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.