

Fax Your Representatives to stop SOPA / PIPA - guiseppecalzone
http://www.hellofax.com/StopSOPA

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

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lloydarmbrust
Agreed, this is just plain awesome.

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

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ilovecomputers
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).

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zallarak
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.

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cjoh
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.

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baltcode
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.

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

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bschlinker
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)

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

~~~
pasbesoin
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.

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MaxGabriel
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

~~~
switz
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.

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MaxGabriel
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.

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

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

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reason
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.

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literalusername
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.

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idle_processor
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.

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davezatch
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.

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

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ComputerGuru
Same here, and I'm 60189.

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bcrawl
Have you tried using the wiki link to identify them?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup?zip=6018...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup?zip=60189)

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

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mirkules
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 :)

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BudVVeezer
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.

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

~~~
BudVVeezer
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!

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dhugiaskmak
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.

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

PB

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OstiaAntica
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/>

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joelandren
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.

