pouët.net

I have noticed this thing happening several times this year. Peoople come to the party, they don't notice what the wifi pass is, try something, this doesn't work and then they set up their own access point from phone.

Eventually when they get to wifi, they can't find the party lan.

It's bit annoying to have to stare at the screen slides hoping to spot the required info. Instead I propose organizers add this info directly to votekey slip. Wouldn't be too much effort to put the wifi SSID, pass and lan address directly to the votekey slip? Would avoid a bit of stress for some people.

What others think?

Great idea! I always liked the goodie bag from Revision, I remember a flyer being there with all this meta information and a welcome text. I can completely second this, I myself are always annoyed by this... was it www.party, party.lan, party.evoke.eu, ???

to be fair if the party orgas stick to common sense i never had a big problem to guess the wifi password (usually partyname+year), some even offer open wifi but that may be not the best idea if you want your data not to be sniffed while in the air...
of course it would be convenient to have that information handed at entrance, tho.

a sheet of paper with the snippets of info (ssid, passwd, intranet partymeister url) pinned to the toilet doors should do the trick.

My strategy here is to ask other people at the party, for example the person sitting next to me.

trouble with printing such details is that it requires preparation (time)
and of course, even if you prepare well, shit(tm) will happen at the last moment
so from a party orga pov it's much more practical to put those details in the beamer rotation because you can update them if necessary

What havoc said. In theory it's a good idea, but then there is the risk of spreading wrong information, which is imo even worse than no information.

During 15+ years of organizing trsac, I have never heard anyone complaining about this specific issue.

Why using a WiFi PW at all? It is more or less public anyway.

And .party is a TLD now, thus no *.party for intranet site anymore.

Well I also didn't actually complain. I also asked people sitting next to me. But i've always found myself in that specific situation, and now that it's been spoken out aloud, I can fully agree that it's something that can be improved.
And from an orga point of view, is it really to be expected that intranet URLs and WiFi passwords tend to fluctuate just before the party?

tbh this has been on the wuhu todolist for a while now, just never got around it.

novel, at evoke asking people around me turned up all kinds of interesting rumors! in the end, guessing the pwd worked.

I always assumed not spoon-feeding these infos was intentional. As if they wanted you to have a line to break the ice with and talk to the people next to you :D Lots of shy people around.

You could walk around the party place and ask the wifi pass over and over, meeting new people. Not that I've done it.

That's actually a very good idea, put the intra url, ssid / pass and votekey on the same slip.

It's such a no-brainer when I think about it now :D

We usually print it out and hang it on the walls at Deadline.

Yeah, putting up signs should be accessible enough and is much more flexible w/r/t last-minute changes compared to having to potentially re-print hundreds of small pieces of paper.

The obvious solution: Stop having internal-only sites. Make your partyweb available from the internet, so people can access it no matter if they use your Wi-Fi or 4G or carrier pigeons. Then link to it from your party's home page.

with a public partynet you could give away votekeys to sofasceners as well. either for free or via some sort of supporter ticket (although in that case you better make sure your stream works as intended ;)

let´s make a password-guessing-compo out of it!

what if for any party we will have a rule for password, network name and local web?

something like:
WIFI: demoparty
Password: AsGargajSaid
URL: http://demoparty.local

Most parties already use easy-to-guess passwords, and the intranet URL is mostly standardized (although this is changing due to the .party TLD issue).
Also, this still doesn't help if there are some last-minute network changes.

I have memories of atleast one Demoparty which had nice little booklets containing all information and a wrong WiFi password ;)

This.

Regarding public ip, not going to work since that assumes off site hosting and that means people have to upload their 300MB iphone video entries over a slow connection (or hog it all).

From what i have seen, parties generally have this info on bigscreen and usually when it isnt, there is something more important happening /or the party just started and orgas are busy/scrambling to do finish other critical tasks.

Open wifi, no. Youre traffic should be safer and encrypted.

Printing on votekeys, i agree. Although some times this isnt as easy as there might be last minute changes to networking infra or others.

Popular party systems don't give this option so it would be a lot of hassle to put custom text and the votekey together. What's wrong with onscreen and posters? If someone is that ignorant, they shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway.