Inside LabourStart

August is supposed to be a quiet month.  In Europe and elsewhere, schools are closed, trade union headquarters shut down, people go off on vacation.  I was even away for the first two weeks of the month.  And still LabourStart grew — with big gains for our mailing lists, increased traffic to the website, and the very rapid growth over just two weeks of the new version of UnionBook.

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of July in brackets:

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 68,857 [+1,023]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 57,950 [+167]
• Absolute unique visitors according to Google: 30,153 [+2,055]
• UnionBook – members: 4,959 [+180]
• UnionBook 2.0 – members: 1,192 [+1,192]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 3,612 [+100]
• Twitter – followers: 2,414 [+125]
• Correspondents: 803 [+6]
• Union group on Flickr: 564 [+2]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 199 [+9]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

• Norwegian 2,716 [+17]
• French 2,162 [+54]
• Spanish 1,209  [+21]
• German 798 [+3]
• Italian 518 [+3]
• Russian 441 [+12]
• Turkish 435 [+60]
• Polish 304 [+1]
• Portuguese 238 [+1]
• Dutch 230 [+5]
• Swedish 229 [+1]
• Chinese 181 [+12]
• Danish 162 [no change]

The story of LabourStart’s mailing lists is an epic saga — it goes on and on …

In early 2010 we settled on what seemed to be a good solution.  We had an inexpensive web hosting company in the USA (DirectNIC) and free, open source software (PHPlist) and it all seemed to finally work.

And then last week, DirectNIC informed us that as we were using a shared computer with other customers, we couldn’t do mass mailings.  And shut down our site without warning.

The person who initially recommended DirectNIC to us was using it, as we are, to send out mass mailings.  But his lists are obviously much smaller and his activity went unnoticed.

DirectNIC doesn’t offer dedicated servers, so we couldn’t just upgrade.

PHPlist itself does offer hosting, which sounds great, except that their peak plan is 100,000 messages a month (we send something like three times that amount) and even that would have cost us something like $2,160 a year (or triple that amount).

But we had an alternative — a virtual web host on the same company that hosts LabourStart (1&1 Internet) — which we set up two years ago.

Back in 2008, I tried to set up PHPlist there and didn’t succeed.  I even paid PHPlist to install it for us, but it still didn’t work, which is why I gave up and we tried other things (iContact, unionlists.org.uk).

I did, however, succeed this week.  (I must have learned something since 2008.)

I was able to import one of our three databases, the one hosting the mailing lists for Justice for Iranian Workers, Radio Labour and others.

Yesterday and the day before, I tried to import the much larger database holding LabourStart’s 70,000 plus subscribers and it repeatedly failed.  The import process would work for several hours and then generate odd error messages.

Desperate to get a mailing out as the IUF was eager for us to quickly promote their Coke Pakistan campaign, I improvised a solution.

I set up a version of PHPlist for LabourStart, configured it, and then imported (in blocks of 10,000 addresses at a time) LabourStart’s English language mailing list.

The mailing went out successfully.  The current web hosting company did throttle it, preventing us from sending out the mailing at top speed, but it appears to have all gone out.

This means that I now need to import each of the other lists in different languages, one by one, to recreate the templates and administrators for all of them, as well as to do this for the IUF.  It will be a lot of work, but I hope to have it completed by the weekend.

I ask everyone to be patient; I will inform individual editors who need to know.

The good news is that the software is identical, so there’s no learning curve.  All we’ve really done is move from one host to another.

Let’s just hope that this host leaves us alone and lets us send out our mailings in peace.

Update 2: Lists are now working again.

Update: DirectNIC writes “We are currently doing an upgrade on h-sphere, that is why you are getting that error. It should be completed in a few hours. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

Our mailing lists have stopped working.  I’ve written to DirectNIC, the company which hosts them, with this support request:

“I have installed PHPlists on your server several months ago, and they worked fine until this morning.  Now when I go to http://laborlists.org/ and click on LabourStart or IUF, instead of getting a web page to manage my lists, I see the PHP code.  It’s as if your server has stopped recognizing PHP scripts — though I did nothing unusual recently that might cause this.  It’s urgent that we get this fixed.  Thanks.”

I’ll let you know when they are working again.

The last month saw a very big gain for our mailing lists and much smaller growth for all the others.  Here are the totals with the changes since the end of February in brackets:

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 65,379 [+2,243]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 54,236 [+1,582]
• UnionBook – members: 4,435 [+25]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,863 [+54]
• Twitter – followers: 2,079 [+57]
• Correspondents: 756 [+9]
• Union group on Flickr: 533 [+5]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 158 [+7]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

• Norwegian 2,589
• French 1,772
• Spanish 1,020
• German 738
• Italian 452
• Russian 293
• Polish 289
• Swedish 221
• Portuguese 216
• Dutch 186
• Danish 149

At the request of the UE and ICEM, we’ve launched another campaign — the second in two days — here.

This campaign is featured, together with other campaigns, on my new personal (not official LabourStart) blog on the website of Amnesty International’s UK Section.

The problem? There’s some evidence mounting that there may be some attempts to block our campaigns again, black-listing us as spammers:

• Everyone who signed up to the LabourStart campaign in support of the Iraqi teachers received a threatening email from one of the targets, who claimed he’d go to the police.  I wrote to him, as did the TUC, telling him to fuck off.
• Our ISP (1&1 Internet) sent us a form letter warning us that there have been reports that we’ve been spamming.  I replied asking for additional details but have heard nothing.
• An email I just sent to a target in our new Mexican campaign bounced back saying that the address sending it was associated with spam.  Not sure if this is our ISP or Gmail or labourstart.org.
• One of our readers has spotted a possible attempt to block our laborlists.org address as being a source of spam — I’m investigating this now.  This is not connected to our ISP, and is worrying. UPDATE: I’m less worried about this now; it’s being caused by ZoneAlarm which may be flagging up laborlists.org because it’s a new domain name, and because our domain name registrar is based in the Cayman Islands (which should set alarm bells ringing).

All this couldn’t come at a worse time, as I’m travelling for the next two weeks.

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of December in brackets.  The total for mailing lists now includes all users of laborlists.org — and this now includes a small number who are not subscribers to LabourStart’s own lists.  There is no longer any redundancy — someone who is on both the English list and another list is no longer counted twice.  So the figure of 62,225 is much closer to an accurate number than we’ve had for some time now.  To make it easier to track progress on our largest list, I’m now including the total for the English LabourStart list as well.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 62,225 [+1,690]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 52,548
• UnionBook – members: 4,366 [+38]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,764 [+160]
• Twitter – followers: 1,987 [+47]
• Correspondents: 732 [+10]
• Union group on Flickr: 527 [+1]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 137 [+58]