Several weeks ago I set up an event in CC and set it a 40 registrants. I opened it at 12 noon on the day everyone who was interested in registering knew. In 18 minutes it was full and it self closed registration and seemed to work flawlessly. We had five more spaces open so I went back into the same event and set the number of registrations allowed to 45 and it then showed 5 openings and I sent out emails to those interested and opened it today at 12 noon and some how (even though it still says 45) CC allowed 51 people to register. We don't have the extra space so we had to refund money and disappoint quite a few people. This is the first year we used CC for the EVENT (we had used CC for emails for several years). This is an embarrassment to our event and I need to know what caused it. Any help or suggestions would be helpful.
That would indicate the link inserted was the "Register Someone" link that allows you to override closed events which is functioning as designed. If that is not the case, we are currently aware of a defect in our system that would be causing this. At this point we are only fixing critical bugs for our current event campaign feature, so unfortunately no new development will be done. Although, we have developed a deep integration with Eventbrite so that you can easily add an event to an email, track registrations and send follow up emails. We encourage you to try out Eventbrite and give us your feedback. Thank you!
"override" in the URLs. What I did which I am wondering if it caused the problem was send the event link from the event page (at the top) to the same email list via CC email when some said they didn't get the invitation. I am wondering if that link is different than the invitation link which was also sent to the same list. When clicking on both they come to the same event page but I am wondering if they were counted differently.
Second related question - when does the Event lock the person in -- when he starts filling out the form or when he comes back from Paypal and hits submit. We gave people the option of PAYPAL or Pay by Check and it seems the persons who hit pay by check got in before those that selected PAYPAL. It would seem that pay by check is certainly quicker.
The link you described should work everywhere, that Event URL is intended to be used on websites, or for sharing via social media, but there shouldn't be a problem with sharing it through an email campaign. The problem you've described does make sense though. It doesn't mark that someone has completed their registration until they've finished their payment, so yes choosing 'pay by check' could be significantly faster.
It doesn't count-down the number of slots available until after the registration completes, however once we've sent the information to Pay-Pal, we won't cancel/close that registration. So if there are a few people in the process of paying through Pay-Pal, and in those few moments others register through check, it could lead to a slight over-booking, just as you described. It's rare to see that many that happen to be processing at the exact same time, but that is one of the limitations that lead to us leaning towards the integrations with the event specialists at EventBrite.