2044434 - AXS ticket purchasing website has issues on firefox when trying to buy tickets

Status: NEW

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P1)

Description

[Tony Cinotto [:tcinotto] (UTC-8)]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:153.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/153.0

Steps to reproduce:

when trying to buy a ticket on AXS.com I'll be in the waiting room then when it's my turn I receive an error from AXS that there was an issue and I need to go back to the end of the line. This doesn't happen on chrome. Users on reddit are also reporting issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricForest/comments/1piqt55/dont_use_firefox_browser_for_ticket_purchasing/

A user reported that this didn't happen when they were incongnito mode here: https://www.reddit.com/r/mitski/comments/1r2vsna/anyone_else_get_the_oh_no_error_page_on_axs_when/

Actual results:

When my time was up in the queue i was given an error and sent to the back of the queue

Expected results:

I should have been able to proceed.

Comment 1

[Sky Schubert [:skyschub]]

We have no screenshots of the error and we can't really diagnose this on our own probably, so this is bad. :( James was able to get to a login screen on non-waiting-room'ed events, so we might need to get lucky to even be able to diagnose this.

Comment 2

[Tony Cinotto [:tcinotto] (UTC-8)]

It looks like Gracie Abrams has tickets going on sale on June 5th at 9:00am which I think would result in a waitlist. this might be a good opportunity to test and see if we can reproduce https://www.axs.com/artists/1109243/gracie-abrams-tickets

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

FWIW it looks like this site has very (overly?) sensitive anti-bot tactics. I just visited https://www.axs.com/ and clicked through to 2 artists' upcoming events, and I clicked "Get Tickets" on each:

• The first got me a seat-picker-UI (as expected).
• The second got me to a page saying "Sorry, Your Session Expired. Still Interested? Your session has been open for a while and has expired. If you’d like to keep browsing for tickets, please click on the refresh button below". I suspect this was really a "we think you might be a bot..." black-hole page.
• Refreshing didn't help, and then I opened Chrome for comparison; and there, I got a page saying the following (presumably based on them noticing several requests from my IP address):

To ensure a fair experience for all fans, we actively prevent automated bots from accessing our site.

If you are having trouble, please try these steps to continue:

1. Close any extra browser tabs you have open.
2. Switch to a different browser or device (e.g., Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
3. Clear your cache and cookies (check your browser’s settings menu).
4. Turn off your VPN or Private Relay:
  Private Relay: Apple Support for Mac | Apple Support for iPhone
  VPN: Disconnect from your VPN service in its app or settings.
5. Switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data (or vice versa).
After trying the above, reload the page.

If you still need assistance, our customer support team is here to help! Please share the information on this page when reaching out.
IP: [my ip address]
Request ID: [random-looking identifier]

I then reloaded the second artist's page in Firefox and got the same error page there (instead of the "Your Session Expired" page that I was previously getting there.)

Given my experience and their "we actively prevent automated bots from accessing our site" promise,, I'm guessing that users might just be inadvertently tripping their guardrails by e.g. simply opening two Firefox tabs, viewing the same ticket-purchasing page (or opening the tab in two browsers; or reloading the tab in a way that looks similar to AXS); and AXS is treating this as as "suspected bot activity" and triggers perhaps-unwarranted and perhaps-unpredictable outcomes.

So: I'm suspicious that this is just AXS "working as intended" and getting suspicious and setting a "we don't trust you" cookie (or similar -- e.g. doing some fingerprinting), and then users observe that they get better results if they switch browsers or use private-browsing-mode. Under this interpretation/explanation, there's no Firefox bug here; this is just AXS being a bit over-sensitive and users occasionally tripping that and misinterpreting it as the site not working with Firefox.

Tony: you reported this on behalf of some other user - do you know if this^ might be the explanation? Also, you linked to two reddit threads, but those are many months old, so I suspect they're unrelated to whatever recent user report caused you to file this bug...