Show clearly how to make follow-up to body's main FOI address

[mysociety]

Show clearly how to make follow-up to body's main FOI address

[sebbacon]

Could you suggest a precise wording and location? I'm not familiar enough with the support requests to make a judgement on this. "Reply to the public body" next to current "Reply to Information Request"? Should we reword "reply to information request" too? Its meaning isn't clear, I don't think.

Or perhaps when someone clicks any "send followup" type link, they should get a dialog that only appears if the sender is't the FOI contact, saying "your reply will go to [the address that this message was sent from]. If you'd like it to go to the authority's original FOI contact click here"?

Thoughts?

[RichardTaylor]

I think the best, most unobtrusive, option would be in the list following:

"[username] only:"

At the moment the first bullet there states either:

"Reply to [Last Sender]"

or

"Send a follow-up to [Public Body Name]"

I suggest always showing both options and rephrasing the latter to:

"Send a follow-up to the FOI email address for [Public Body Name]"

If we can afford to be more verbose:

"Send follow up message to the main FOI contact address for [public body]"

As this problem (of "reply to this message" not working) affects such a small fraction of users I wouldn't want to add another, potentially confusing, option, below every message, ie. adding another option next to "Reply to this message".

I'm going to raise another issue - a feature request for detecting emails from noreply@ or similar addresses.

[RichardTaylor]

I've added the related issue / feature suggestion for adding code to detect error/autoreplies to which we probably shouldn't offer a "reply" option at:

https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/issues/137

[RichardTaylor]

The WhatDoTheyKnow team are currently getting emails from users at a rate of around one a day or so to which the response is to direct them to use the "send follow up" link under their original message to send a message to the main FOI address for the public body.

I'm adding this comment to say that I think addressing this issue would help avoid a significant number of support requests.

Examples of requests include:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/nick_clegg_visit_to_brazil
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/the_number_of_complaints_for_ace

[sebbacon]

This is related to issue #137

[sebbacon]

How about a single "reply" button, at the bottom of the page, that says "reply" if the last message is not from the user, and "send follow up" if it is? This would open up a textarea inline on the request page, so the user can still scroll back up the whole thread for reference.

Above the textarea it would say "To: Helen Smith [don't want to reply to Helen Smith?]" The link [don't want to reply to Helen Smith?] would give a dropdown choice of all the other correspondents in the thread, with "Main FOI address for Geraldine Quango" as the first option.

We could then do away with the multple reply/followup links and I think it would be far less confusing.

[RichardTaylor]

I think this is a good proposal.

Presumably the aim would be to remove any no-reply addresses from the list

To throw something else in, this is related to #10 as sometimes messages suggest another email address the request ought be sent to; if we could detect such addresses eg. other userparts at the public body's domain we could offer those in the list too (perhaps even less prominently).

Another related idea might be when a "reply" has detected a bounce response the a button allowing the user to "resend to the main FOI address for [public body]" might would be a good "one click" option.