Thousands of people were prevented from signing up for fall swim lessons Monday morning when an external system failure temporarily downed the Vancouver Park Board registration site.
The problem was not with a new, third-party registration service provided by Texas-based ActiveNet, but with the credit card processing service. Park board general manager Malcolm Bromley would not name the company.
“This wasn’t a problem with the registration system, it was a problem with payment. Sometimes you go to a restaurant and they say, ‘Sorry Visa is down, cash only.’ It was one of those situations. It was outside of our control, it was outside of ActiveNet’s control,” said Bromley on Monday once the problem was addressed.
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“We’re really thrilled with ActiveNet, it’s been a terrific system,” said Bromley. “This unfortunately was just bad timing. Once we started again at noon, it was able to process 3,000 people so it can really handle the system.”
Registration for roughly 10,000 spaces in aquatic programs opened at 9 a.m. Aug. 10. Minutes later, the first of hundreds of questions and complaints popped up on social media with the city’s hashtag #ParkBoardNewReg.
Adam James, tweeting as @AdamJamesArch wrote at 9:10 a.m., “Registration works but payment system crashing? ‘Busy encrypting credit card’ message.”
The city had widely promoted the improved cloud-based ActiveNet, which replaced the cumbersome and out-date Safari software the city had used for more than a decade. Bromley called it “old-school” and “antiquated,” noting it had to be installed on city hardware instead of accessed more remotely.
“Normally we’d have 10 different registration days for aquatics in the past because the system couldn’t handle it, and now we’re doing it all in one day,” he said. “It’s hard to believe it right now because of the payment problems which caused delay today, but it’s light-years ahead of where Safari was in its ability to process registrations.”
Nonetheless, Monday’s glitch harkened back to the repeated registration problems associated with signing up for Park Board classes and lessons. Frustration was high, and parents — even once notified registration would open again at noon — vented concerns they were wasting time and their children would miss out.
The park board apologized.
“I want to reassure parents that we’ve gone to great lengths to come up with this new registration system that we love and we have a lot of confidence in and that it wasn’t them,” said Bromley. “It wasn’t their system and it wasn’t us.”
