I want to stress that there has been no official announcement or OFFICIAL response from Experient or Fanime but this is what many of us have seen...
Registration, under CMR, worked as normal up until a few weeks ago. You'd get a QR code e-mailed to you after payment and could log in and change your registration information or view / reprint the QR code at your leisure.
The login option for registration disappeared one day and the system was now hosted by Experient and was for new registrations only.
If you had a problem or wanted to view your memberships / badges, the option no longer existed. If you contacted CMR they would apologize and state that they are no longer handling registration, as this was now being done by Experient.
Experient customer service is extremely slow, unresponsive, and unhelpful.
An Experient employee has posted a couple times on the unofficial Fanime Facebook group that they would be handling registration and the old QR codes would no longer be valid. Instead Experient would be e-mailing new barcodes over the next few days. At this time this information should be taken as UNOFFICIAL as it has not come from Fanime or Experient as a company.
Some of us have received new barcodes (not QR codes) from Experient (not CMR) via e-mail for badge / membership pick up. Although it was assumed at one point that this was a mass e-mailing heading out, it now seems that they've only been e-mailing the barcodes to people who have contacted their "customer service."
The FanimeCon website, under the Registration FAQ, still lists both QR code and barcode as valid for pickup - "Confirmation E-Mail with QR code/barcode that was sent to you after membership payment" This clashes with what the Experient employee has said in the unofficial Facebook group but we don't know for sure one way or the other until we hear an official word from Fanime.
Personally, I was sent the new Experient barcode six times this morning, along with the non-answer to my registration questions. Five of those are exactly the same - my two person group. One of them is a single registration pickup code for the other person in my group. I say this as if you have been sent multiple e-mails from Experient and are picking up badges / memberships for your group, make sure you have the right e-mail in hand that has everyone listed.
It seems that if there is to be a mass new e-mailing that it has yet to happen.
The biggest gripe many of us have is up until the changeover, and in QR code years previous via CMR, you could always view and reprint your code via the registration website. Experient's registration site does not allow you to self-service view your barcode if you were registered prior to the handoff from CMR, basically any registration prior to something like three weeks ago.
The second biggest gripe many of us have is that this is something that Fanime fixed two years ago and since then has done better than any other convention. Why such a change was made so late in the game, with an event management company that to this point has shown nothing but being unresponsive to customer issues, makes no sense. It just seems like a huge step backwards.
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Topic: Registration 2016 (Read 42483 times)