By Kim Siebert MacPhail
Earlier this week, parents who stayed up late—or got up early—to register their children for coveted spots in popular recreation courses, were thwarted by glitches in the Recreation Department’s registration software. Though the Town’s own website has been affected recently by hacker attacks and internal meltdowns at GoDaddy (the world’s largest web host) the problem in this case, according to director Amy Hamilton, was unrelated.
Registration for fall recreation courses went “live” at midnight on Wednesday, September 12th and, according to the office’s tally, about 100 online forms were submitted between 12:00 and 1:57 AM. At that point, the site came crashing down, apparently due to problems with Active Network’s RecWare software. The issue was not discovered until the next morning when the assumption was that the Town’s main website was again on the fritz. It was later in the day when the true locus of the problem was identified but, by that point, many parents had become frustrated at not being able to secure recreation course spots for their children.
The site was reportedly fixed by 5 o’clock last night, but now an additional problem has developed: a message from “slyhacker,” an entity whose name appears— along with the sounds of chanting— greets anyone attempting to access the Recreation Department’s website.
During a conversation with Director Hamilton, the history of recreation registration in Bedford was instructive: “We used to have registration at night and we’d have lines up the stairs and out onto the sidewalk,” said Hamilton. “As technology became available, we added more ways to register: online, fax, mail, coming to the office. A lot of people use the fax, actually. The only way we really can’t do it is by phone. We try to make it as fair as possible, to accommodate different work schedules, and we add classes when we can if the original ones fill.”
But some classes can’t be expanded for a variety of reasons: the room or gym isn’t big enough or additional rooms aren’t available at the time when the course would run. If a popular course adds another section on a different day, the day might not work for the people who want the class.
Hamilton said that it can be surprising which classes are a hit. “We don’t think it’s a success when a class fills in the first day of registration,” she added. “We know that means that there are unhappy people who wanted to get in.”
It can also be perplexing why a popular course is completely booked for several years running only to have so-so registration after that. Gymnastics, for example, was once a big draw but now it’s a race to claim placement in tennis or chess or Davis School after school sports classes.
“We try to forecast,” said Hamilton, “but it’s hard to keep up with changes in demand.”
And although the sign-up frenzy at midnight on the first day of registration presents challenges, last-minute sign up is also hard to accommodate. Hamilton pointed out that the recent soccer registration ultimately saw 300 participants once registration closed. While the final enrollment number is good, the difficulty is that 60 of the registrants signed up in the last week of registration. “We ran out of equipment, pinnies, cones, shirts and we had to find more coaches,” said Hamilton. “It’s hard to schedule but it definitely keeps us on our toes!”
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