Wittenberg

Following up on my last announcement, and now that all the work is complete: I'd like to announce that the new immigration system is live and working smoothly.

For years now, the immigration application has been handled by a custom web form through WordPress.  It required several specific plugins to function, many of which were no longer updated and were not compatible with newer WordPress.  Worse, it seems like it kept records on the plugin that were openly accessible in plaintext to anyone with the rights to edit the national website.

I don't think we ever had a problem because of this, but it wasn't a good situation.  However, it was also really challenging to do anything to improve it.  Any edits or changes were likely to make the whole thing inoperable.  This happened a while ago when the immigration form was entirely broken for months -- it took a lot of fiddling to get it working again.

Anyway, it was apparent that we needed something new.  And a week ago, I got started trying to update the backend of things... and the whole form immediately broke.  And because I was sufficiently annoyed with that, I ended up abandoning it.  Instead, I replaced it entirely.

The new system automatically takes in data and sends it to a secure online spreadsheet, where a script parses it each time and generates the necessary emails.  This information is then pulled to another sheet, where it is stored with fields for notes about the process (eg, which applications were rejected as incomplete with an explanatory email, which applications were complete but missing a Witt account, etc).

The benefits:

• Records will now be much more secure, and we're no longer exposing five years' worth of names, addresses, emails, and phone numbers.
• The website is now fully updated, making it also more secure from security vulnerabilities.
• We're now keeping automated records, making it much easier for Immigration to keep track of all applications.
• Data on failure points will now be easily available.  We'll know exactly where people tend to fail when they drop out of the immigration process.
• No applications will be lost.  Government will be fully accountable.
• It will be much easier for Immigration to post applications, since a lot of the manual labor is now done by a machine.
• Future work will be much easier.

I'm sure there will be bugs to work out, but it's been a few days and I'm fairly confident that everything is working the way it should.  Please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.  I'm here to serve you.