When the ticket page dies the week of the show

Week of the show, the link stops loading. Or the page is up and sales are already closed. Either way the house is selling at the door with whatever is on someone’s laptop.

Community theatre people already say this out loud. The ticket page died when they needed it. They sold at the door. The backup was a spreadsheet and a stack of email confirmations.

Two failure modes, one night

The page is down. Hosting, a vendor outage, a theme that ate the embed. Patrons refresh. The volunteer at the table cannot see who already paid.

Sales closed early. The storefront stops taking money hours before curtain. Walk-ups are told to pay in the lobby. Will-call is a printed list that was current at lunch.

Both nights end the same way: the door is a second box office, built in a hurry, by the people who were supposed to be ushering.

The door is not a backup plan

A volunteer house does not have a spare box-office staff. The person on the laptop is a parent, a board member, or whoever got handed the charger.

The ticket page and the door should be the same sale. We are building Places so the storefront and the house table read one list. A dead link should not become a production of its own.

This page is about the failure, not a vendor scorecard. Named lockups and fee tables belong in research notes until the facts are on a first-party page with an as-of date.