As soon as J. K. Rowling announced
that she had something special planned (which unfortunately wasn't a sequel), I
began to wait with bated breath for whatever was in store. I dutifully followed
the youtube videos and ogled at the owls several times a week to see if
anything extra had come up in addition to the annoyingly vague 'something
special will be announced.' Finally the day came when Pottermore was announced
- I was so excited when I heard Rowling say, “come
back on 31st July to find out how you can get the chance to
enter Pottermore early.” Woo! A new website with more Potter content to
read and explore! It was as if my dream had come true.
And then of course,
the madness of finding the magical quill began (early access granted to 1
million people for Beta testing). I missed the Day 1 quill because I saw the
announcement video too late. Day 2 was lost because I was asleep at the time
the quill was out and about. Day 3 found me determined to find out everything I
could about the challenge and I looked up the previous quill posting time, what
other people across the world were saying etc and missed the quill because I
was too busy reading all that other stuff (yeah yeah, I am stupid, I know). On
Day 4, I found the quill but found the site too overwhelmed due to demand and
the challenge closed before I could get in. I stayed up all night and by
mid-morning was refreshing my browser every five minutes to get to the quill
challenge and finally the Day 5 question appeared. I solved the clue and got to
the scholastic website....and couldn't find the quill. I played all the Potter
games that showed up on the page in the vain hope that one of them would lead
me to the quill (of particular note is the dementor game that scared the
b-jesus out of me when it popped up on my browser the first time). Sad, confused, angry and frustrated, I turned to the
only option I had left - Google. This led me to Expecto Patronum! which instructed me
to find the quill on top of the page in the ad banner and voila! I got into
Pottermore and created my account in record time (I think the quill challenge
was up for only about an 40-60 minutes and I got my a/c before it ended).
Considerably cheered up, I focused my energies toward getting one of my friends
excited about the quill challenge and into the site. We missed Day 5, so I
spent the rest of my 'free' time that day reading 'Expecto Patronum!'. I kept
an eye out for the Day 6 clue, solved it and IM'd my friend with the link to
find the quill (it was just the excitement - I am not obsessive.
Really!...ish). So my friend was in and the next day I solved the Day 7 clue
just for fun. Life was good...until I realized that I hadn't received my
welcome email yet.
Anxious, I started keeping my email
open 24x7 and refreshing the page every 10 minutes (see, I am not obsessive at
all - it's totally normal to wait like that for an email). On Aug 12th, I
finally got an email from Pottermore, only it turned out to be a 'you're
selected for early entry' email which advised me to keep checking my inbox for the welcome email that could arrive anytime between mid-August and the end
of September. WTH?!? Needless to say, more anxious waiting ensued. It was made
a wee bit more interesting by http://expatronum.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/waiting-for-pottermore-a-top-10-list/. By
Sept 23 however, I was so sad that I decided to delete my a/c in protest
if, after all the trouble I went to & sleep I lost, I got access
a day before the site opened to the public. The result of course was that I got
my welcome email the very next day. I was so happy and emotionally exhausted
that I went to sleep instead of logging in to the site at once (after all the
waiting I did - shame on me!). The next day, fortuitously was a Sunday and I
spent a good two hours exploring the site to my content (see newer posts for
details).
It turns out that at the time I got
my email less than half of the Beta testers had gotten their welcome emails.
According to http://insider.pottermore.com/, the
remaining testers have all received their emails as of earlier today. Now of course,
the issue is that the site is not accessible 'due to overwhelming
demand'. It will take a while to get the site ready to handle a large # of
users so, my guess is that until they are sure that the site is equipped to
handle at least the 1 million beta folks they won’t open the site to the public
(so maybe they'll open October 31st instead of October 1st). Hopefully they can
pull it off by Halloween without flashing the ‘site overwhelmed due to demand’
stuff.
Waiting for the welcome owl has been
an awful experience for me; if the poor people who've been waiting for the site
to open to all finally hear its open but can’t create an a/c because the site
is down it will be a worse experience for them. With team Pottermore's
performance so far, I fully expect that will happen. In support of fans who are
waiting like I did, I am not going to log in to Pottermore until its is open to
all and let the newbies have a better chance to explore the site.
