TrafficViolators is Upgrading

Traffic Violators is under going an upgrade!

We heard your feedback and have been consistently working to incorporate the same. At the same time, technology has also been moving with a tremendous pace.

The upgraded site will have some new technology and will incorporate all the features you suggested.

During the upgrade you will not be able to enter any new violations. However, the site will continue to  be available and we will not be loosing any data (including your registration).

If all goes well during the upgrade, we will be back on June 23rd 2008. Till then – Safe Driving!

Why we don’t allow anonymous postings

It has been suggested that that we should allow anonymous posting of traffic violations at trafficviolators.com. The reasons have broadly fallen in 2 categories:

1. Ease of use: Having people submit the violations anonymously is quicker as one doesn’t need to spend time logging in at the site.
2. Safety of the submitter: People who have been reported may hit back with retribution if they know who has submitted their vehicle no.

Both of these are legitimate concerns and we sat down to seriously think about them. Not only did we think amongst ourselves but also called up a few people on the same. The result of this discussion was that we have decided to NOT allow anonymous postings. The main reason is to avoid any useless submissions made by spammers. We are also aware of the suggestions made earlier and here is how we support them:

1. We have a simple one step registration that let’s a user just enter the username and password to join the site. this is the quickest way to register. A person does need to login from time to time at the portal and we have a “Remember Login” checkbox to avoid multiple login prompts in short durations of usage.
2. We never highlight the real name or username of the user who submitted the violation report. Hence there is no fear of retribution and the cloak of anonymity is always available. In addition, only due to username being used we are able to support you editing your previous submissions and adding more information to your traffic violations report.

Hence we will continue to only have non-anonymous traffic violations at the site.

We thank you for taking your time to improve and better the road safety.

Revamping TrafficViolators

The traffic on the road is only getting worse. And we have been inactive!!

Would start by truly apologising for the inactivity. But we don’t intend to anymore. We are planning a revamp now. Nothing will get affected for the users and they can continue to use the site without a glitch!

Some data on the site usage for May 2008:

1. We had 84 visitors who contributed to the 609 page views and almost all are new visitors to the site.
2. 77% use IE and 20% use Firefox with 40% using 1024×768 screen resolution.
3. Around 30% traffic is direct while 53% comes via search engines. The keywords being used have been “traffic violators”, “traffic violations”, “report traffic violations” etc. Maximum traffic to the site has been sent via facebook.

Now about some of the features we are thinking of implementing:

1. Anonymous reporting of violations (still to be debated)
2. Information on what happens to your reports when you submit them
3. Provision for the owner to come back and say sorry
4. Provision to handle commercial vehicles/ cabs
5. Richer API set so that widgets can be built
6. Reach out to the local news channels and get them to talk about the site
7. Offences to be reported in some form of a visual graph?
8. Press and Testimonials page
9. Improve Page formatting
10. Reactivate the SMS feature

All the above features are taken from feedback observed on the web. I especially thank Deepak Vasudevan and Shiv for their comments about the site.

Please feel free to comment here if you have any other feedback. We are eager to get them in practice and make this a more useful site.

TrafficViolators coming to Facebook!

facebook is a social networking application. i have seen a lot of people both in India and abroad on this network!

to reach out to these networks, trafficviolators.com will be creating a facebook application! included in the application will be the ability to:

1. enter the violations report from facebook itself
2. should display the latest violations from the trafficviolators.com
3. should add a message on friends walls if a user enters a traffic violation

the application is being created in .NET 2.0 and will be using FacebookNET client library!

with creation of the application, this citizenship effort will find it easy to travel in the online world from one person to the next. please be on a lookout for this application!

if you have an suggestion, please feel free to share your feedback with us at info@trafficviolators.com

trafficviolators is BACK!

the recent spate in the blue line deaths and the consequent media attention gave us another reason to focus on reviving the site that had mistakenly got deleted.

so after significant time with it, we have revived the site! the new site has all the features of the old and should be more reliable and faster (given our new infrastructure)! the look and feel of the site was highly commented on and has been redone to make it look more appealing.

an additional feature we have introduced is the ability to get a @trafficviolators.com email  to anyone who wants the same.

Please contribute by taking a quick look at the site and sharing your feedback with us at info@trafficviolators.com..

Trafficviolators hits a ROADBLOCK

our site has experienced an unplanned downtime! we were cruising fine on the highway when we hit a roadblock..

we have broken arms and a punctured heart! are we going to live.. oh hell, we are..

the scenario is that we were upgrading the site to fix some bugs and by mistake overwrote the database with an older database. We lost all the users, all the data and all the violations reported – lucky violators!

our team has worked very hard to restore the site to normalcy but we have lost all data. the site is back up and working fine though!

if you had registered with us earlier, we request you to register again and if you have never been to our site before do visit us and register there.

Starting this blog!

we are starting with this blog to share our learnings as we about building this community. there will be some technical discussions and some general discussions. All of it to simply share what we learn from day to day!

and we may surprise you with an announcement or two

safe motoring and catch the trafficviolators!