The e-petitions site went live today at noon so that people could start signing petitions raised in the first week and raise new petitions.
Interest in the site exceeded our expectations - some key figures from the first day:
- More than 1700 visitors a minute to the site
- Over 2,400 petitions raised
- Over 14,000 signatures in the first 4 hours.
We are working to increase the capacity and the performance of the site to support the interest in this initiative.
I am sorry to anyone who was unable to access the site during periods of peak demand today, the site did not go down at any time but we do need to provide more information to people during times of high load so that no one gets discouraged from using the site.
If you have any thoughts or comments on the site then please let me know and I will blog with more details around our learning from this site later this month.
5 comments
Comment by What does “Google is the homepage” mean IRL? | Government Digital Service posted on
[...] the summer GDS launched e-petitions, “an easy way for you to influence government policy in the UK. You can create an e-petition [...]
Comment by Lemesmer posted on
Quick question - what's the difference between a site "going down" and a site not working properly as happened with epetitions today?
Comment by richardstobart posted on
@Lemesmer - The difference is similar to the difference between being stationary on a motorway because of the volume of traffic and being stationary because of a pile-up.
Comment by Lemesmer posted on
Hmm - semantics....!
Comment by Andy Bold posted on
Nice problems to have 🙂
One question - how do I report what may be a bug?
I signed a petition, got the confirmation email, clicked the confirmation link and got a 500 page. When I re-try the link it fails saying page no longer valid. When I try and register my vote again it says that my email address has already been used. This doesn't confirm that my preference is registered though, and I don't have a confirmation that my name was registered on the petition.
Is it possible to put up a "You're already registered" page for links that are re-clicked? (Complete, of course, with a check that it did register.) Also, a change to make the "email already" used a better confirmation that the name is definitely (again with a check that all is present and correct)?
Anyway, great start - keep up the good work!