So, it’s my turn to write something here. Well, this’ll be short. As Francis mentions below, PledgeBank launched today, and everything’s gone reasonably smoothly, with the exception of some tedious PHP bug we haven’t tracked down yet. With any luck the new version of PHP will fix it, so there won’t be hours of painful debugging to do. (I could bore you for hours with my opinions of PHP — actually, I could probably shorten that quite a lot if I were allowed to swear, but this is a family-friendly ‘blog — but let’s just say that fixing PHP problems Is Not My Favourite Job.)

Instead I’ll say what I’m doing right now, which is beginning to add geographical lookup to PledgeBank. At the moment we ask pledge authors for a country (though it can either be “UK” or “global” at the moment), and, if they’re in the UK, a postcode. The idea is to “georeference” (i.e. look up the coordinates of) the postcode, though we don’t actually do that yet. So I’m modifying the database a bit to store coordinates (as a latitude/longitude, so that we don’t have to write a separate case for every wacky national coordinate grid) and generalise the notion of “country” so that we can let non-Brits actually put in their own countries when they create pledges.

Other things we’ve discovered today:

• People are confused by the “(suspicious signer?)” link next to signatures on each pledge page — several people thought that we were reporting our suspicions of the signer. You probably think that’s stupid, but if so that’s only because you’re familiar with sites that have this sort of retroactive moderation button everywhere. Actually it’s us that’s being stupid and we’re going to remove it until we have a better way to implement it — at the moment we think we’re mostly on top of the occasional joke/abusive signature.
• People are confused by the pledge signature confirmation mail, which currently reads (for instance),
  

  Please click on the link below to confirm your signature on the pledge at the bottom of this email.

  http://www.pledgebank.com/L/…

  The pledge reads:

  ‘Phil Booth will refuse to register for an ID card and will donate £10 to a legal defence fund but only if 10,000 other people will also make this same pledge.’

  — the PledgeBank.com team

  We got several emails from people saying “your site has got my name wrong — I’m not Phil Booth”. The point is that Phil Booth wrote the pledge, so it’s in his name; the email reflects that. But that’s not obvious to the signer, and since the only name in the body of the email isn’t theirs, they think it’s got it wrong and complain. (To be fair, only three out of ~1,100 did, but that’s still bad.) This is the sort of problem we need user testing to spot: none of us saw anything wrong with the text when we were testing it. So we need to reword that.

• We’ve had several people email to say that they’d like to do versions of PledgeBank in their own countries, and we’d like to hear from anyone interested in localising the mySociety projects who has time, expertise or even just opinions to donate. If that’s you, please get in touch!

And probably some other stuff, but I said this post would be short….