OPRAmachine Blog

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]

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!

Expect intermittent downtime over the weekend (Saturday June 15th, 2019 through Sunday, June 16th) as we complete maintenance and software upgrades on OPRAmachine systems.

UPDATE: We have completed the updates ahead of schedule and site access has been restored. Please reach out to our support team if you encounter any issues.

We’re asking users to please be careful when filing new OPRA requests so as to avoid sending duplicates of the same request to public agencies on OPRAmachine. Duplicate requests can complicate things for the administration team as well as government agencies. Often, what will happen is that the government agency will respond to the first request but not the second, while the second request will still show up on OPRAmachine as awaiting a response, which then requires our administrators to take action to remove the duplicate request so as to not skew the statistics produced by our site. [Read More]

OPRAmachine founder Gavin Rozzi spoke at the May 30th, 2019 meeting of the Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders. Rozzi’s remarks were made in response to Assignment Judge Lisa P. Thornton’s May 24th ruling in favor of OPRAmachine and its users. The county attempted to deny all requests submitted via our website after one of their employees failed to redact information, despite our attempts to work with the county and rectify their mistake. [Read More]

PRESS RELEASE FREEHOLD, NJ – Monmouth County Assignment Judge Lisa P. Thorton ruled on Friday that the county broke the law by refusing to process certain public records requests under a new policy enacted last year, rejecting all of the county’s arguments in favor of refusing to respond to public records requests that will be automatically published online. “This ruling makes clear what we knew from the start: Monmouth County’s unlawful attempt at tightening access to public records because of the negligence of their employees was a blatant attack on the public interest and undermined the public policy of transparency enshrined in New Jersey’s OPRA law,” said Gavin Rozzi, an Ocean County web developer & journalist who founded OPRAmachine in 2017. [Read More]

Government agencies can’t deny public records requests because they’re automatically published online, Monmouth County Superior Court Assignment Judge Lisa P. Thornton ruled. Our ongoing dispute with Monmouth County has been resolved in favor of OPRAmachine and our users with the recent ruling from Judge Thornton. Last summer, Monmouth County started refusing public records requests submitted by users of OPRAmachine. They adopted a new policy that stated they will deny any public records requests that are submitted through a service that automatically publishes their response online, demanding that users provide direct personal email addresses instead. [Read More]

Esther Surden of NJ Tech Weekly recently interviewed OPRAmachine founder Gavin Rozzi about the impact of the site in a feature article published in May. Gavin Rozzi was a journalist in Ocean County and finishing up his education at Stockton University when he came up with the idea for OPRAmachine. OPRAmachine is an open-source platform that lets citizens easily file requests for public records to their local governments, and it makes the requests and answers available to the public. [Read More]