Yellowstone Times

Update on CivicRec

First and foremost, on behalf of the City and our entire Parks & Rec team, we want to thank residents for your patience and understanding as we experienced technology issues with CivicRec this morning. This event was incredibly unfortunate, and we empathize with you and understand the frustrations it has caused. Our team continues to work on fixing things and has more information to share.  

We have been using CivicRec since January 3, 2023, and the software itself has performed well. The problem this morning was caused by the credit card vendor, authorize.net. Authorize.net had a default filter that staff was not made aware of that allowed only the first 100 transactions to go through. We are currently working on adjusting this filter so that this issue does not happen again.  

As we navigated through the credit/debit card processing issue, we found that those who attempted to reserve a recreation program this morning but could not fully process payment may have preauthorization or holds from your financial institution for each attempt. That means you may have multiple holds for the same amount if you tried multiple times to submit payment. Authorizations may take 3-5 days to fall off your account. If after 3-5 days you continue to have problems with your card or statement, please contact your financial institution directly. Staff have worked with authorize.net today to clear all pending charges, so if you attempted to charge your card and couldn’t, you should ultimately not be charged at all.  

Our best path forward is to start over. We will clear all waitlists, so anyone currently signed up on one will be removed. For those few who received confirmation and were able to register without issues, you will keep your spot. 

We will reopen registration on Thursday, March 9 at 6 AM. This allows all preauthorization charges to clear and for everyone to have an equal chance once again to register for the remaining spots. We are committed to having a smooth process by then and will keep you up to date on the progress that we continue to make and any other updates ahead of our reopening. Please follow our social channels or sign up for e-notifications at Bozeman.net to stay up to date. 

Finally, we want to acknowledge the larger issue. Bozeman is rapidly growing and each year, demand for programming increases. It takes more staff and space in order to tackle this at large, and one of the ways we are doing that is through our work on the Bozeman Community Center. That project wouldn’t completely solve demand concerns, but it would add capacity. Please know that we hear your concerns, acknowledge the demand, and look to larger solutions as well. 

We are sorry for the technology problems this morning and at the same time, are grateful there are so many residents who take such a great interest in our quality programming. We look forward to continuing to serve you all this spring and thank you once again for your patience with us. 

Original source can be found here.