The New Obama 2012 website: Not ready for prime time.

[Skinner]

As everyone here probably knows, President Obama is formally launching his campaign for reelection today. There is even an ad running on DU right now from the campaign announcing the launch of his website. As an enthusiastic supporter of the President who raised more than $110,000 for his campaign in 2008 (along with the help of all my friends on DU), I was eager to sign up again to help his re-election campaign.

So, I went to barackobama.com. I browsed past the solicitation for my email address and found the "Get Involved" button, which I clicked. Then I clicked the "Grassroots Fundraising" button. I was prompted to enter my email address and password to get in. I entered the same address and password which I used in 2008, and to my great pleasure I was able to log in. (Thank you.)

I clicked the "Click here to get started" link to get started. Entered my goal and a name for my fundraising page, and also gave a "Short name". According to the website: "This will be used to create an easy to remember URL for your page. We suggest you use your name or nickname. Letters and numbers only. No spaces." I entered "du" which was my short name back in 2008.

Oops.

The software tells me "This slug is already in use. Please select a different one." Slug refers to my short name ("du").

I have a strong suspicion that the slug "du" is already in use because I used it back in 2008. Unfortunately, there is no way for me to tell for sure.

Just to double-check that I did use the term "du" in 2008, I went back and tried to find the old URL for my previoius fundraising page. A search of my email using the keywords "my.barackobama.com" and "/du" confirms that we did in fact use the URL "/du" for our 2008 fundraising. Somewhat ironically, the email I found which confirmed this fact was one that I sent to the campaign shortly after President Obama was elected:

TEXT OF EMAIL FROM NOVEMBER 2008:

Dear NAME REDACTED:

My name is David Allen, I am the administrator of the popular liberal website Democratic Underground, http://www.democraticunderground.com. Visitors to my website have been enthusiastic supporters of President-elect Obama throughout the campaign, and together donated more than $110,000 through our My Barack Obama fund-raising page: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/du

I called the Obama campaign today, and was instructed to email you with my request.

I was wondering if it would be possible for President-elect Obama to post a message on Democratic Underground thanking our members for their support in the campaign. If not, could we get a written thank you letter from him which I could scan and post on our website? We receive more than 100,000 unique visitors on most days, and I know that they would be absolutely thrilled to receive some sort of communication from the president-elect.

If you have any questions, I can be reached by email or by phone: NUMBER REDACTED. Thank you for time.

David Allen
Administrator
Democratic Underground

(Incidentally, I never got a response to this email from the campaign. To be fair, I know what it is like to be inundated with email and not be able to reply to all of it. But if someone gave me $100,000, I would not need that person to make a phone call and submit an email request in order to remember to say "Thank you." To this day I am still appalled that I never received any type of Thank You from the campaign. If I had raised $100,000 for the Bush campaign, I would have had the honorific "Bush Pioneer" bestowed upon me. From the Obama campaign: Nothing. If anyone from the Obama campaign is reading this, it sure would be nice if someone contacted me and ASKED if I would do President Obama the favor of raising $100,000 again. Hint, hint. But I digress.)

As for my 2012 "slug," I would like to use "/du" again if it hasn't been taken by someone else (other than my 2008 self).

So, I look for some kind of contact form to get in touch with the campaign. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Contact Us." I am provided with a list of options indicating the type of problem I have, so my contact will go to the right place. I click "About Technical Issues" and I'm taken to another page where I fill out a form explaining my problem. I click "Submit" and (drumroll please)....

Nothing happens.

Oh, the irony.

I click submit again and again and again and nothing happens. So I back out of the page and select "Other" and fill out that form and click "Submit" but nothing happens again.

So, on a hunch I exit out of my extremely rare web browser known as "Firefox" (perhaps you've heard of it) and launch Microsoft Internet Explorer instead. After logging in, the Barack Obama "Contact Us" page deigns to accept my submission, and sends me an extremely promising confirmation email that promises "it may be a few weeks until we’re able to respond".

No worries. I'll wait.

Considering the fact that they plan to raise http://www.google.com/search?q=billion+dollar+campaign">$1 billion, I can see how the campaign might not be too concerned about little old me with my hope of raising a measley $100K.

ON EDIT: I have received an email response from the campaign. Very fast. Unfortunately my Internet connection for my laptop is down, and I can't seem to log in to my barackobama.com account from my phone. So I'll have to wait for Internet before I can log on and (hopefully) set up the DU fundraising page.