This week, we released improvements to our request download tool so it works better with large requests and improved the language in follow ups. Here’s what’s new at MuckRock and how you can help out.

For previous site improvements, check out all of MuckRock’s release notes, and if you’d like to get a list of site improvements every Tuesday - along with ways to help contribute to the site’s development yourself - subscribe to our developer newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

Site updates

Fixed downloads for requests with a lot of attachments

Sometimes agencies respond to requests with dozens or hundreds of attachments (usually if there are a lot of attachments, the agency sent these to us on DVD and then we’ve uploaded them to your request page). Instead of having to download them one at a time, MuckRock makes it easy for users download everything at once (including both files and every communication saved as a text file) by using “Download as Zip.” Once you click that button, we’ll start preparing your export and email you a link when ready, after which you’ll have five days to download the file.

Some download requests with hundreds of attachments were occasionally failing, so we’ve refactored this feature to make it more reliable and hopefully faster. If your request has a lot of attachments, it may take up to half an hour, but everything should be much faster now than it was before.

Follow ups are now 100% less redundant

Auto-follow up messages to agencies used to ask agencies if they needed any clarification twice in each follow up message. It used to be this:

I wanted to follow up on the following Freedom of Information Act request, copied below, and originally submitted on (date). Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response, or if further clarification is needed.

Thanks for your help, and let me know if further clarification is needed.

and now we send a variant of this:

I wanted to follow up on the following Freedom of Information Act request, copied below, and originally submitted on (date). Please let me know when I can expect to receive a response.

Thanks for your help, and let me know if further clarification is needed.

Come hack on MuckRock

We have a growing group of volunteer hackers helping to make MuckRock better every day. We want to make it easier to contribute, so we’re launching a new project and weekly newsletter, “Release Notes.” Register to get a summary of site updates each week, a list of issues you can help with, and details about our Code for Boston meetups.

Check out some of our issues labeled “help wanted” for ideas on where’s good to start, or just pop into our Slack’s #Developers channel.

Subscribers to the weekly newsletter get exclusive data sets, FOIA-related scripts, and other transparency hacker tidbits exclusively for subscribers. You can subscribe to to the newsletter at the top or bottom of this page.

If you want to contribute better FOIA tools for thousands of requesters, there’s a number of ways to help. If you find a bug you can email us directly or open an issue on GitHub.

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.

In addition to the new newsletter, we have a developer channel on the MuckRock Slack.

Image via Wikimedia Commons