An apology about our suggest a campaign system

Photograph by Sonja Alves

38 Degrees is a member led movement – which means that 38 Degrees members decide what we campaign on. One of the ways this happens is through our campaign suggestions forum on the website. It’s a really busy part of the website – with thousands of votes cast every week.

On Friday one of our volunteers was tasked with looking at the possibility of duplicate suggestions on Uservoice and merging them to avoid votes being split, people getting confused etc. It seems like he may have got slightly carried away and done rather more than I had expected! I suspect we probably didn’t give clear enough instructions.We’re very sorry about this mistake and understand why it has upset people. We are a young organisation, with only three full-time staff — we still have lots to learn and on this occasion we messed something up.

We’ve been trying to press “undo” on all the changes by restoring everything to how it was on Friday and can’t get it to work. Which is a pain. So we’re going to have to try to fix it manually – we’ve already started work on that and hope to have everything fixed very soon.

Sorry about this and thanks for your patience.

Update: the merged campaign suggestions are back with all the votes restored. Sorry again for the time it took to get this fixed, big thanks to the team at Uservoice for helping us sort this out. Here are some links to the restored campaign suggestions:

• Encourage REUSE via Freegle. Don’t Throw it Away! Give it Away!!
• A campaign to stop the abolition of Disability Living Allowance – the measure of civilised society.

Update 2: We’re looking into a technical problem with the suggest a campaigns system.

Last night we merged a two campaign suggestions after being asked to by the people who had originally created the suggestions.

Unfortunately when we merged the campaigns there was a problem with the system and thousands of votes were removed from the total.

I’m really sorry this happened. We’re looking into this and trying to sort it out.