We Mounted an Problem with How Restricted Rewards Work on Kickstarter — Kickstarter

I’m excited to let you already know a couple of repair we’ve deployed to enhance the expertise of backing Restricted rewards on Kickstarter. This replace will scale back frustration for creators who supply rewards in a Restricted tier, and can make it simpler and clearer for backers who wish to again these rewards.

Drawback: Previous to this launch, when a creator launched a big challenge with a Restricted rewards tier out there, we might be liable to the location buckling and turning into unavailable. This was attributable to a big group of backers dashing directly by way of checkout to get one of many Restricted rewards—some individuals can be fortunate whereas others wouldn’t, and there wasn’t readability about what was occurring if you happen to weren’t one of many fortunate ones. The load this placed on our system would convey it down, and no person would be capable to pledge to any challenge.

Answer: To raised deal with this, we applied a revised checkout circulation that added a component of queuing. Now, every profitable backer is assigned a Restricted reward and has fifteen minutes to finish the checkout, in any other case that stock is launched and out there for one more backer to pledge to:

If a backer is simply too late and all of the rewards have been claimed, they’ll obtain a discover to attempt once more:

Whereas this appears to be like easy by way of a backer-facing change, the backend logic and work to assist that is fairly large. The method we took was to create a restricted pool of reward database rows that correspond with the challenge’s Restricted rewards in order that, earlier in checkout, a backer who begins the backing course of “claims” a reward row, after which we begin a timer for a way lengthy they’ve a maintain on that row. If their maintain on the Restricted reward expires (as a result of their checkout took too lengthy, for instance), then it’s out there to be claimed by one other backer. That is no straightforward process of pc coordination (shared sources are normally a bit trickier, particularly when many individuals need them unexpectedly), however by way of our testing in actual world conditions, we’ve been capable of refine it and stop overselling rewards.

–Dannel Jurado, Senior Engineer