This past week, we launched a new experimental feature that does a better job of displaying datasets. It isn’t widely rolled out yet, so see if you can spot it and let us know what you’d like to see happen with it. We also improved how we handled mail and forms, speeding up request processing.

We’ve had a lot of features roll out over the past week, a few user facing goodies and a lot of backend improvements to keep speeding up request processing.

This Giving Tuesday, we’ve launched a new feature that allows you to make an automatic monthly donation to help support government transparency.

This week, we worked behind the scenes to continue to tweak and improve our integration with agency FOIA portals.

MuckRock requests can now be submitted through agencies’ existing portals, making a smoother experience for both requesters and agencies alike. Plus better sorting, fewer bad agencies, improving tracking number tracking, and more.

Building off communication improvements we previously made, we’ve revamped some of our internal tools for identifying when agencies stop responding to requests so we can more quickly reach out and update our database of contacts. We also made some small search engine optimization improvements as well as continue to fight aggressive spammers in the forums.

Last week, we pushed out some much-needed improvements for spam management on the Q&A forums plus set the groundwork for important upgrades to how we file and track requests.

We’re kicking off a new feature to let you know about new features being released to MuckRock and FOIA Machine, as well as highlight opportunities to help us improve the service.

We’re really excited to have released a slate of new features that will make navigating this site much easier. This includes more relevant search results, more powerful filtering options, and a simplified menu structure.