I wish this service would allow me to write my own personal message instead of appending it. The provided text, which I cannot change, has a line that I feel is too dramatic for the rhetoric I'm trying to keep: "provide cover for totalitarian regimes that want to undermine Internet freedom abroad."
Sure, that could happen eventually, but right now I want to express the immediate and probable effects of the bill that matters most to me (copyright holders bypassing due process to block online content).
I love this. This not only speaks to their values, but to their long-term vision. Lots of companies speaking out against SOPA/PIPA would potentially be threatened by the bill, I doubt HelloFax would operationally [I may be ignorant though] but they have the foresight to still stand against it, and go as far as to enable others to effectively protest by providing their service for free.
you know, I just spent all day here (http://www.informationdiet.com/live) talking to congressional staffers about the most effective way of communicating to Congress.
The conclusion: the fax is the biggest waste of time that there is for communicating to Congress.
What is a better use of time for communicating with Congress? Most people don't have time to set up an appointment and go to their offices. Writing a paper letter takes a lot more time, and then you have to find an envelope, stamps and go mail it. I guess we should try to do it anyway.
Looks like hellofax couldn't handle the surge in traffic -- site is now down for me.
Whenever I see a site down like this due to a surge in traffic for a "free" opportunity, I always question whether it is in the site's best interest. For instance, if I was a hellofax customer attempting to send a fax right now, I would be unhappy -- I pay to be able to send / receive faxes, and an (perhaps from the customers perspective) "unnecessary event" has prevented me from doing that.
Brings up another question -- whenever companies do these types of "promotions" / "events", should they be hosted on a separate system to minimize impact on existing customers / site activity? I believe this year, Sparkfun use a separate system for free day to ensure the surge in traffic did not impact the main site (and paying customers).
If you can let us know when it stabilizes, I'd like to then share the link to my personal network. (Although I guess that might be kind of self-defeating for your at this point? OTOH a significant portion of my network is small businesspeople who might appreciate having an inexpensive, email-accessible fax line on hand.)
To others here: Remembering HelloFax as a YC company, I signed up for and used it a month or two ago to fax my legislators on SOPA/PIPA at a time when my landline was having problems. (I signed up even though the free trial might have sufficed. TANSTAAFL.)
For $5 a month (and I didn't take the lowest plan), I have a web and email accessible fax machine, without the hassle of trying to set one up, myself. If I'm traveling, in the cafe, or whatever, it doesn't matter. My fax machine's with me.
There's still an annoying amount of stuff where fax is the only choice or the only choice that works for the other party.
And in the past, I've found my legislators to be consistently responsive to faxes. From my own experience and reading, they seem to have some of the impact of a written letter [1] while getting through in a timely fashion.
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1. As I understand it, they generally are perceived as taking more time and effort to write and send, and as a message category there are fewer of them than e.g. emails and phone calls. And if and as they are printed out upon receipt (I'm not sure, these days), they represent a physical object in the office and in someone's hands, rather than another message on a screen or a tick in an intern's phone call tally.
P.S. I've shared it, now. Hope that generates a few more faxes and some good will (and maybe a customer or three) for you.
Has HelloFax considered a service that would let other people set up a form like this, where HelloFax handled the backend faxing? It sounds like a great advocacy tool
I think the whole point is they hope to generate future revenue from potential clients from this. It might be somewhat wrong, but at the end of the day they're providing a great free service that will do a lot of good. I think it's smart and fine.
No--I'm suggesting that HelloFax sell a service to organizations to run a form like this one. So if I'm the NRA I can have a form on my website to send a fax to people's representatives about some sort of gun legislation, and HelloFax handles the faxing backend like with this SOPA form.
Both bills are serious threats to many of the companies that have helped usher our society into the Digital Age. As a resident of the state that is home to most of the world's most innovative and progressive digital companies, I would hope that my representatives too take pride in the fact that these companies find California to foster a culture conducive to technological innovation. I ask you to help continue the progress, and to vote against these bills.
I get the error message "Please select at least one legislator." Sure thing, but where do I select them from? I don't see any listed anywhere.
Edit: I tried again and it worked. The problem was probably an unanswered JSON request for the legislator list, since the server was bogged down. The no-legislator-selected condition should be updated to ensure that the legislator list has been received prior to assuming it's a user error.
The email address field is a bit too short for the email address I wanted to use. Some universities force students to use cumbersomely long emails addresses; e.g., California State University Long Beach makes its students use firstname.lastname@student.csulb.edu.
May want to tweak your validation to allow a bit more breathing room.
Also, my personal message ran past the allotted space, and didn't expand, nor was there a scroll bar. So I couldn't see the last several words. An auto-expanding textarea or simply a scroll bar would be nice.
Sorry about that. We use sunlightlabs excellent Congress API but there are a few quirks with it. Try changing to another zipcode in your area and you should see results.
The outage doesn't reflect poorly on your site IMO, it just demonstrates the quantity of people who appreciate what you're doing. Thank you for looking into making it better though!
Joseph here, cofounder of HelloFax. We got a massive surge of traffic from this and we're adding another instance to deal with this. Will be running smoothly shortly.
Sending faxes is a complete waste of time. Offices don't look at faxes, they are normally discarded. Send messages through the Congressional website webforms, those go to the office CRM and are tallied and usually get a response.
Completely disagree. Although traditional web forms are fine, I've worked in a staffer's office and I know that faxes are always reviewed. Receiving a large number of faxes is more likely to indicate a groundswell of opposition than a web form.
It's free and provides tangible/tactile evidence of opposition. I'm faxing my reps now.
