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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Despite this, we will still be working away on our various projects and getting ready for the next set of developments we have planned. Before we go dark, however, here is a sneak peak of what will be appearing after the election:

StayPrivate.org

StayPrivate is designed to make signing up for various marketing suppression lists easier by merging them into one form. In May, we will be releasing a limited beta for users to test subscription and account functions.

At this stage, you will be able to sign up for two or three of the main services- most likely the Telephone and Mail preference services. There will be two ways of signing up – either with or without an account. If you sign up without an account, we will submit your details to the services then delete any data we store. If you sign up with an account, we will re-subscribe you whenever you update your details or when the subscription expires.

Energy Price Comparison

This was a service provided by EnergyWatch (one of our predecessor bodies). The service shows the cheapest energy suppliers for various user types for each part of the country. It also offers a monthly email alert showing the cheapest supplier and downloadable price fact sheets.

A few months ago, the system was updated for a new supplier of pricing data and brought in-house. Since then, we’ve been working on improvements and have completely rebuilt the system. The new version will have better subscription management, bookmarkable URLs, XML sitemaps and has been given the ‘Consumer Focus’ look. It will be available on the main Consumer Focus website when it is released.

Keep Up-to-date

If you want to know when we release either of these, sign up to our mailing list or follow us on twitter.

There are of course a few more bits and pieces on the way over the next few months including an updated Consumer Focus website. We’ll be updating this blog with details after May 6th.

Consumer Focus Corporate Website

In October we announced that we had taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. One of our first jobs was to transfer the site from the ASP.NET content management system provided by the original developers to Wordpress. This involved converting the existing design to Wordpress templates, bringing over all the content and training the staff involved in updating the site. With everything completed we launched the “new” site in late November.

Since then we’ve been working on the second phase of work – a complete content restructure and update to make content easier to find across Consumer Focus’ target audiences. This, together with several tweaks to the look and feel of the site (designed to take advantage of some of the features available in Wordpress), will be completed in the next few weeks.

Both phases have been a huge undertaking, but we felt it was important to make it as easy as possible to make changes in the future, hence the switch to Wordpress. One of the advantages of the Wordpress platform is that it is so easy to extend. Where we need to add in new functionality, it is likely a plugin already exists to do the job. If it doesn’t, creating one is fairly straightforward.

For those that are interested in some of the technical aspects- the site now uses Wordpress MU on a LAMP platform. We control all the code through our SVN repositories and deploy to the servers using Capistrano. This is almost identical to the way in which we manage our other projects such as this site and Recalled Products.

Guidelines for public sector websites

As some of you may be aware, the Central Office of Information (COI) publishes a set of guidelines for UK public sector websites. We’ve spent a fair amount of time working out what we need to do to reach compliance and we’ll be making the necessary adaptations to all Consumer Focus and Labs websites over the coming months.

Does Directgov Deliver?

In December we launched ‘Does Directgov Deliver?‘, Consumer Focus’s first report to allow comments directly from members of the public by way of consultative website. The report itself was produced by the Public & Community Services Team within Consumer Focus and looks at whether Directgov delivers on its promise to ‘provide information and online services for the public all in one place’. We wanted to make it easy to comment on each part of the report, so Wordpress was the obvious choice. We adapted the Commentariat theme developed by the BIS innovation team to power the website.

If you want to comment on the report, head over to the website. Comments will be closing soon but the website will remain online. Sign up to the mailing list on the website (powered by Google Groups) to be kept up-to-date on Consumer Focus’s work on Directgov.

We are now looking at how we can improve the process of collecting comments on our reports, so keep an eye out for future experiments like this.

Recalled Products

As you may have noticed, in December we turned on another set of features on the Recalled Products website. We now pull in photos and related documents for products when they are available. We’re also experimenting with producing some statistics on the number of recalls we import every week, what categories they are in and what the dangers are. Let us know what you think of these and how we can improve them.

Our work on the Stay Private project has continued amongst our other duties. We now have a framework in place and are starting to build the part that submits information to the Telephone Preference Service. As you might imagine, this is one of the most complicated parts of the system as there are multiple forms that need to be submitted for the process to work. We are hoping to have a very early stage test site available in the next few weeks.

We’ve continued to chase Tesco with our data protection request. They have finally responded and sent some of our data to us – although it isn’t quite what we were expecting. I’ll be posting some more details about this on our data blog shortly. (Update: You can read the response from Tesco here).

Some people may have noticed that we’ve moved our websites to a new server. Up until now, we’d been using Slicehost as our hosting provider. While they did a good job and served us well, we weren’t that comfortable with using a server based in the USA. This would have been of particular concern when we got around to launching the Stay Private website. As a result, we’ve moved everything to a new UK based server.

CF Labs has also recently taken over responsibility for the Consumer Focus corporate website. We felt that we were best placed to manage new developments and overall strategy including introducing a social media programme. One of our first priorities is to move it away from the current ASP.NET system to the open source Wordpress CMS. This work is currently on going and is due to be completed in a few weeks time. While the website will not look any different (aside from a few small layout changes), moving it to Wordpress means it’ll be more flexible and easier to maintain. We’re also looking at how we can make Consumer Focus reports and publications more open by using the Commentariat theme developed by the people over at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

As you can see, there are quite a few bits and pieces going on. We’ll keep you updated as work progresses.

The first stage of our work involved planning out what we wanted the site to do. We did this a few weeks ago during a session involving lots of sticky notes, coloured dots and pieces of paper. The outcome (as you can see below) is a sheet of paper outlining what features we want to have and roughly what priority they are. In this case, there are two possible priorities, “essential” and “not essential”. Features like “registration form” are classed as essential, whereas “pretty charts showing complaint levels” are less important.

Once we had done this, we used it to produce a rough sitemap and list of features for the first release. This list of features is a subset of the ‘essential’ items we originally had. These are items we think we must have in order for the site to work – so it includes things such as database structure and user accounts. Once these items are done, everything else can be built ontop.

Our next stage has been to wireframe the site. This has again involved in reverting to the good old pen and paper to sketch out how parts of the site might look and how they will work. Now we have these, we can start building the functionality for the site.

We’ll keep updating you as the site progresses.

Prior to the start of the switchover in Wales, our parent organisation Consumer Focus Wales conducted a mystery shopper survey of aerial installers in Wales.  The aim was to see how well aerial installers in the country were responding to the challenges.  The outcome of the survey has been reported across the media in Wales.

We’ve put together a small and simple website to expose the results from this survey.  The site provides a little backgound to the survey, some analysis, and the results in a Google Spreadsheet.  We’ve released the data under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license.  This means you can use the data in any way you like as long as you link back to us as the original author.  If you do use the data for something, please let us know – we’d love to see what you do with it.

You can see the website at http://dso-wales.consumerfocuslabs.org.  A Welsh language version is also available.