Back by Popular Demand?

Written on Thu 22 Sep 2011

On the 10th of September I opened my inbox to a torrent of complaints from victims of fraudsters. In every case it was the same story. A too-good-to-be-true offer of face-value tickets for a highly-popular even - which turned out to be a complete con. The victims parted with their money - and that was the last they heard. Scarlet Mist had been set up to bring joy and karma to the world, but instead it was bringing grief and misery. I felt that I was partly to blame, and that the only honourable course of action was to shut the site.

The following day I opened my inbox to a torrent of complaints from loyal users. I was overwhelmed with the level of support, affection and enthusiasm that the users had to the site. For example:-

You ... provided a service to meet a lovely bunch of strangers and restore a little faith in humanity.
I feel like I have lost a friend
Absolutely devastated that you’ve gone, thank you for helping me get to all those gigs ticketmaster couldn’t help me with. Please come back soon.  From Heartbroken of Woking

As the emails continued to come in then I realised that the site needed to be reborn - but with as much attention as possible paid to preventing fraud.

And to my surprise I had a couple of emails from Big Players in the ticketing industry, who wanted to look at ways that we could work together. Interesting!

I had been working on a redevelopment for the previous 2 or 3 years, but never seemed to have the time to finish it. Now perhaps, with the day to day running of the site suspended, then it might be possible. I am an amateur programmer, and what I really need is a colleague or partner to work with.