The Warden plugin is the backbone of ticket integrity on your platform. Without it, double-sold instants and prizes would become increasingly common as your order volume grows — Warden silently intercepts every order, verifies tickets against the database, and resolves any conflicts before customers or operators are even aware of a problem.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/Rahat-Pagecode/gitbook-competitions/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
It is impossible for customers (or anyone else) to see tickets before payment. Tickets are randomly generated only after a successful payment is received.
The Ticket Security Process
Customer Places an Order and Pays
Once payment is confirmed, Warden immediately intercepts the order and begins a verification process. It checks every ticket in the order against the full ticket database to detect duplicates. A small random delay is introduced between order checks to handle the edge case where two customers generate the same ticket number at the exact same millisecond. After completing multiple checks, Warden reaches one of two outcomes: approve the order or continue to the conflict-resolution flow. If the order is approved, tickets become visible on the post-checkout page and confirmation emails are dispatched.
Some Tickets Are Duplicate
If one or more tickets in the order collide with tickets already held by another customer, the affected tickets are withheld from the frontend and emails are held back. Within 5 seconds, Warden attempts a partial replacement — it swaps only the conflicting tickets while keeping all unaffected tickets intact. If the partial replacement succeeds, the order is approved and the customer sees their full ticket set. If it does not succeed, the process moves to full regeneration.
Regenerating the Order
The order is placed on-hold and enters the full regeneration queue. A completely new set of tickets is generated for the entire order. The customer sees a progress bar on their page and can safely leave — they will receive their confirmation emails once regeneration completes. The regeneration process typically takes a few seconds but may be queued for up to one minute. Once the new tickets pass verification, the order is approved and all tickets become visible.
Regeneration Failed
If regeneration fails, Warden retries automatically. If the retry also fails, the order is queued as a failed regeneration and a refund is issued — either to the customer’s on-site wallet or directly to the original payment gateway, depending on your configured refund settings.
If you are unsure which refund method is configured for your site, contact support and the team will set it up to match your preferences.
Checking for Issues
If you ever suspect a ticket problem, navigate to the Edit Product page for the relevant competition. Warden surfaces a widget there that shows any detected issues. In the vast majority of cases, problems are resolved silently in the background long before you or a customer notices — but the widget is always available as a quick sanity check.
Other Functionality of Warden
Beyond duplicate detection, Warden handles a wide range of platform hardening tasks automatically:Full list of Warden background tasks
Full list of Warden background tasks
- Automatically creates database indexes to optimise ticket query performance
- Double-checks for duplicate wallet rewards and zeros any duplicates
- Prevents coupons from being applied to wallet top-up orders
- Blocks automated attempts to discover instant win ticket numbers
- Dispatches order confirmation emails only after the full verification process completes
- Clears pending orders over time to keep the database tidy
- Fixes edge cases where wallet payments did not deduct correctly
- Fixes WooCommerce £0 order double-creation issues
- Fixes tickets not being added to the database on high-volume sites
- Clears page cache automatically when a competition closes
- Applies a strict extended verification process for instant wins over £1,000