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Tue. October 17, 2006, 06:46am PDT
Online city complaint form complaint
I checked out the city's new online conduct complaint form and I'll avoid tearing apart the tech for now but would like to point something out. When someone opts to submit the form anonymously, one field that troubles me stays hot: race.
Although this is not a required field to submit the form, it may prove to be a barrier to anyone wishing to voice a complaint when they see other nearby fields get grayed out but not this one. Even if someone chooses to identify themselves, hopefully the race field serves only the purpose of some federal statistic necessarily gathered for some form of reporting or to gain funding for something. It might be nice to title the field "ethnicity" as well.
Just briefly, back to the tech (I'll probably get to it over here later). There's no technical reason why the race field couldn't be grayed out or disabled along with the name, phone, address, etc. fields. I can think of numerous ways to get rid of it and they didn't. In case the city ever needs a little web help, have your people contact my people.
Previously in the Tacoma News Tribune
Comments (2) | To Top
10/17/2006 @ 8:45am
looks like whomever put that form together was on an inline style binge or using some sort of microsoft tool. or on crack. same diff. pseudo anonymity is underrated.
by sparkrobot
10/17/2006 @ 9:37am
Yeah, MS code is ugly stuff. Ugly code under an ugly form with some ugly functionality.
by KevinFreitas