Fax Your Representatives to stop SOPA / PIPA | Hacker News Reader

Fax Your Representatives to stop SOPA / PIPA

hellofax.com

I have to tip my hat to any company giving away its product to support a broader cause.

Agreed, this is just plain awesome.

And it's excellent marketing, too. Win-win.

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.

The effectiveness of advocacy is directly proportional to the amount of externally visible effort and sacrifice you put behind it.

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).

(Edited to add further discussion)

Joseph here, cofounder of HelloFax. The anti-sopa campaign produced a big surge in traffic. We'll working on resolving things now.

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.

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.

Genius marketing. I love this - I think faxing is actually a better approach than calling,too. I'll never use FaxZero again.

It's at least an additional approach. If you have the time to call as well it's worth doing.

My personal message (I'm from California):

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.

Thanks for the feedback, we added the suggested 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.

It couldn't find the representatives for my zip code, that's too bad.

Whats your zip code?

20001? :)

Same here, and I'm 60189.

Have you tried using the wiki link to identify them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup?zip=6018...

I know my reps... just noting this here so if the site coders need some info to debug this problem for others.

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.

Is there any way to provide this over https? I really do not feel comfortable putting my contact details over http.

I love this idea and would love to participate :)

I think this is a fantastic service and I applaud them for providing it, but I get an "unexpected error" whenever I try to submit the form.

When I click "Send it Now" nothing happens

This happened for me. Then I reloaded the page.

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.

I got the same error, but I refreshed the page 4 times (resubmitting the form each time) and it finally worked.

Sorry to hear that. We're having some load issues but we should have everything stable shortly.

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!

I'd love to, but I live in Washington, D.C. and the rest of you keep electing people that won't let me have any.

Hey, I'm glad you all decided to push the button on this! I hope it works out well, for all of us!

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.

http://house.gov/htbin/findrep?ZIP=

http://www.senate.gov/

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.

Offices don't look at faxes, they are normally discarded.

Do you have a specific source for this? Or are you just assuming that this is the case based on how most business offices treat unsolicited faxes?

That's wrong. My wife was a staffer at a senator's office. Everything, including faxes, are reviewed.

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