I was trying to report a non-urgent crime (vehicle incident I witnessed involving another bike rider) in London. The Met police force site came up nicely in Google and there was a sitemap and looked like the possibility of finding the right form through deep links via search.
Firstly the Met police force site gave me a nice 502 error (any page), in full tomcat style (at least it wasn’t a default (Apache) Forbidden notice - this came later). Ouch, embarrassing.
But at least it cleared after about ten minutes - (server coming back up or deployment finishing perhaps?) I tried waiting for came back and eventually found the correct page to report this problem (under “Roadsafe London” — not “Online crime reporting”, or “Crime and Internet crime reporting” or any other ways of communicating online in this byzantinely complicated site).
The process was painful because of a number of errors (not least a 256 character limit on the text box for the anser to “Your information… Please provide as much detail as possible in order…”). So being a good web citizen (and besides this is kind of a busman’s holiday for me), I decided to report the problems (including the various broken links etc I had gathered).
But was that going to be easy? There’s a link to “Website feedback” in ‘contact us’ but that gives rise to effectively a survey form allowing you to tell how your experience with met.police.uk made you feel (I’m sure a useful form, but no way to report specific errors). I didn’t feel like I needed to make a “complaint about the police” (don’t want to add my noise to that important stream).
So eventually under “General Enquiry” I wrote up my:
“Detailed website feedback”.
In order of importance
1) There are several problems with Roadsafe London form at https://secure.met.police.uk/roadsafelondon/
a) VERY IMPORTANT: there is a very small character limit (256 letters!) on “Your information” — doesn’t give enough space to put in details requested by the form: “Please provide as much detail as possible in order for us to deal with your information in the most effective way, please include such things as dates, times and places as well as details of any other people involved.” This needs to be increased to several thousand
b) Need ability to put in “more details about Vehicle” under “Vehicle details” (e.g. this was a NL-registered tour coach)
2) On the main “Reporting Crime” page (http://www.met.police.uk/reporting_crime/), under “Online reporting”, the link labelled “Access online crime reporting” links to “Customer feedback” (https://secure.met.police.uk/yourvoicecounts/index.php) — it should link to “https://online.met.police.uk/”.
3) On many pages, there are links to “Crimes” (http://www.met.police.uk/crimes/) — this page gives a “Forbidden” error - as a stopgap you should make this page some kind of index page. Examples of these links - in the top menu for https://online.met.police.uk/, https://secure.met.police.uk/enquiries, for https://secure.met.police.uk/roadsafelondon/ etc.)
4) The site needs a proper website error reporting form.
The website feedback form only allows me to report general feelings about website, not an ability to report broken links and issues such as the above.
5) Judging by the length of the list above you need a QA team working on your very important website.
Did it surprise me when I clicked submit I just got the form back, wiped clean (no, not at all) — I guess my session must have expired (session, for a general enquiry form with no server-side state - ah, that must be tomcat (or at least bad J2EE coding). But add to that, no messaging to tell the user what has happened. You do need to be a web developer to use this site.
Really good post on writing your read-me first
Found that writing user manual first was very helpful for writing the sugar api for Brainstorm realtime 3d engine: http://cleverplugs.com/sugar/
Oddly I ended up writing api methods that seemed unlikely to be used other than for a learner trying out the engine. However they made the learning process much easier (and encourage console/command-line usage).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167059/
Jesus wears a suit
Magdalena smokes a cigarette
Huguette drove us. What you see is what huguette. “I hope we don’t bottom out” (we did). Je suis québecoise mais je parle bon français.
Gainey (wine)
Fess Parker (davey crockett hat, wine)
Roblar (too much wine)
