Internal talk:Registration

My comments on regsitration page. Kill me if I'm too late :P

And my reply. Sorry for threading like this.

Attendance

Euro sign should be AFTER price. But then that's just me, and it should be written in letters anyway, cos I'm sure some people either : don't know it, or can't see it
I'm pretty sure it should be before, at least for the English form. The euro symbol is an html entity, one your browser can render as € or EUR or E$ or "foo" for all anyone really cares.
How come Monday outings is a radio button?
Because you can't register for the full conference and a day pass. That would be really expensive, anyway.
- Can't I register for the full conference AND the Monday outings? This is not very clear to me :P. Monday outings should be a normal button, unchecked at first, checkable at will.
I thought it was clear that registering for the full conference entitled you to attend the full conference.
And how come I can't come for 2 days? I want to be there on Friday and Saturday!!!
Buy two day passes? You can buy those at the door, too, or at conference affairs if you come and decide to stay an extra day.

Personal information

Valid email address should be required so we can confirm payment, reservation and such (make announcements, tell your reservation is going to go dead in five minutes and autodestruct etc.). *I* am not going to run around the wikis to leave people notes on their talk pages.
Nation-state affiliation apears to be a required field, and yet it says "select one, *if* you like". It's not *if*, it's do it or die. :P But then, I am a non-English speaker.
Both of these concerns seem to arise over confusion as to which fields are required. As it says at the very top of the form, "fields marked with an asterisk (*) are optional." I can make the notice red or something, but the very fact that it says "if you like" would seem to make it even more obvious to me. Are people really going to think that we don't require their name and e-mail address, but do require their Wikimedia project affiliation and nickname for badges?
asking for linguistic abilities infers that we expect them to tell us what language they speak at what level. Confusing. I'd say very simply : your preferred language. Your second preferred language. Or something of the kind.
It's a dropdown box. I think they'll get the idea, and even if they don't, there's no way to screw it up.

Accomodation

Difference between Double and Full double? (the bed is bigger? *g*)
"If you and another person are coming as a couple, you have the option of reserving both beds of a double room. Your partner should register individually and select 'none' at this step."
Although I love the Y chromosome comment and the chick/dude thing, you have to consider that the people who are going to use the English interface might not be English-speakers, and might lose the joke and not understand the question. ;)
I can change "a dude" to "male" and "a chick" to "female," thus avoiding all confusion. It was never meant to be more than a placeholder, but people seemed to like the joke, and it stuck.

Volunteer

A coordinator will contact you via e-mail. This goes to prove my point, we need a valid e-mail address :P.
See above.
I'd put 2 checkboxes, such as : Technical help, Miscellaneous (maybe you can get fantastic networkers to help you on site? Or will it be too late already?)
Volunteers will need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis no matter what checkboxes we put up there, and we'll get better information through meaningful dialog.

Payment

At the beginning of the form we need to tell people that they HAVE to pay in order to reserve, but that their registration will go dead after...say...15 days or something, if payment or proof of payment has not been received (ie. a bank statement sent by their bank -we need a fax number! or something like this).
It's on the form twice. Do we really need it there a third time? I had planned to put it on the confirmation page, just for good measure, but there comes a point that it's just gratuitous.
We need to list the other means of payment accepted (bank transfer, cash, checks, money orders?). Check in my opinion, except for Germany, cannot be accepted, it originates way too much loss of money due to bank commissions and stuff. Is cash possible? If yes, how? Money orders need to be well drafted so we don't support any change fees, ie. we get the exact amoount we charge.
Again, it's already there. More detailed information will be on the "pay by other means" page.

And this closes the votes of the French jury. notafish }<';> 12:24, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I hope I'm never arrested in France. Austin 21:57, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Dates and stuff

..should look like this :

Please indicate whether you want to register for the entire conference or a single day. Prices include attendance for all events, lunch at the venue, and wireless network access on-site. Holders of full conference tickets may attend the kickoff party Thursday night.

O Full conference - Friday to Sunday (50 EUR)

O Friday only (20 EUR)

O Saturday only (20 EUR)

O Sunday only (20 EUR)

X Monday outings

Wikimedia has booked a number of rooms at the Haus der Jugend, where the conference will be held. A limited number of rooms are available, so your reservation will not be confirmed until we have received your payment. Prices quoted are per person for all four nights (Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday night), and include breakfast; if you're registering for one day only, or intend to find your own accomodations, you can skip this section.

O Dormitory (shared bedroom, 8-12 beds - 80 EUR per person)

O Small room (shared bedroom, 4 beds - 100 per person)

X I am part of a group and would like to be put in the same room as [FIELD FOR NAMES] (fill in names or nicknames, make sure other people from your group do the same, or find a real cool name for your group)

X I am not part of a group and will share the room with whomever

O Double (shared bedroom, 2 beds - 120 EUR per person)

X I am with one other person and will share this room with [NAME OF PARTNER]

X I am ok to share a room with whomever

NB. Due to the limited number of rooms, we cannot garantee that your wishes be granted. People will be assigned rooms as registrations come in. If you're part of a group and want to be together, be sure to register all the participants at around the same time.

O stands for radio button X stands for checkbox

I don't understand why we should allow people to be part of a group and not part of a group and with another person. I'd love to hear better ideas for booking couples, however. Austin 21:57, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Last notes

Okay, another "Austin will hate me" note, but after filling out the registration form several times and inserting one order after the other I think we need a way for users to cancel a registration if they made a mistake in the form.

before proceeding to Reserved.php/Paypal/credit card we should issue a page where users can see all the data they have filled out: name, e-mail, type of ticket, type of bed... and then give them a button to confirm and proceed to payment.

Use non-breaking space before the * asterisks indicating required fields. Else at certain screen-widths, there are confusing trailing asterisks, at the end of long lines. Sj 02:53, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Excellent idea, now implemented. Austin 06:06, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Notwithstanding a few finishing touches and a little more tinkering with the code for instant payment confirmation, the basic registration system is done. There's now nothing barring us from opening registration in English, German, and French, and if I can get Spanish this week we'll be good to go there.

At this point, I'd like to ask the other coordinators to register yourselves for the conference. For accomodation choose "none" and for payment choose "other means"; I'll then manually fiddle with the appropriate flags in the database. If anything breaks, by all means, tell me; I've tested everything pretty extensively, but a few last-minute changes may have introduced a bug or two.

Which brings me to my next point: this should be done better next time. I'll be the first to admit that this is not my best work, and I'm glad that I have the next year to come up with a better system than the one I hacked out over the last two weeks. Some things I regret not being able to accomplish:

Full multilingualism/multinationalism. The credit card system only speaks English and is a bit jingoistic in its acceptance of world currencies, but five days ago we didn't even have one. A merchant provider supporting tighter integration, along with a proper i18n template system, will solve this.
More comprehensive options for registrants. Believe it or not, my disregard of your suggestions for the registration form didn't come out of some egotistical desire to blow you off, but rather my desperation to meet our impending deadline. As much as I'd have liked to have completely rewritten the booking system on March 30th, it just wasn't happening in the time I had left. (That said, I think that I've addressed the most important points, and for those I haven't I beg your collective forgiveness.)
Future maintainability. In all honesty, I think the only code I'll be reusing is the 700-byte registration.css, and even that's likely to change. As I write this, faced with the task of developing applications for administration, press registration, and checkin, I wish I had been able to implement a more flexible framework for all of this. Expect the next batch of data to be stored in neat little objects, managed by software written in some language other than PHP.

But for now, more immediate goals: as I just mentioned, getting people registered is only the first milestone for the infrastructure needed to make this conference the success we all expect it to be. It's all fine and good to have a list of people in a database and be able to take their money, but assigning them rooms, managing their individual needs, and providing them services on-site is quite another thing. This tired coder will remain tired a while longer. Austin 10:52, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

My experience is that if you can provide us with a daily database, or better, a database we could download at will and work on, we will manage. It is a pain, but if done properly from the start (integration of new registrants everyday, it is manageable. I have done it before and am willing to do it again. notafish }<';> 17:47, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Hacking Days registrants

Because this is a dead, out-of-the-way page that's somewhat on-topic.

mysql> select id, wm, name, email from hackingdays;
+----+------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
| id | wm   | name                  | email                             |
+----+------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
|  1 |    1 | Austin Hair           | austin@austinhair.org             |
|  2 |  154 | Domas Mituzas         | domas.mituzas@gmail.com           |
|  3 |   23 | Brion Vibber          | brion@pobox.com                   |
|  4 |  183 | Anders Wegge Jakobsen | awegge@gmail.com                  |
|  6 |   58 | Luke Bales Stodola    | luke@dxdt.org                     |
|  7 |  328 | Kurt Sanders          | kurt.sanders@intel.com            |
|  8 |  341 | Christian Boese       | im@bnd24.de                       |
|  9 |   10 | Samuel Klein          | meta.sj@gmail.com                 | - can sleep anywhere
| 10 |  363 | Kasper Souren         | guaka@no-log.org                  | - Staying elsewhere?
| 11 |  533 | Tim Starling          | t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au |
| 12 |  374 | Sven Dowideit         | SvenDowideit@home.org.au          | 
| 13 |  379 | Carsten Niehaus       | cniehaus@kde.org                  |
| 14 |   20 | Jama Poulsen          | jama@debianlinux.net              |
| 15 | NULL | Jan Kneschke          | jan@kneschke.de                   |
| 16 |  518 | Rory O'Connor         | roc@globalvision.org              | - Globalvision
| 17 |  522 | Ascánder Suárez       | Ascander@gmail.com                | - OSI (HdJ)
| 18 |  538 | Mark Bergsma          | mark@nedworks.org                 |
| 19 | NULL | Danny Schechter       |  Danny@mediachannel.org           | - Globalvision
+----+------+-----------------------+-----------------------------------+
18 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Others who are planning to come:
              JD Ruiz (Mon - Thurs) - OSI (HdJ)
              Eugene Kim  (Mon - Thurs) - we're lodging him.  (HdJ) 
              Ward Cunningham  (Wed, Thurs) - we're putting him in a hotel
              Christophe Ducamp (Thurs) + 2 others - can find own lodging; wrote delphine.
              Ludovic Dubost   (Thurs) - finding own lodging.
              Luis Fagundes  (Mon - Thurs) - Speaker. Morcego 3D Framework.

Accomodation

Sunday: mysql> select id, name from hackingdays where acc_sun='yes';
+----+-----------------------+
| id | name                  |
+----+-----------------------+
|  3 | Brion Vibber          |
|  4 | Anders Wegge Jakobsen |
|  8 | Christian Boese       |
| 11 | Tim Starling          |
| 12 | Sven Dowideit         |
| 13 | Carsten Niehaus       |
| 15 | Jan Kneschke          |
| 18 | Mark Bergsma          |

Monday: mysql> select id, name from hackingdays where acc_mon='yes';
+----+-----------------------+
| id | name                  |
+----+-----------------------+
|  3 | Brion Vibber          |
|  4 | Anders Wegge Jakobsen |
|  8 | Christian Boese       |
|  9 | Samuel Klein          |
| 11 | Tim Starling          |
| 12 | Sven Dowideit         |
| 13 | Carsten Niehaus       |
| 14 | Jama Poulsen          |
| 15 | Jan Kneschke          |
| 17 | Ascánder Suárez     |
| 18 | Mark Bergsma          |

Tuesday: mysql> select id, name from hackingdays where acc_tue='yes';
+----+-----------------------+
| id | name                  |
+----+-----------------------+
|  3 | Brion Vibber          |
|  4 | Anders Wegge Jakobsen |
|  8 | Christian Boese       |
|  9 | Samuel Klein          |
| 11 | Tim Starling          |
| 12 | Sven Dowideit         |
| 13 | Carsten Niehaus       |
| 14 | Jama Poulsen          |
| 15 | Jan Kneschke          |
| 16 | Rory O'Connor         |
| 17 | Ascánder Suárez     |
| 18 | Mark Bergsma          |
| 19 | Danny Schechter       |

Wednesday: mysql> select id, name from hackingdays where acc_wed='yes';
+----+-----------------------+
| id | name                  |
+----+-----------------------+
|  3 | Brion Vibber          |
|  4 | Anders Wegge Jakobsen |
|  8 | Christian Boese       |
|  9 | Samuel Klein          |
| 11 | Tim Starling          |
| 12 | Sven Dowideit         |
| 13 | Carsten Niehaus       |
| 14 | Jama Poulsen          |
| 15 | Jan Kneschke          |
| 16 | Rory O'Connor         |
| 17 | Ascánder Suárez     |
| 18 | Mark Bergsma          |
| 19 | Danny Schechter       |