This coming Sunday - April 6th, 2018 - MuckRock will have two hours of planned downtime starting at 2pm Eastern as we roll out some major site upgrades. When we come back, you’ll have access to a revamped requesting tool and a host of powerful new features.
We’ve teased some of these updates in previous MuckRock release notes, and are very grateful to all those that have provided feedback during our testing phase.
During Sunday’s downtime, the site will be largely inaccessible, including request pages, news articles, and filing tools, but our support email and Slack channe will remain active. Incoming emails and other communications from agencies will be properly processed once the site is back up and running.
This is our first planned downtime in a few years, during which we will overhaul a number of different aspects of the site, including how we store request data and our request composer tool, while enabling a number of long-standing feature requests. Stay tuned for a full update of the new functionality when it goes live Monday.
Come hack on MuckRock
If you’d like to help us continue making improvements like these in the future, there are lots of ways to help out.
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 might not make it to every one of them, so if you want to meet up there it’s a good idea to check in on Slack first. We will not be at tonight’s meetup.
In particular, we’re looking for designers who are interested in helping us find ways to make all of our tools and data more accessible and more fun to use. We’ve got a relatively simple front-end stack, so if you’re interested in helping hundreds of thousands of people better understand public records and the importance of transparency, please get in touch!
Image via Wikimedia Commons
