Send message confirmation issues

[sinak]

I'm getting lots and lots of these, so I'll document them all here. A bit hard to tell exactly what is happening.

I was sending to three people (2 senators and a congressman). When I was finished, I pressed send, then it came up with another screen for the congressman, so I thought it was going to make me review each of them and confirm them one by one. So I hit send again. Then it just sat on the same screen. I'm confused what if anything has been sent. Shouldn't it say something like "your message has been sent to x, y & z"? The temptation is to click send again. (I now see in my email inbox two confirmations from the congressman, nothing from the others).

2:

When I hit send, the wheel spun for a while and then it went back to the compose page. No confirmation that my message was sent, and no error message either. This is somewhat confusing. Did my message go through?

3:

Hi there, I have tried to enter my address into the form on your site, and when I hit "Submit" absolutely nothing happens. I have tried it on Firefox and IE. No dice. Any suggestions?

4:

I just tried to send a message to my senators and my representative concerning the FATCA law. I hit “send” and waited about 30 seconds. Then the web page returned to the exact same form that it was before I hit “send.” There was no feedback to let me know if my message had been sent or not. It would be very helpful to have some feedback letting people know that their message has been successfully sent.

5:

Unfortunately, when we hit send, rather than seeing a response page that says “thank you for sending your message”, many of our members are being returned to the main forms page. We suspect that at least some of these emails are getting through, but were wondering if this is a known issue and if you have suggestions for how to handle it.

6:

Hi there, I've sent an email using your form but returned me to the letter-writing page. I know the letter sent as i got an auto-reply from one senator (though not other senator or rep). Is there a problem with the system at the moment?

7:

We are using your wonderful service (truly a great help!) to send messages to Congress regarding overseas issues. Unfortunately, when we hit send, rather than seeing a response page that says “thank you for sending your message”, many of our members are being returned to the main forms page. We suspect that at least some of these emails are getting through, but were wondering if this is a known issue and if you have suggestions for how to handle it.

8:

I used https://democracy.io/#/compose to try to write a note to my Representative and Senators, and clicked "Send!". That gave me the "30 seconds" message and finally left me back on the fully-composed page with no indication that the message had been sent. I clicked "Send!" three times trying to send the message, with the same result. Something is obviously wrong there, in either then sending process or the design of the interface.

9:

I’m trying to send a letter to my reps in Florida through your website democracy.io, and I can’t figure out if it is working properly or not, because I’m not getting a page or window confirming that my message was sent. When I hit send, it tells me it is sending my message. And then I end up back on my message page. No confirmation, no error message, no way to know if it worked.

@randylubin I think you did most of the work on this step, could you take a look and see if you can figure it out.

[sinak]

I'm wondering if it's a timeout issue? Here's how we deal with this on the action center side: if there's no CAPTCHA, we just assume success. Because sometimes its a fail (and someone will deal with that via a delayedjob), and other times its a success, but then our assumption is correct. Can we do the same for DIO?

[randylubin]

We currently don't have a way of handling server errors in our send message callback (lines 122-126 in https://github.com/EFForg/democracy.io/blob/master/www/js/controllers/message-form.js). In the case of an error we just set the 'sending' boolean to false and show the form again.

If it's a timeout issue, would we get an explicit server error passed through our callback? If so, forwarding for non captcha messages is easy.

Any thoughts on the message to display for captcha-required messages?

[sinak]

Yeah I think then that either an error or timeout is causing the problem, since showing the message form again is exactly what's happening.

I'm not sure if we'd get an explicit error for a callback. It might be a 504?

I think we should probably increase the timeout length to around 90 seconds (I'm pretty sure you can do this in Angular), and also assume success if there are no captchas to wait for and move people instantly to the "thanks" screen.

[randylubin]

I'm a little wary about auto-forwarding to the "thanks" screen - if there's an issue with our server or we can't reach PotC then we shouldn't let the user think the message has been sent.

If we know the message reaches PotC, then I think it's okay to send them onward. Is there an easy way to pass that through to our callback from the server side? cc: @l12s

I'm not sure how a timeout issue would be causing the sending boolean to flip - it would have to trigger the callback, right?

[sinak]

If we can't reach the PotC server we won't be able to properly render the contact form in the first place, right? We need to ping PotC know what form fields to show the user.

I think as long as we don't get a 500 or 400 error from the PotC within a second, we should just assume the message is being sent. We can continue to wait if there is a captcha to show the user.

We're getting so many emails about this, I really think we should apply a hot-fix as soon as we can.

[randylubin]

Temporary fix with this commit: 2b18749

It still relies on the callback being hit so it won't be an instant forward on to the thanks page. I think a more permanent solution should involve the server side logic

[sinak]

Great, thanks for doing that.

The tricky things about changes to the API are that they affect lots of other org's implementations, so we need to make sure we get it right. What's the best solution is that we can suggest to @legind? The server could send a temporary "in process" message and then the client could start long-polling?