Yep Spiner defo tweeted that he would be here, I retweeted it but it does seem to have vanished. Also the post I put on this forum saying this was taken down very quickly. I don't understand all the cloak and dagger.