The Familiar Ticketing Waiting Room on Fandom Stage: Making the Most Intense Moment as Fair as Possible
Who’s Your Ultimate Bias?
A new program centered around K-pop fandom culture, Fandom Stage, recently premiered and has already been generating plenty of buzz.
Rather than putting artists in the spotlight, Fandom Stage makes the fans themselves the stars. A total of 40 fans representing 10 different fandoms* compete in a survival-style competition to determine the ultimate winning team. The prize? A commemorative outdoor advertisement featuring their favorite artist.
Wanting nothing more than to put up an ad for the artist you love—that might just be the definition of true fandom devotion.
Contestants take part in challenges inspired by real-life fandom culture, from speed-unboxing albums and performing official fan chants to taking concert photos and videos. Each fandom puts years of accumulated experience and know-how to the test, proving just how dedicated they really are.
The First Challenge You Can’t Avoid: Ticketing
The very first mission was enough to make any fan’s heart race: the ticketing battle, one of the greatest joys—and greatest challenges—of being a fan.
Tickets offer fans the chance to see their favorite artists in person, but with only a limited number of seats available, competition is always intense. For many fans, simply hearing the word “ticketing” can bring back some painful memories.
But while watching the show, we spotted a very familiar screen—and couldn’t help but feel a little excited.
‘Waiting to Connect’ — The NetFUNNEL Virtual Waiting Room
The waiting room where countless fans experience moments of joy and disappointment was implemented just like the access waiting screen of STCLab’s virtual waiting room solution, NetFUNNEL.
When ticket sales open, the passion of thousands—or even millions—of fans can hit a ticketing platform all at once, creating traffic volumes that servers may struggle to handle.
If the server crashes under the load, users may face repeated outages and restarts, leaving fans stuck in front of their computers without knowing how long they will have to wait. In the end, ticketing can feel like a matter of pure luck.
NetFUNNEL manages these massive access requests by allowing only as much traffic as the server can safely process, placing excess users in a queue based on their order of arrival, and admitting them sequentially for a stable and fair ticketing experience.
Wherever passionate fandoms gather in Korea, NetFUNNEL is working behind the scenes to help keep digital services running smoothly.
Making the Most Intense Moment as Fair as Possible
With Naverism displaying the ticketing platform’s server time, the tension continued to build until ticket sales finally opened—and the frantic clicking began.
Some contestants successfully passed through the waiting queue and secured one of the 64 available seats across the different seating categories. Others ran into painfully realistic ticketing problems: suddenly being logged out, or losing valuable seconds because they had forgotten to disable their browser’s pop-up blocker in advance.*
*For the longtime fangod members who once lined up at banks to buy tickets in person, modern online ticketing must have felt like a particularly difficult challenge. We’re rooting for you.
Watching everyone focus so intensely on ticketing just to support the artists and fandoms they love—and seeing people brought together by their shared passion cheering one another on—was unexpectedly moving.
We also want to thank the production team for creating such an original and entertaining program.
Most of all, seeing NetFUNNEL appear on Fandom Stage reminded us that our technology is present at some of the most important moments in K-pop culture. It made us proud, but also gave us an even stronger sense of responsibility.
We will continue improving our products and services so that the journey between fans and the artists they love can remain as safe, stable, and fair as possible.
And as for the malicious bots and macros that try to exploit fans’ passion for profit?
We’ll keep taking them on with BotManager.
Here’s to fair ticketing for every fandom.