Hello! Some of you may have received multiple copies of your Norwescon 41 registration email (titled “Norwescon 41 Preregistration eTicket”). You also may have noticed that there’s a large blank area where normally there would be policies and rules. Whoops!

In short: we had some minor behind-the-scenes hiccups and we apologize. We hope we haven’t caused too much confusion. If you received multiple copies of the email, it does not matter which version you bring with you. Also, while bringing the form helps keep our registration lines moving quickly, we can look you up in the system without it. So there’s a backup plan, in case your print gets left at home as you pack for the convention! The mysterious invisible policies you are being asked to agree to are available on our website on our Policies and Guidelines page. So don’t panic!

Want the longer peek-behind-the-curtain?

The registration system we use, Convention Master, has an awesome (for us) feature that limits the amount of emails sent in a period of time. This way we don’t get flagged as being a spammer for sending 1,400 emails out all at once, or have to manually split the membership list into chunks to avoid this.

Convention Master also takes advantage of a scheduler called ‘cron’ (not to be confused with the deity that Conan follows, Crom) to schedule tasks like executing the script that sends emails.

However, it turns out that we had our settings tweaked so that the two different schedulers interfered with each other, leaving the Convention Master server with 1,000+ emails queued up with nowhere to go. Completely our fault! So, we cleared the queue, reset the scheduling processes, and out went the emails—which caused some people to get the email more than once.

Upon the matter of the invisible policies text, or “Dude, where’s my agreement?”

Much of Convention Master is made up of areas we use consistently year-round. But there are the parts that we use once per year—like setting up this Agreement text that should have linked to our policies document. When we forget how to do this, it ends up blank. We have made a note for next year (alongside our other notes!) to make sure we have that text.

In the interim, you can try waving your wizard’s wand over the square and say “mischief managed!” If that doesn’t work, just check the Policies and Guidelines page on our website.

Once again, we apologies for the confusion. We look forward to seeing you in a few days at Norwescon 41!