I went to send a complaint to my local councilman and visited his Web site. He had a contact form, so I filled it out to complain that vegetation has become overgrown on a stretch of sidewalk that we use making it more difficult to walk our dog and push our son in his stroller. I hit the submit button multiple times using Safari and nothing happened. I went to Firefox, filled out the form and something happened. “Page Not Found”. Wow, that’s great. So I looked at the source and whoever worked on the page had uncommented the line for the testing server and commented out the line for the production server, thereby causing the form to goto a server that would appear to be only accessible internally.
So I sent email and got an auto-response. It was a pleasant auto-response that had a paragraph in it that disturbed me:
You have been automatically added to receive via email our eNewsletter
that keeps you up to date on issues in our community and the City. The
eNewsletter is sent once a month and contains information on things
going on.
That’s great. There was no unsubscribe link and I didn’t ask to be subscribed to a newsletter. Isn’t that in violation of the CAN-SPAM act? Or are government officials exempt? Or since I sent email, that automatically meant I agreed to receiving crap? I made the mistake of using my regular email address; damn. I would just block email from the city, but I receive email from CERT.
What’s better if you look at past newsletters, there is a link to update your preferences; it doesn’t work.
Thanks Mr. Councilman!
Yes, all Government related websites are usually not very good. If you want better and a bit faster service, you may want to contact your city directly, either the streets, or engineering departments.