The registration system is always improving. Some cool new things or on the way things . . .

1. Help Tickets. This time of year it is easy for staff to miss emails. We receive emails but don’t answer because we don’t know, or we don’t have time, and pretty soon the email is no longer “above the fold” and it becomes forgotten and unanswered. To prevent this from ever happening again, we are implementing a ticket system called OTRS (“Otters”). It is currently testing on registration@ only, but if all goes well it will go to other very commonly used department emails, and possibly all department emails. It is unlikely we will place it on “personal” or individual snafucon.com emails, but ya never know . . .
2. Gift Codes. Coming 2013 (we hope): You want to buy your friend a badge? Great! You want to protect yourself from future price hikes? Fine! Buy a badge code at full price and it’s good until used! To prevent abuse they must be purchased at full con pricing (no prereg discount, group discount, military discount, or coupons accepted!), and they are completely non-refundable, but other than that there aren’t too many rules beyond “no selling codes.” They’re gift codes – give them away! We hope to have this in place before con starts 2013, but it may not happen until next year.
3. Temporary Badges. Okay so this isn’t something most people would consider “cool” but it is to me. We attempted temp badges last year and it worked out wonderfully. Parents had free access for 5 minutes to find their kids, bloggers had 20 minutes free access to write their articles. It just worked. However, there wasn’t a completed back-end set up so we don’t know who got badges or how many, or how long. To prevent abuse we will be appending the temp badges to the current badge system. This is particularly important this year as we are bringing in performers and panelists which need temp badges. There are like 4 groups of people this year which NEED this system in place.
4. Panel/Programming/Scheduling System. To fix a lot of previous headaches, I’ve been wanting this since 2011. As of 2013, all panels & programming are now handled through the reg system. It’s still new and . . . well, unfinished. But we’re improving on it every chance we get. As of last night (9/10/13) we finished the code to post all approved panels to the site – now you can see what we’re going to be doing as soon as we know we’re doing it! Eventually this will handle our entire scheduling and dynamically create a schedule for you on the website. Eventually.
5. Staff Contracting. Although this isn’t THAT new, it is new as of this year (2013). We have added staff/volunteer contracts to the staff section so that staff can get their contracting process out of the way early. This is a hell of a lot easier than having llama create and distribute contracts via email, then tracking down the people who didn’t return them at con. I’m sure he’ll have to track people down, but the system will generate a nice little list for him. =D
6. Legal Name Opt Out. It’s a relatively hidden option, but it’s an option. As of 2013, we are allowing people to opt out of having their legal names on their badges. We still need your legal name in the system because we still need to make sure that we’re giving YOU your badge, but since we can track everything by badge number, we are going to see how this works. If there is ever any issue with it, we will go back to requiring names be printed on the badge, but until then . . . we’ll see. So if it’s super important to you to replace your legal name with your fan name, look for the option. It’s there . . . somewhere. (No I’m not telling you where, but you’re welcome to ask via email and we just might tell you where to look if you ask nicely.)

That’s about it, I think. There were dozens of small enhancements, bug fixes, and other misc things, but the above are the most notable for 2013.