Our supplier has worked to replace the faulty equipment and bring our services back online.  This work was completed at around 2.15pm this afternoon.  There are however a few outstanding issues with some of our websites:

• We have taken the decision to temporarily suspend new registrations on StayPrivate.org for a few hours to ensure that the server is stable and no problems occur.
• Recalled Product alert emails that should have been sent this morning have not been sent.  We will schedule these to be sent later today.

This blog and the CF Labs twitter account will be updated when the items above are resolved. We will be monitoring situation for the next few hours to ensure everything is running normally and will publish a more detailed post later in the week once we’ve had a chance to discuss the cause with our supplier.

We apologise for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.

Update (18:27): We are now accepting new registrations on StayPrivate.org.

Update 2 (21:26): This morning’s recall alerts have now been sent.

Data encryption

When you sign up to StayPrivate.org you provide us with a significant amount of personal data. At a minimum you provide us with your name, email address and postal address. If you are a business, you also provide us with details about your organisation.

You then have to provide varying amounts of data depending on which of the marketing opt-out services you wish to use. This includes things like telephone numbers (for the TPS, CTPS & FPS) and names of other people at your address (for the MPS).

All of this information is encrypted when it is stored in our database. For example, my name ‘Dafydd’ becomes something like ‘A0JQNABiWi5SawY2’ or ‘BEUEYFQ2WCwHPgAw’. Without the encryption key, we can’t decode it to see what it means and neither can anyone else.

Data storage

This is another key element in our service – we don’t store data for any longer than is absolutely necessary and you can ask us to destroy it at any time. The options open to you depend on what you select when you register.

If you don’t sign up for an account, we will destroy the data once we’ve registered you with the opt-out services. This is done automatically & there is nothing for you to do.

If you signed up for an account but didn’t tick the “store data” box, we’ll automatically destroy everything except your name and email address once we’ve registered you with the services. You can ask us to destroy the rest by clicking the “Close Account” button in the dashboard.

If you signed up the account and ticked the “store data” box, we’ll keep it until you ask us to destroy it. We’ll send you a reminder every year and ask you to confirm you still want us to keep it – if you don’t, we’ll destroy it automatically. You don’t need to wait for the reminder however – at any point you can ask us to destroy it by clicking the “Close Account” or “Delete Data” buttons in the dashboard.

Secured Connection

On Monday this week we launched full SSL encryption on StayPrivate.org. If you’ve ever used online banking or shopped online, you might be familiar with the padlock that appears in your web browser to show that the webpage is secure.

This means that your web browser is using a secure connection (HTTPS) to communicate with the website to ensure the data you send and receive remains private.

From this week, StayPrivate.org is only available using a secure connection, so you will see that padlock on every page of the website. Whenever you view data on the site or send data to us, it will be secured and will remain private.

This is an important step forward for StayPrivate and ensures that security and privacy of your data is being taken care of at each step in the process.

It seems like a while since the heady days of June 2010 when the website fell over following unexpected mainstream media coverage on version 1 launch day. Since then we’ve racked up a substantial 28,000+ registrants and the site continues to draw praise for its simple and free solution to a problem experienced by people of all ages, backgrounds and denominations.

We’ve purposely opted for a very quiet release in this instance to allow for snagging and rectifying the inevitable teething problems. We will be publicising the site modestly in February but in the meantime, here’s some background on the new features in version 2.

New opt-out services added

In line with our aim to increase the range of opt-out services covered by StayPrivate.org, we’ve added in the ability to register with the Direct Marketing Association’s Corporate Telephone Preference (CTPS) and Fax Preference (FPS) services.

Support for business registrants

Since the CTPS is business-specific and is unavailable to home registrants, it made sense to separate registration into distinct residential and business types. Residential registrants are given access to the Mail (MPS), Telephone (TPS), Baby Mail (BMPS) and FPS services whilst business registrants can access the CTPS and FPS services. Following account creation, indication is given in the dashboard section as to which type of account a user holds.

Delegated registrations

Feedback indicated that a significant number of users wished to register on behalf of a family member or friend lacking internet access and/or an email address. In response to this, we altered the account management area to allow multiple homes to be registered from a single email address. Accordingly, we’ve also provided the ability to manage each set of address details from the account dashboard.

Improvements to help and guidance

We receive a large number of queries requesting assistance on a range of issues from basic usability queries to concerns over the nature of marketing communications received by our users post sign-up. As a team of two that doesn’t work in this area exclusively, fielding these queries, let alone responding in detail to each one, is a massive task. We therefore place great importance in the quality and simplicity of the guidance information we provide and this has been edited, added to and repositioned to improve clarity, to provide as much assistance as possible and to reduce repetition.

Improving this information is not a science – rather it involves simple analysis of the queries received and a common sense approach to answering them. Ensuring that all issues are covered, keeping language as simple and free of jargon as possible, making appropriate information easier to locate by grouping and indexing questions, signposting where assistance is out of scope and stating clearly what CF Labs/StayPrivate.org can and cannot do are the basic yet fundamental tenets we have strived to observe. Along with instructing users to read the FAQ as the first step on our help page, of course…

Visual design

We’ve freshened up the design as well as made some necessary changes to accommodate elements introduced in version 2. There are now two sign up buttons to cater for the addition of business registrations to our original residential service. We’ve added big bold icons to the homepage to draw attention to information on the main aspects of the service. We’ve also included a visual map of the registration journey on our ‘About’ page to illustrate the process in a comprehensive way and further eliminate any confusion as to how the service operates.

Background improvements

On the back end, we’ve built a comprehensive admin system that allows us to do more things faster and more easily, from manipulating registration throughput levels to quickly updating service status messages. We’ve also added SSL security to the site, making StayPrivate.org even more private!

Feedback

As always, we appreciate any feedback you have. Either leave a comment here, or email feedback [at] stayprivate.org.

We will be upgrading and testing the StayPrivate.org website on Tuesday 25th January. The site may be temporarily unavailable while the work is carried out, although we will endeavour to keep interruptions to an absolute minimum. We apologise in advance for any inconvenience this may cause.

More Detail

We will be testing the throughput of new opt-out services prior to roll out as well as bug checking following significant changes made to the backend and the user account system.

Updates

As ever, we’ll be posting updates during the work through the @cflabs twitter account.

There are many different reasons for wanting to stop automated scripts from submitting forms. For example, scripts are regularly used to submit spam comments to blogs or to attempt to guess a user’s password by trying many different combinations very quickly.

Unfortunately CAPTCHAs introduce a big accessibility problem as they rely on visual perception (being able to see and understand the text). Any users with visual difficulties (for example, users with a disability) will potentially have trouble completing the test correctly. Anyone who uses a screen reader to browse websites will not be able to complete the form because it cannot read the image – after all, if it could, it would defeat the whole object of the test. Some CAPTCHA tests also include an audio version alongside the image, but this does not resolve the issues completely.

Because of these accessibility issues, we try and avoid using CAPTCHAs on all CF Labs applications. We try and make use of other methods such as email verification (where we send you a link in an email which you need to click) and only use CAPTCHAs as a last resort.

In the case of our StayPrivate.org service, we’ve built a CAPTCHA into our ‘log in’ and ‘forgotten password’ process – however we hope that the vast majority of users will never see it. While we want to reduce the possibility of an automated script trying to break into a user account, we didn’t want to impose a CAPTCHA every time you try to log in. Instead, we only show it if you enter the wrong email address and password combination three times in 15 minutes. This method means that the vast majority of users never see the image (and so do not face the accessibility issues), while we can reduce the threat of automated scripts.

To assist the minority that do activate this test, we’ve chosen to use the reCAPTCHA service which includes an audio version as well as the standard image.

This is not a perfect solution but hopefully it is a good compromise between security, accessibility and ease of use.

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.