OPRAmachine Blog

To the OPRAmachine user community: As a part of OPRAmachine’s commitment to protecting the privacy of users of our platform, we are writing to notify you that we have received a subpoena seeking to compel us to disclose the personal information of an allegedly pseudonymous OPRAmachine user that requested tax records about properties owned by public officials in the Borough of Ridgefield (Bergen County) earlier this year. This is the first instance where we have received such a demand. [Read More]

We wanted to take an opportunity to clarify OPRAmachine’s policies for handling requests for removal of content on the platform as well as update some pertinent policies and codify existing practices in response to recent inquiries. OPRAmachine Policy Statement & Legal Fact Sheet Demand letters We will no longer individually respond to demand letters submitted to OPRAmachine where the substance of the letter concerns a demand for the removal of information from OPRAmachine. [Read More]

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the OPRAmachine Research Grant, a new initiative where we are providing free access to OPRAmachine’s batch request and exclusive Pro toolkit in exchange for public-interest research that will be shared with the community. We accepted applications and competitively selected 5 winning research proposals that we believe will serve the public interest using our platform. The winning proposals will receive support from OPRAmachine in order to leverage government data & documents to address the authors’ research questions for their projects. [Read More]

The OPRAmachine research paper, entitled “The first statewide, open access dataset tracking public records requests in New Jersey” has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal Data in Brief. The journal article describes the data collection infrastructure powering the site, as well as makes available detailed metadata on thousands of requests submitted via OPRAmachine.

You can read the article here

Please note that there will be some planned downtime this weekend as we work to complete scheduled server maintenance and upgrades to the OPRAmachine service.

Full service will be restored by Monday. Thank you for your patience as we work to make OPRAmachine even better for our users.

Please note that there will be some planned downtime this weekend as we work to complete scheduled server maintenance and upgrades to the OPRAmachine service.

Full service will be restored by Monday. Thank you for your patience as we work to make OPRAmachine even better for our users.

We are now accepting applications for the first annual OPRAmachine Research Fellowship. OPRAmachine Research Fellows will be provided a free OPRAmachine Pro account, which allows the usage of advanced features beyond those offered to free users for up to one year (a $144 value) in exchange for using the site to research an issue of public concern affecting New Jersey residents. Individuals and / or organizations selected to become Research Fellows will be provided all Pro features for free (normally $12 per month) in addition to training on how to best utilize batch and private request features provided they meet the following conditions: [Read More]

Users of OPRAmachine may have had difficulty accessing the site over the past month. The reason why users sometimes see an error message that states “502 Bad Gateway” is because OPRAmachine has been knocked offline as a result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks targeting OPRAmachine infrastructure. Based upon our review of the attacks so far, we have determined that most of the malicious traffic is coming from IP addresses outside of the United States. [Read More]

We are pleased to announce that every county board of elections has been added to OPRAmachine as of today. This has been made possible by one of our users who took the time to compile all of the contact information for the boards of elections that we were missing. We are very grateful for the user’s efforts. With election season recently behind us, we are sure that many of our users are interested in researching local elections, so this addition to the site will sure to be of use. [Read More]

Effective immediately we are eliminating phone support for free users of OPRAmachine. Due to the high volume of calls we have received and limited manpower that we have to answer them, it is no longer sustainable for us to be able to process user support inquiries via phone. Phone support will now be limited to Pro subscribers or for sales inquiries. To receive support for an OPRA request submitted using our service, please mark your request as either having a delivery error or needing administrator attention from the request page on the OPRAmachine website and your issue will be entered into our system. [Read More]