OPRAmachine Blog

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]

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]