Waiting Rooms

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Overview

Virtual waiting rooms protect a company’s ticket shop during periods of high demand. When more shoppers arrive than the shop can comfortably handle, the waiting room automatically queues excess visitors and releases them in order as space becomes available. This prevents the shop from becoming overloaded and ensures every customer gets a fair chance to purchase, regardless of their device or internet speed. Waiting room settings are configured per company from the company edit page in the hub. The hub also provides a real-time monitoring dashboard that shows queue activity across all companies.

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How It Works

The waiting room operates on a simple threshold model:

1. Every visitor to a company’s ticket shop is tracked by session.
2. As long as the number of active visitors stays below the Maximum number of simultaneous shoppers threshold, everyone accesses the shop normally.
3. Once the threshold is exceeded, new visitors are placed into a queue and shown a waiting room page with their position.
4. As existing shoppers leave or become inactive, queued visitors are released into the shop in the order they arrived.

The system maintains separate queues for human visitors and automated bots, so bot traffic does not displace real customers.

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What Shoppers See

When placed in the waiting room, shoppers see a branded page (using the company’s theme colours and branding) that displays:

• A “You are now in line” header
• Their current position in the queue, which updates automatically
• An animated progress bar showing movement through the queue
• The option to receive a browser notification when they reach the front
• A link to give up their spot if they change their mind

The page polls for position updates at intervals that scale with queue depth — shoppers near the front receive faster updates (every 15 seconds) while those further back poll less frequently (up to 90 seconds) to reduce server load. When a shopper reaches the front of the queue, the page automatically redirects them into the ticket shop.

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Inactivity and Hold Time

Two timers work together to keep the queue moving: The inactivity timeout ensures abandoned sessions don’t block the queue. The maximum hold time prevents a single shopper from occupying the site indefinitely during a high-demand sale.

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Configuring Waiting Room Settings

Waiting room settings are found in the Waiting room settings section on the company edit page. These settings control whether the waiting room is active and how it behaves.

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Settings Reference

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Choosing the Right User Limit

The Maximum number of simultaneous shoppers value depends on the company’s expected traffic patterns:

• Too low — shoppers are queued unnecessarily during normal traffic, creating frustration when the shop could handle more visitors
• Too high — the shop may become overloaded during peak demand before the queue activates, leading to slow page loads and failed checkouts
• A starting point of 200 works for most companies, but high-demand events may benefit from a lower threshold to maintain checkout stability

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Custom Waiting Room Text

Companies can customise the text shown on the waiting room page. The Waiting room options section (labelled “Here you can add more specific text to your waiting room. This will replace the generic text when users are waiting to access your shop”) provides two text block fields:

• Waiting room text block one
• Waiting room text block two

These replace the default queue messaging when configured, allowing companies to include event-specific information or instructions for waiting shoppers.

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Monitoring Waiting Rooms

The Waiting rooms dashboard in the hub provides real-time visibility into queue activity across all companies. This page is accessible to users with the Access Dev Tools permission. The dashboard displays:

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Per-Company Statistics

Each company with an active queue shows: Companies are sorted by the number of humans waiting, so the busiest queues appear first. The dashboard also shows a warning count of companies that do not have the waiting room enabled.

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Cloudflare Waiting Rooms

The dashboard additionally displays Cloudflare waiting room statistics where configured. These are infrastructure-level waiting rooms that operate at the DNS/CDN layer, separate from the application-level waiting rooms described above. Each Cloudflare entry shows the host, path, number of queued users, and number of active users.

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