Consumer Focus Labs

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.

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.