When someone visits FixMyStreet.com from a country other than the UK, put up a big banner about being able to use local deploys

[TomSteinberg]

This might require some more deep thinking to work out how it might scale for people visiting any international deployment from another country

For reference, I spotted this because it already exists on Alavetli, which I just saw by accessing the Czech depoyment from the USA

[abibroom]

#346 would be much better than this solution.

[dracos]

@abimysoc Not sure I follow - if you're not in the UK, coming to fixmystreet.com I think showing a banner like WDTK does makes a lot of sense; for the UK (and everyone), the changes of #346 make sense too, I think they're both good.

[abibroom]

Mainly I don't like this solution because it has the potential not to show for a visitor who might be interested in the platform - e.g. at a UK event, I might mention FixMyStreet.com to some foreigners, they go and look at it on their laptops, they see no banner. The country a visitor is in, in so far as you can tell that from presumably their IP address, may not have any bearing on the country they're interested in FMS/Alaveteli in.

So IMO it is better for every instance to advertise the platform all the time (i.e. prominently and by default in the front-end design), not try to deduce via geography-sniffing whether or not a visitor might be interested in knowing about it. "Powered by FixMyStreet Platform".

[dracos]

You should have mentioned fixmystreet.org to them? :) The vast majority of users to fixmystreet.com are people reporting things to their bodies, and something prominent will just be annoying to them. We certainly should have fixmystreet.org advertised as #346 says (and on front page could be top right where @wrightmartin has put "Are you from a council?" on #346, but probably only one thing there, and note that's where the logged in mesage appears if you are logged in...), I think the footer might actually be more prominent for that though, it's probably where I'd look.

[TomSteinberg]

For the benefit of other peope who are reading this thread, it is worth
noting that WhatDoTheyKnow already shows a relatively prominent message
only to non-UK IP users. I always forget about it until I'm abroad. I don't
think it's an unreasonable idea to give a subtle message to everyone, but a
big in your face message to people who are outside the country so can't
actually use the UK site.

On 9 April 2014 16:32, Matthew Somerville notifications@github.com wrote:

You should have mentioned fixmystreet.org to them? :) The vast majority
of users to fixmystreet.com are people reporting things to their bodies,
and something prominent will just be annoying to them. We certainly should
have fixmystreet.org advertised as #346https://github.com/mysociety/fixmystreet/issues/346says (and on front page could be top right where
@wrightmartin https://github.com/wrightmartin has put "Are you from a
council?" on #346 #346,
but probably only one thing there, and note that's where the logged in
mesage appears if you are logged in...), I think the footer might actually
be more prominent for that though, it's probably where I'd look.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/571#issuecomment-39978263
.

[wrightmartin]

I'm working on a slight change to homepage that I think addresses this - will post shortly

[wrightmartin]

I agree with Matthew, the vast majority of visitors are coming because they're reporting a problem, any messaging that feels salesy will be to their annoyance. I'd want to be really cautious about adding 'ads' to the homepage as it could be detrimental.

I've added a 'powered by...' message to the footer, it will appear on every page and it's in context with the councils/developers messaging that's there.

[wrightmartin]

@dracos I didn't realise the logged-in message appeared in a different place on the home page. Now I see why that space looked so empty :)

[dracos]

This ticket is about a banner that appears above/over the page for a foreign visitor, not changes to the front page, which is #771. We still need a design for the actual banner; WDTK's is just a basic

[struan]

Current text says:

This site is for reporting problems in the UK. There are FixMyStreet sites
all over the world, or you
could set up your own using the FixMyStreet Platform.

And looks like this:

Comments welcome.

[dracos]

I think we can perhaps be bolder :) The Alaveteli banner appears at the top of the page pushing down the content of the page (easiest way to see it is on any WDTK page, console $('#other-country-notice .popup-content').html('You can make FOI requests in Australia at this site!').parent().show().

I don't think we cache the front page at present beyond the default, but technically I guess to do this we would need to Vary: IP if we were worried about showing the wrong thing (if we cached it more, I guess). Alaveteli implements the banner with JavaScript to avoid this anti-caching, and also can set a cookie to prevent the message showing again. Do we think it's worth doing the same here?

[TomSteinberg]

I agree with @dracos , the purpose of this is to strongly steer people from the UK site (that they really can't use) to something more positive. It may be that you don't feel comfortable with doing this until you can get some time from @zarino or @wrightmartin , in which case please add to the design backlog for them.

[struan]

Ok, javascript thing done and also bolder, if rather rudimentary, alert in place: