Waitlist & seat offers

When a capped event fills up, new sign-ups don't get turned away — they join a waitlist, in order. From Host → your event → Waitlist you see the queue and can move people into open seats.

The waitlist page

The scoreboard at the top shows seats open, on waitlist, and seats wanted — the sum of everyone's party size, not just a headcount, so a group of four shows as needing four seats. If more seats are wanted than are open, a callout tells you how many people at the front of the line would actually fit.

Each row shows the attendee, how many seats they need, when they joined, and their chosen payment method. You can drag the order with the up/down arrows if you want to reorder the queue by hand — otherwise it's strict first-in-line.

Promoting someone

Click Promote on a row to move that person off the waitlist and email them. What happens next depends on whether they picked a payment method when they joined the waitlist:

If they already chose one, they move straight into that step — cash goes straight to confirmed with a QR ticket attached to the email; card or other digital methods move to a pending-payment state and the email tells them how to finish paying.
If they hadn't chosen a method yet, they get a claim your spot email instead, with a link to finish picking a tier/add-ons and paying. That link carries a 24-hour deadline. If they don't claim it in time, the seat opens back up and rolls to the next person on the list automatically — you don't have to do anything.

Auto-promotion from a cancellation (below) always uses this claim-link flow, since there's no payment method on file for a seat you didn't know was coming open.

If promoting someone would put the event over capacity, you get an oversell warning first — you can back out or confirm the oversell explicitly. Nobody gets bumped without you seeing that warning.

For paid, capped events, a couple of the Guests page's group actions touch the waitlist too: select multiple waitlisted rows there to promote them together, or use Offer reservations to fill remaining seats to work down the queue and fill every open seat in one pass, in order, stopping if the next person in line needs more seats than are left (it won't skip ahead to pack in a smaller party out of turn).

Auto-promote

Auto-promote from waitlist is a per-event setting on the event's edit form, next to capacity — it only shows once the event has a capacity set. Turn it on and the moment a confirmed seat frees up (a cancellation, or someone switching to Interested), the next person on the waitlist is automatically sent the 24-hour claim-your-spot email — no need to watch the list yourself. New events default to this on; if capacity was already in use before this setting existed, it defaults to off so cancellations don't suddenly start emailing offers you weren't expecting.

With auto-promote off, freed seats just sit open until you promote someone manually from the Waitlist page.

Pause RSVPs

Pause RSVPs is a separate toggle, on the main event page (not the waitlist page) — it stops new sign-ups without cancelling anything. Turn it on and:

The event page stays live and shareable.
Existing confirmed seats and waitlist positions are untouched.
New RSVPs are blocked and payment methods are hidden from the RSVP form.

Turn it back off and attendees can sign up normally again. Nothing about the waitlist queue or auto-promote changes while paused — a seat that frees up during a pause still triggers auto-promote (if it's on) exactly as it would otherwise.

Interested — the soft signal next to the waitlist

Any attendee can tap I'm interested next to the main RSVP button, whether or not there's a waitlist to join — it shows up on events that are full, on presale events that haven't opened RSVPs yet, and anywhere else someone wants to flag "count me in if a spot opens." It's a soft signal only: it doesn't reserve a seat and it doesn't enter the waitlist queue, so it never competes with — or jumps ahead of — anyone actually waitlisted.

Interested only turns into an invitation under a specific condition: on a paid, capacity-capped event, if a confirmed attendee cancels and there's nobody on the waitlist to auto-promote, the oldest person who marked themselves Interested gets a "spot opened" email pointing them back at the event. There's no claim link or deadline here, and Offkai doesn't hold the seat for them — it's first-come-first-served from there, same as anyone else RSVPing normally. If someone is already on the waitlist, they always take priority; Interested users are only notified once the waitlist is empty.