Parents battle technical troubles at city swimming class 'The Hunger Games'

2 laptops, 2 iPads, 2 The iPhone, and clever pre-planning It took Rob and Grace Butler to enroll their little daughter for fall swim lessons Monday night in Ottawa City. The Butlers were among those who managed to earn a spot in what some call swimming lessons "The Hunger Games," a regular competition for limited space in the city's recreational programs. .

"A friend warned me that this was going to be a problem, so I'm basically just sitting on the website," Rob Butler said on Tuesday.

} Like many parents who tried to log in when registration opened at 9 p.m., on Monday, Butlers discovered that the ottawa.ca website had crashed.

"The entire website was down with a 503 Denial of Service error," Butler said.

But the couple had a trick. It was a URL that bypassed the main landing page and went directly to the course page. About 15 minutes later I had his daughter register.

"Oh my god, it was like winning the lottery. We got in," said Butler. "It's hilarious, but it wasn't hilarious at the time."

Twitter was inundated with complaints Monday night and Tuesday from other parents frustrated with the process. did. But there is good news for the future, Stitzville Coun said. Glen Gower. Later this year, perhaps in November, he plans to move to a cloud-hosted system that can handle the demands of web traffic that his current configuration can't handle.

Gower remembers her teenage daughters' frustrations when they were young.

"Push update, update, update seemingly forever until it finally gets into the system. And people still have to do it now," he said.

"Rather than performing registrations from our own servers, which are clearly unable to handle too many requests at once, we are moving to third-party hosting with the ability to manage demand. said Gower.

"Currently they are procuring, testing and implementing, and are close to their goal of launching in the fall."

This Parent Ariel Troster, a candidate for Somerset County Councilor in the fall local elections, spent more than two hours booking her daughter's sessions and tried unsuccessfully to drive to the Botanical Recreation Center to register in person. Did.

"I pushed her refresh until eleven o'clock," he said Troster. "In the end I got something, but not at a pool near me. It wasn't a good time, but I got something. I'm tech savvy, I have multiple devices and , I was able to hop in the car and try it out at the community center, and if it was hard for me, I can only imagine how hard it would be for someone who doesn't have the time or energy."

She worries about the fairness of a system that favors those who stick with the know-how and resources.

"This is hitting the most vulnerable hardest. More choices. For some people, this becomes completely impossible for people who are tied to their neighborhoods, such as having no devices, no devices, etc. And that's really unfair."

capital district. Sean Menard said he was also frustrated with the system that enrolls the 3-year-old and her 6-year-old on the show.

"We inquired about this being fixed early in theperiod and were told that a solution would be provided to handle the inflow," Menard said in an email. said. “That was in 2019, 2020, 2021. We know this system is reaching the end of its life and staff say it will be resolved in the coming months.

Some frustrated parents mocked the city's aging system on social media. computer methods of the 1980s), and liken the process to entering a radio contest with a rotary phone.