Sparkfun Free Day is Back

Not sure if anyone noticed. It's tomorrow!

I'll have to give it a shot... :smiley:

Less than 45 minutes to go...

Let's see if their server holds this time.

hah

Server timeouts already happening 10 minutes before Free Day

yeah, not very impressed so far... :frowning:

come on guys, they are seeing "record traffic" for whatever that is worth on their catalog bought dells ;D

damn shit wont load

All I get is the something is broke error screen. I'm not sure it's even worth it to keep refreshing hoping to get through. I can be doing more productive things right now.

Yeah. I am taking an early lunch break today for this but I am going to be very disappointed if it never works in time for me and then I read later on about the people that DID get to do it.

My other concern is whether people might be using it as an opportunity to game it a bit. Hire a bunch of people (not necessarily in the US) to bang the site until they get in, and get coupons. Buy stuff for "free" with whatever they got and then resell it.

I also wonder how many logged errors they have to actually review...

I got to the quiz!
...But it won't load...

The URL is, when you want to do the quiz, sparkfun.com/free_day/quiz. Hope this is usefull for someone.

I would hope most people would take the quiz if only to help donate money. I do not have enough years to really be worthwhile so I figure why not...

Worked for me. (Just took the $40 loyalty)

Still unable to get anywhere yet. Been trying for 30min... Oh well. I hope they at least post the quiz after the fact so I can take it and see how well I would have done.

BroHogan: Aren't they located in Denver also? Maybe you had less traffic to contend with.

fillibar,
Their located in Boulder which is just north of Denver.
When I saw how wacky their ('Dell' ::)) servers were, I figured it best to take the simplest route.
Good luck!
[edit]Don't think it matters too much how far away you are. I just had a lot of tabs opened and kept refreshing them. [/edit]

I guess there's no chance for those of us living on the East coast, eh?

I have the login page appearing now. Furthest yet. I wish I knew whether the grey bar in the funds section meant how much was left, or how much is spent. Disappointing that there is very little/no grey in the donation section that I can see.

I live in Belgium, I think I'm screwed the most.

My thought about the distance was more of how many "segments" the connection needs to go through to get to SparkFun's servers. Each one would add a delay, chance of error, etc...

Well, I am not sure if it is such a good idea for Sparkfun to try "free day" again next year....

I think the reason there's nothing in the donation field is because nobody's been able to get to the quiz. I got to the page that asks if you want to take the lump sum or the quiz but when I clicked the quiz I got an error page and I haven't gotten that far again. I keep getting logged out too. So the totals right now probably reflect only those who took the lump sum, and there is no donation for those that do that.

That makes sense to me. Hopefully they will "learn their lesson" again and add to their capabilities for a repeat next year. It seems like a good idea but again they appear to have underestimated the response.