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Comment by liquidise | Hacker News Reader

AXS has an incorrigible treatment of VPNs built into every step of their checkout process. Some highlights:

- expect 5-6 pages of captchas during the process. Each will require multiple steps of attempts

- page loads are articially delayed 30+ seconds per page

- the payment form CATEGORICALLY REJECTS payments from known VPN ips claiming the payment was rejected from your bank

I’ve learned these lessons the hard way using AXS as they have a vicegrip on the Denver concert scene. While they used to be a refreshing alternative to Ticketmaster their newfound approach to privacy is absurd. Instead you spend minutes identifying sidewalks and street lights only to discover it was all a ruse and your were literally incapable of purchasing tickets in the first place. This is using a denver vpn to purchase tickets to small local shows.

Convenience indeed.

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Well stopping bots from buying tickets and vpns so they can resell them at insane prices is exactly why events need AXS type stuff, and then they abuse that for their own anti-consumer actions

I’ve never understood why tickets can’t have your name on them, with ID checked at the venue. That’d stop scalping.

There are a lot of corner cases. What if I want to give some of the tickets to a friend who has to arrive late and meet me inside the venue? What if I want to do legitimate reselling on a website like Stubhub (many events encourage this even, like reselling sports tickets if you can’t make it, so that the seat doesn’t go empty and the stadium can make money on concessions... this happens all the time if you’re a season ticket holder for a particular team; you just frequently can’t make it and need to resell).

Personally I wish tickets were just bearer bonds. If you have the paper ticket in your hand, you get in, all else be damned.

Then to solve scalping or bots, try to invent solutions that offer tickets to verified long-time fans / supporters first, then use a pre-registered (not day-of) lottery system to allow general purchases.

Dedicated VPN seems to be the only way to go moving forward

Sharing VPNs just makes it so that other people can tell you use a VPN

Still easy to tell by the ISP your IP relates to.

If you're coming from, say, a DigitalOcean or Amazon Web Services/AWS (or any other data center for that matter) IP address then it's rather obvious that you're either a bot or a VPN/proxied user.

I think most checks nowadays are testing if you're coming from a residential/business ISP.

It sucks, but VPNs are nothing but trouble when you're on the other side of those transactions though.

genuinely curious but how so ? because the true source IP address is masked ?

Also realized about every single concert venue here uses AXS and their miserable app. It’s so bad it almost makes me want Ticketmaster back.

The app is so, so bad.

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