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mysociety / alaveteli

Provide a Freedom of Information request system for your jurisdiction
https://alaveteli.org
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Periodically check contact email if unchanged for a long time #7174

Open FOIMonkey opened 2 years ago

FOIMonkey commented 2 years ago

I've dealt with a support request where a delay occurred because we were using a generic contact address for a district council, when a dedicated FOI address existed. We'd been using that address for 14 years, so I suspect that a more suitable address didn't exist when the body was first added.

Perhaps we should be prompted every 5-10 years to check if the address we're using is still the best one.

Sort of linked to #3700

garethrees commented 2 years ago

I think this is essentially a duplicate of https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/4837.

FOIMonkey commented 2 years ago

It's not the same. That one is about auto checking if the addresses work at all. This is about checking if they are the best address to use.

In this case, the address we were using was valid, so would have passed all the checks proposed on the other ticket. It was the incorrect address to use for FOI requests which lead to delivery being delayed.

garethrees commented 2 years ago

Ah gotcha!

Maybe this could be linked in as part of #4837 where we email send an automated email to the authority every N years with a link to the relevant public body change request form for email updates.

mdeuk commented 2 years ago

Ah gotcha!

Maybe this could be linked in as part of #4837 where we email send an automated email to the authority every N years with a link to the relevant public body change request form for email updates.

That'd be a good call to action. We used a similar format for the recent NHS ICB formations - albeit, in a more manual way, as for the amount of updates we were doing, it made sense to try and control them through the mailbox.

I would like to do some sweeps of older data, but we'll need to put together a plan on the wdtk repo for how exactly to do that. Perhaps this could act as a small "proof of concept" exercise.