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StayPrivate.org common registration problems & queries

By Dafydd Vaughan Wednesday August 25, 2010

StayPrivateFAQSince we launched StayPrivate.org in June we’ve been receiving lots of comments, questions and requests for help from users of the service. As we’ve noticed trends in these messages, we’ve been making changes to the site such as adding in extra descriptions and help text to make it easier to use. We’ve also restructured our FAQ to include some more of the common questions. Despite this, we still get emails from users asking the same questions or encountering similar problems.

In this post, I want to go through some of these common problems and provide some useful answers – a sort of mini-FAQ.

Registration Problem: I’ve not received my activation email, why?

When you sign up, StayPrivate.org sends you an email with a link which you must click to activate your account. This is an important part of the process that allows us to confirm that you have given us a valid email address. Unfortunately, we regularly get emails from people who have not received these activation emails and need help to get their account activated.

I’ve looked at the last 80 occasions where activation emails have not been received and the most common cause (67/80) were because the user incorrectly entered their email address. Of these, about half are from mistakes in the last part of the email address (the bit after the @ symbol). We’ve had pretty much every combination of ‘btinternet.com’ you can think of: ‘btinternt.com’, ‘btinterent.com’, ‘at.btinternet.com’, ‘bginternet.com’, ‘btintrernet.com’ etc. Other common occurrences are ‘@live.uk’, ‘@g.mail.com’, ‘@hotmail.com.uk’, @talk.talk.net’ and ‘@wamadoo.com’. Please be careful when entering your email address, if it isn’t correct, you won’t be able to activate your account.

Another common issue is a user’s spam settings. We have had several emails from people who have their spam filters set so high that we can’t even reply to their messages. All we see is “Sorry, this email address doesn’t accept messages from your address” or similar. If you only allow selected email addresses to contact you, you will need to add ‘bot@stayprivate.org’ to this white list or you will not be able to activate your account.

Some people are using services such as BlueBottle which means we must answer some questions to prove to them we are human before they will allow the activation emails to be delivered to the inbox. While this may be a great way of stopping spam reaching your inbox, it also stops emails from our automated systems getting to you. If you use this service, please white list bot@stayprivate.org or you will not be able to activate your account.

Finally, we notice several people have used fake email addresses. You must provide us with a valid email address or you will not be able to activate your account.

Registration Query: Can I register someone else on their behalf?

Although we have answered this one in our FAQ already, we still get sent this question on a regular basis.

Yes you can register someone else. If they live at your address, just include them on the form when you sign up. If they don’t live at your address, you will need a separate registration.

At the moment we only allow one account per email address (although we are looking at changing this within the next few months), so you will need to use a different email address. If you don’t have one to hand we recommend you use one of the free web-based email providers for now.

If you do wish to register on someone else’s behalf, you MUST have their permission first.

Registration Query: I’m still receiving calls after registering, why?

Unfortunately the Telephone Preference Service cannot stop all direct marketing calls. You might still receive calls from companies you have previously had a relationship with (e.g. your electricity/gas provider, insurance company, letting agents etc.), and from companies based overseas. If you are receiving calls from one of these companies, you should tell them you are registered with the Telephone Preference Service and that you do not want them to call you again.

If you are receiving calls from any other UK based company, take a look at the complaints service offered by the Direct Marketing Association.

Registration Query: Can you assist me to transfer my $9million inheritance fund to another country?

I’m sorry, this is not something we can help with.

How to help us help you when you have a problem

If you have a problem with StayPrivate.org there are some steps you can take to make it easier for us to help you with your issue.

Firstly read this post and the FAQ – we might have already answered the question.

Secondly give us as much detail as possible, an email that says “It’s broken” doesn’t give us much to go on. Tell us what you were doing and send us any emails you have received from the website.

If you have having trouble activating your account or logging into the website, we can find your account more quickly if you send us your activation email (it has a unique code that helps us search our records).

And finally…

Thank you for all the comments we’ve received and keep them coming. We appreciate any feedback we get.

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StayPrivate.org update

By Dafydd Vaughan Wednesday June 16, 2010

Since our post on Friday last week, we’ve been busy working on clearing the queue of submissions and implementing some of the feedback we’ve received. We’re pleased to say that we’ve now reduced the queues to a more manageable level and are submitting everyone within 2 hours of signing up.

Since our media appearances on Thursday, StayPrivate.org has been featured on Directgov and Money Saving Expert’s junk mail guide.  Thanks in part to these, we’ve now had over 5900 people register with the website!

This afternoon, we pushed out an update to the site that adds in a few suggested improvements, bug fixes and makes back end management of the site a bit easier.

Postcode validation

A few people have had issues with validating their postcodes on the sign up form. We were using a regular expression to do the validation, but it was rejecting some perfectly valid postcodes so we’ve rewritten the way it works. Let us know if you continue to have problems.

Email sending

One of the biggest changes we’ve made is to email sending. The website generates a pretty significant number of emails during a typical user lifecycle, for example we send an email when the user signs up (to activate the registration) and once we’ve submitted them to each service. We also send emails when a user forgets their password or deletes their account. If we assume that each user has signed up to both the Mail and Telephone preference service, it means we could have sent over 17,700 emails in less than a week.

The process of sending emails was slowing the site down considerably. Even after we turned off submission emails on Thursday afternoon, the registration form was still taking a while to complete. As a result, we’ve rebuilt the emailing service. We now put all emails in a queue in our database and have a separate process that runs through this queue one by one to send the email. This should make the site a bit quicker and enable us to prioritise certain types of emails in times of heavy load.

Activation emails

We’ve had messages from people who haven’t received their activation emails. We hope that the new email sending process will reduce the occurances of this for new sign ups. For those that signed up before we deployed this update, we will be providing a form on the website later in the week to get a new activation code sent out to you. We’ll update this blog once we’ve done that.

Update (18/06/2010): We’ve now added a form for people request a new activation email.

Website hosting

As some of you will know, we struggled to keep the site up and running on Thursday lunchtime due to the high level of demand. Some users got through, others were met with a blank screen. This latest update to the site will allow us to turn off features and prioritise certain functions in the event of a heavy load, which should go some way to reducing this problem in the future. We are also looking at upgrading our website hosting platform to help us cope with a large influx of users. We’re looking for a solution that is good value for money and will allow us to scale up quickly when needed. Once we have more information on this we will update this blog.

Telephone Preference Service

Due to a teething problem with the submission to the Telephone Preference Service, some of our earliest users might be receiving a second confirmation email from the TPS. This is affecting some (but not all) of the users that signed up before 1pm on Monday (14th June). You will need to click on the link in this second email to ensure your number is registered on the TPS. Not all of those affected will have received this second email yet as the queue is being processed in batches. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Other updates & feedback

We will be working on further changes and improvements to the site over the next few weeks and will update the blog when we deploy them to the server.  Please keep sending us feedback – we are reading all the emails and comments we get and will respond as quickly as we can.

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StayPrivate.org 36 hours on

By Dafydd Vaughan Friday June 11, 2010

Thank everyone who has signed up to StayPrivate.org over the last 36 hours or so. We’ve had massive interest in the website – much more than we expected. I’d also like to thank everyone who has sent us comments, suggestions and questions. We haven’t managed to reply to all of them yet, but we are working through them and hope to get a reply to you soon.

Since our launch yesterday morning, we’ve had over 3500 registrations, and nearly 7500 visitors to the website. In total, we have almost 4500 individual submissions to the opt-out services.

At lunchtime yesterday (following an appearance on the BBC 2 programme Working Lunch), we had a huge influx of registrations on the site. To free up server resources and help us keep the site up and running, we turned off the automatic processes that sends the data to the DMA and queued the requests. Despite this, users had trouble accessing the site for an hour or so. Part of this was due to the large numbers of visitors to the StayPrivate.org website but also due to an increase in visitors to othe CF Labs blog. As we hadn’t expected such a big response, we will now take away this experience and look at how we can improve the systems to cope with higher traffic levels in future.

Once the peak of visits passed, we restarted submissions to the DMA at a reduced rate of 1 every two minutes. We manually monitored their progress until around 8pm when we switched the process back to automatic. Overnight we had around 400 more people sign up to the site with the resultant increase in the submission queues.

Our current priority is to bring these queues down to the point where we are submitting everyone within 60 minutes of registering with our website. We’ve turned off part of the submission process that sends a confirmation email so we can increase the rate without increasing the server load. This means that you won’t get an email from us to tell you we’ve sent the details to the TPS/MPS, however, you should still receive a message from the DMA when they have received your submission.

StayPrivate.org Submission Queue

Following the comments received, we have identified a number of areas where we can make improvements to the site. These include:

  • Making it clearer that this is a free service. We’ve had a number of phone calls and emails asking us if there is any cost to join StayPrivate.org. We’ve added a new question to our FAQ to explain that there is no cost and we’ve updated our homepage to state that we are free. We will look at other ways of making this more obvious.
  • Making the purpose of the Baby MPS clearer. We’ve added a note onto the submission form to explain its purpose and will look at the content in the about us section.
  • Some people had problems with post code validation on the website. We are going to replace the post code validator with a more robust version.
  • Making the purpose of “Store your data” on the user account form clearer. We’re going to look at making the description of this option more obvious
  • Putting the site behind an SSL security certificate

We will look at making these changes over the coming weeks.

Please keep sending your comments and suggestions to us. You can either email team@consumerfocuslabs.org, send us a tweet (@cflabs) or leave a comment here.

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Helping to reduce cold calls & unwanted mail

By Dafydd Vaughan Thursday June 10, 2010

StayPrivate.orgFollowing on from our announcement yesterday, we’ve just launched our new beta website – StayPrivate.org

There are a huge number of marketing opt-out services provided in the UK. At present, each service has its own website and forms required to register. These forms require much of the same information such as your name, address, email address etc, which means you have to type the same information in over and over again.

We wanted to make the process easier, so we developed StayPrivate.org. In this version we’ve merged the forms for the Telephone, Mail and Baby Mail Preference Services offered by the Direct Marketing Association. This means you only need to type in the common information once.

As soon as you have submitted the form (and confirmed your email address), the site will do the hard work of submitting your details to the services you want to register with.

We’ve also built in the ability to create a user account and sign up for a newsletter (both are optional). If you sign up for an account, you will easily be able to make changes to your information and resubmit it – just once! – to multiple opt-out services.

As the site is all about keeping your information private, we wanted to provide several options for how we handle your data. If you don’t want an account, we’ll completely destroy all your information once we’ve finished submitting it to the opt-out services. If you do want an account, you can decide whether you want us to keep hold of it (to make it easier to submit changes in the future), or we will destroy everything (except your name, email address and sign-up dates) when we’ve finished submitting your details. At any point you can ask us to delete your data & close your account by logging into your account control panel.

As with our previous sites, this is just the first iteration. Future versions will bring additional features and further opt-out services.

StayPrivate.org is a beta website, so please let us know your thoughts. We appreciate any and all feedback so we can improve the service. You can either leave your comments here, or email us at team@consumerfocuslabs.org.

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StayPrivate.org launches tomorrow (10/06/2010)

By Dafydd Vaughan Wednesday June 9, 2010

In our last entry we mentioned a number of projects that we would be launching once the general election was over and we emerged from purdah. We are now at that point, and the first of these projects will be launched into beta tomorrow.

StayPrivate.org is designed to make it easier to reduce the amount of unwanted marketing material you receive.  In this initial version we have taken the Telephone, Mail and Baby Mail Preference Services from the Direct Marketing Association and merged them into one submission form.

Sign up once and StayPrivate.org will do the hard work of submitting you to each of these services. There is also the option of a user account to make it easier to submit altered details in future and a newsletter so we can keep you up-to-date with developments.

We’ll post more information about the site tomorrow morning following its launch.  Until then, keep an eye on this blog and StayPrivate.org.

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