If you have sold out but your waiting room still contains many users, and you’re concerned about letting that traffic back onto your site, then use the message box to let your users know the event is over. Raise the rate to something manageable and wait for a period of time equivalent to your session timeout to allow the queue to dissipate naturally first.
Once you’re comfortable allowing the traffic onto your site, Edit the waiting room, and select DISABLED from the Protect URLs field. Any users still in the waiting room will be promoted automatically, redirecting them onto your site.
Once the waiting room is disabled, you can choose to delete it if you want. Or you can keep it in its disabled state for future use.
We've seen customers use other strategies to close down waiting rooms based on their specific use cases and integrations including:
A: Changing the URL protection to non-existent URLs, this will stop new users being added to the waiting room, and users already in the room will be redirected out over a period of time as dictated by the rate.
B: Setting the room capacity to 0, triggering a room-full message to all waiting users and preventing new users joining the room. When combined with a custom template and messaging this can be used to put the room in a 'closed down' state.