@rickyhennessy I did request a change to my gmail, but that doesn’t appear to have been granted. The “fingerprints” in the one successful Helios email gave me the header and routing information I needed to comb through the logs and prove that there simply was never an email from their services at the indicated time. It was actually a pretty quiet hour for email altogether. Respectfully, I’ve been running web and email servers, professionally, since 1999. If the prevailing feeling is to shrug this off in the face of technical evidence, then my confidence is negatively impacted.
We have had a few people say that they’ve never received a ballot and usually that has to do with it going into spam or something like that. We usually put in the notice if you don’t receive the ballot to contact us immediately and we can send it to you manually. Since voting goes on for a week or so we’re usually able to catch anything like that. I’m not sure if we put that in the message this time, but if not, we’ll make sure to add that in the future so people will know what to do if something like this happens and they don’t receive their ballot.
@Pete_Gilcrease That would be my first recommendation to any of my customers too, but as you and I have already discussed, I do not have a spam folder. Traffic to my domain is low enough that I simply catch-all in one inbox and manually skim through what little spam I get. Bear in mind, the fact that I run my own email server is less of a valid avenue to speculate on user error. This isn’t my pride speaking. In fact, I have access to far more information than if I depended on my carrier’s SMTP. And I’m qualified to analyze it.
My goal isn’t to make FAN abandon their voting system (!) it’s to help resolve a problem with it. Let’s be reasonable. On one hand, we have a declaration, without evidence, that Helios can not be at fault. On the other, we have mine, with evidence, that my email server was not at fault. Let’s not drop the ball, friends.
There have been a few cases that I don’t think spam was the issue and I’m not sure what was. I assume you’d probably fall into that category in this case. It’s really rare. I assume the ballot just didn’t make it through the internet for some reason and in that case we just resend the ballot information through an option in Helios and it usually makes it through the second time. We’ll definitely provide a better notice next time. We want to make sure everyone receives their ballot and can vote! That’s also why we send the voting notices through the google group to provide another level or redundancy to make sure that everyone is receiving the information that a vote is going on and to make sure they received a ballot. Although, that doesn’t really help unless we provide a sentence that specifically says something like “if you don’t receive a ballot today, then you didn’t receive it and you’ll need to notify us to resend your ballot information.” Please bare with us as we refine our system of announcements and voting best practices!
@Pete_Gilcrease I’m told my ballot was resent. That did not show up, either. Then, I requested a change to my gmail address 10/2 and was handed off to another. I simply heard no response afterwards. The refinement could include publishing the contacts who are directly empowered to help with voting issues, and to establish a formal process to follow so that existing options aren’t neglected. What say you all?
That makes sense. If people don’t have a single point of contact, then things could get lost. We’ll make sure to post the main contact email address for voting issues too. It should always be info@atxfriends.org and that’ll get to whoever can help with voting. Hopefully those suggestions can make sure it doesn’t happen again!
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If possible, I’d like to change my email address to dawsonneighborhoodORG@gmail.com for membership and voting, but leave the existing address which I subscribe to forum posts alone.
Done! I changed your registered email address where votes go to. I didn’t make any changes to anything else like your forums profile, so it’s still set to the email you had it set to before. That’s easy enough to change though if you need to change it in the future under your forum profile settings.
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