This Giving Tuesday, we’ve launched a new feature that allows you to make an automatic monthly donation to help support government transparency. We also have a host of other small updates and improvements to the site and details on how you can help us keep improving MuckRock.
For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s release notes.
What’s new on MuckRock
Recurring donations
We’re incredibly grateful for all the MuckRock users who support the site by filing their requests with us, but user fees only cover about a quarter of our ongoing expenses. Donations are critical in helping us cover that gap, and today we’re excited to launch recurring donations for those who want to support us in an ongoing way.
You can make a recurring donation in any amount, and each month you’ll receive a receipt for your records. You can also use our built in payment solution or donate through PayPal. Either way, your support is deeply appreciated.
Hidden organizations no longer show up on user profiles
If you’re an administrator of an organization, you have the option to make it private. When we implemented this, however, the name of the organization still showed up on user profile pages. It no longer does.
Improved integration with agency portals
We made some more tweaks so that more requests filed with agencies that use portals will get filed instantly or near instantly. We’d love feedback on if you see any issues, and hope to roll this out to almost every agency that uses portals by the end of the year.
Small fixes
We also had a number of small fixes:
- There were some bugs with newsletter subscriptions we think we’ve fully fixed now.
- We fixed a bug that choked on a weirdly formatted agency email address, which is what crashed the site last weekend.
- We improved handling of issues when people flag something on jurisdiction pages so that we can more promptly handle them.
Help build a better MuckRock
We love transparency. In fact, MuckRock and FOIA Machine are open source software. Anyone can freely inspect, modify, and reuse our code, and if you’re a developer or designer, you can help us continue to improve the sites (they’re actually built on the same codebase!). Open issues are all listed on GitHub. If you find a bug you can email us directly or open an issue. If you do the latter, please search open issues first to make sure it hasn’t already been reported. If it has been reported previously, please leave an additional comment letting us know it’s an issue for you, particularly if you can provide more details about when it crops up or what you think is causing the problem.
For those who want to contribute design, code, or otherwise more directly to the site, we have a developer channel on the MuckRock Slack.
We’re also part of Code for Boston’s weekly hack nights, which take place Tuesday evenings in Kendall Square.
We won’t be at tonight’s event, but get in touch if you’d like to join us some evening to build better transparency software and we’ll let you know next time we do attend.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
