Convio Advocacy Data updated for President Obama and Vice-President Biden

GilLamont :

Then why is there a President-Elect in the Target List when I click on Manage Targets?

We changed that particular folder in the Target List to "Presidential change.gov Site" last week as President Obama was sworn into office.

However, the Contact Us webform previously located on change.gov ( ) is now defunct and redirects people to the whitehouse.gov Contact page, so we will be removing the change.gov target from that folder in the near future.

Tom Camerlinck:

Hi Joseph,

I see now that Obama's webform is "untrainable". Do you know when that happened? Is it simply that they added a CAPTCHA to the webform that makes it untrainable for you? Or is there something more difficult about the Obama CAPTCHA implementation that's more difficult?

"Untrainable" sounds like a dead-end, but is there any hope that you'll work around the technical issues here and be able to submit via webform to the President in the near future?

Thanks.

Tom

Hello Tom,

My apologies for not seeing your question earlier.

Yes, back in late August we had to mark President Obama's webform as "untrainable". This is because the whitehouse.gov webform began using reCAPTCHA to validate submissions to their webform. The reCAPTCHA functionality does more than a "standard" CAPTCHA in that it detects to which IP address the CAPTCHA was sent and if it received the answer from the same IP address. Normally, with a "standard" CAPTCHA, Convio's advocacy system imbeds the CAPTCHA portion of a webform in a user-side page and presents it to the end-user. The end-user then fills out the page, including the answer to the CAPTCHA question, and clicks submit, and Convio software then takes their answer and submits it to the webform on behalf of the end-user. So, in the case of the whitehouse.gov presidential form, the CAPTCHA was being sent to the end-user's IP address but the answer submitted from one of the IP addresses of Convio's servers. The reCAPTCHA functionality detects this mismatch and asks the user to resubmit their answer.

Thus, we had to change the Obama webform to click-to-submit for the time being. In that scenario, the end-user clicks on a link and is taken directly to the webform and can fill it out themselves, using cut and paste features to paste the content of the advocacy message into the webform. We know this is less than ideal.

Convio executives are working with technical experts who maintain the whitehouse.gov webform on this issue. We hope to come up with a solution that allows us to return to our previous ability to submit advocacy messages to the whitehouse.gov website on behalf of the end-user, without the end-user having to perform the additional click-to-submit step.

Joseph Poirier

Director, Engineering Services

Convio, Inc.