How are people submitting comment period comments, and can we let users edit suggested comments?

I’ll defer to Bonterrans to confirm whether EA can no longer deliver comments to Regulation.gov. I believe the administration removed the POST API that made it possible: https://www.citizen.org/news/trump-quietly-removes-public-comment-tool/

I know some nonprofits have been downloading and delivering letters, though. You can do an Advocacy Report and then Edit Columns to get the message subject, topic, and text along with the constituent information, and then use that file to mail merge letters (or just send the spreadsheet if you want to deliver comments and don’t want to fuss about a mail merge).

Interested to hear what others have been doing! The glory days of Regulation.gov delivery were glorious. 

Great question ​@hstamper and thanks for your input ​@Sally Heaven ! l can confirm that earlier this year the United States General Services Administration disabled the API used to submit regulations.gov Advocacy forms, which is why this functionality is no longer available.

Our team has been working on a new solution to this and you can expect to hear more early next year! Hope this helps :) 

Thank you Sally! This worked, and we will do it going forward. 

Great! I’m glad that worked. 

We’ve had the issue for even longer than the API issue because the USFS was already using a portal that wasn’t compatible. Our strategy most recently was to do a ‘sign-on’ style comment (AKA petition). There was a field to enter the number of signers for the comment when submitting. It’s not ideal and doesn’t allow folks to customize, but it was the best strategy we had at the time, especially with a much shorter comment period! I’ve been thinking a lot about other workarounds but there’s nothing I figured out that would match the efficacy of this strategy.

For a previous comment period, we printed out comments and mailed them to the address provided, but that takes more resources.

An imperfect but perhaps better than nothing option if you want to collect data on people who might choose to comment independently would be to offer the link to comment in the email and track those link clicks. It may even be possible to follow up with folks who clicked the link, but I haven’t tried that. 

Hi! I’m a product manager at Bonterra, and I wanted to share an update here. In response to the shutdown of the Regulations.gov POST API, we’re preparing an update rolling out later this month that introduces a Guided Copy/Paste Workflow for Regulations.gov advocacy actions.

This approach is intended as a workaround, not a 1:1 replacement for the prior automated submission capability. It’s designed to help supporters continue submitting comments with clear, guided steps. Supporters will complete the advocacy form as usual, then copy their comment with one click and submit it directly on the correct Regulations.gov comment page, with instructions shown on the confirmation page and in the follow-up email.

If Regulations.gov reinstates the POST API in the future, we would re-enable the prior automated submission functionality. More details and documentation will be shared once the release is live.

The update ​@Patricia Frontanes mentioned was released in February if you want to take a look! 

 

We tested this fix, and it appears to be broken/less than ideal UI.

• The “personalized” box seems to include the full alert text automatically -- but seems to have already have the letter text “preloaded” on the back end, so when you submit, you always get a “this exceeds 4,000 characters”
• When I dropped what’s in the personalization box to a single line, I did reach the final page, with the original “letter” text included and my “personlization” at the end.
• So the “letter text” is already loaded, but repeated in the “personalization” box, and so when you try to submit, it’s adding what’s in the backend + what’s in the personalization box, which is why it’s always giving us the 4k+ character error.

Ideally, the user would be able to see the “core” letter text, be able to add personalization, and 

The formatting on the “copy” block on the final page retains no formatting, which may be best for regs.gov, but it looks really bad overall.

I appreciate the work for a workaround, but think this needs more work and more hand-holding UI for users.