On Tuesday, 10/22, We'll be rolling back the changes to the document preview system for Recorded Documents.

 Last week, we made a major change to our document preview system to prevent theft. (Details here.)

Within hours, we began receiving feedback from Doxpop users who had come to depend on the "scrolling pane" preview system that we have used for many years. Apparently that method of previewing documents has been built into many business processes, and the sudden change ruined the week for many people. 

Although the change was made for good reasons that will have to be addressed in the long run, we obviously screwed up by not understanding the value that the scrolling pane system provides. We're going to put the old preview back, and then spend some more time looking for a better solution. Thanks to everyone who provided immediate feedback. We needed to hear your message, and we appreciate it.

So... What's next? We still have to deal with the image theft that is occurring for several important reasons:

1. Indiana and Michigan Statutes make it clear that copy fee income is to be used as a partial funding source for Recorders (Indiana) and Registers of Deeds (Michigan.) If we allow this theft to continue, it ultimately hurts the taxpayers.
2. The majority of businesses that don't engage in theft are forced to compete with the few dishonest businesses that reduce their expenses through thievery. That's not fair.
3. Doxpop has an obligation to protect the Recorders & Registers we work with. We are aware from observing other vendors that when companies who work with public offices don't take the trust that is placed in them seriously, substantial losses can occur in a very short time.

We'll be revisiting our options in the next few weeks, and we'll be reaching out to everyone who got in touch with us about the problems that removing the original preview system caused.

If you sent us an email or left a phone number when you commented last week, we'll be back in touch this week to seek your input. If you left an anonymous comment on the blog, or just haven't been in touch yet, but have thoughts to pass along, please email support@doxpop.com to let us know how you use the scrolling pane preview system so we can preserve that value for you to the extent possible.

A Significant Change to the Recorded Document Preview System

Beginning on Tuesday, 10/15/24, Doxpop will be changing our document preview system. The old approach of providing a scrolling "slice" of the document image so you could read a document without printing it was being abused by organizations who where taking snapshots of all of the pieces of a document and then electronically "taping" them together in order to avoid paying the copy fees that the Recorder and Registers offices collect.

To address this, we have been forced to provide only half of each page for visual inspection. We believe this is still enough for you to be able to confirm that you've found the right document before purchasing it, and to select the necessary pages in situations where you don't need the entire document. We recognize that this may not serve the needs of folks who want to read a document without purchasing it. That's a loss forced on all of us by bad actors.

We apologize to the honest people who just lost a nice feature due to the dishonest actions of a few. We didn't want to do this, but inaction would not be fair to the taxpayers who have to make up the shortfall when Recorders and Registers lose copy fee income to scammers. It's also not fair to force those of you who use our system professionally to compete with businesses that cheat in order to reduce their costs in a manner that honest business people don't.

Follow-up, added 10/17/24:

We've received a lot of negative feedback on this change. This is not entirely unexpected, because we didn't want to make this change either. We invested quite a bit in the previous "sliding pane" preview and were proud of how it provided people with the ability to read documents without purchasing a copy. We thought it was a great solution, and only stopped using it because we were forced to. 

I'll follow up directly with every person who provided contact information in a comment or email. Anonymous comments won't show up on this blog, and of course I have no way to reach you if you made an anonymous comment, so I'll try to address some of those comments here:

First, this change was not made to increase Doxpop's income. We pass along the copy fees directly to the Recorders offices. The only upcharge is on extremely low volume accounts where we charge more than the $1 fee in order to cover transaction costs and not take a loss on small purchases. The vast majority of our users pay $1/page, which all goes to the Recorder. Copy fees are essentially a revenue neutral pass-through for Doxpop.

We don't make the rules, but we have have to follow them. A couple of folks expressed anger that they have to pay copy fees at all and wonder if we and the Recorder should be allowed to do this. The answer is that we're not only allowed, we're required to charge this fee. A copy fee for Recorded Documents has been required by legislation for decades and because the revenue from copy fees has long been a reliable part of every Recorder's budget, all counties allocate less tax funding to Recorder's offices. Eliminating the fee is not something Doxpop or a Recorder can just decide to do. It would require a restructuring of funding in every county and almost certainly an act of the State legislature.

Yes, there really are people who made the effort to write a program to download all of the little pieces in our sliding pane preview system to avoid paying copy fees. We responded to solid evidence, not a vague worry. Doxpop was fortunate enough to catch this early so we can prevent serious abuse. One of our competitors who didn't take strong action previously had hundreds of thousands of pages of images stolen from their Recorder partners through a similar hack, and we've learned from their unfortunate experience. We don't have the option to just ignore theft, because we are contractually obligated to prevent theft and collect the copy fees for every image that is provided through our system.

There is one positive aspect to this... The businesses stealing images are competing with legitimate businesses that follow the rules and pay for copies. That means many of you have been subjected to unfair competition in the past. This puts a stop to that in the counties we work with.

Are there other options? Maybe... That's why I'll be following up with anyone who provides contact information and is open to a positive discussion.

Doxpop can't ignore theft, and we can't change the rules we work under. However, we are open to any creative ideas to make our system meet your needs given those restrictions.

For instance, if changing the area that is blurred on each page can be done in a way that reveals most useful information without allowing theft of the image, we will certainly be willing to adjust that.

There might be ways to provide better access for local users who are willing to sign a contract with substantial penalties for theft. We are not willing to put ourselves in a position where we have to be constantly chasing miscreants in court, but anything short of that is on the table.

Footnote on terminology: I've used the term "Recorder" above to refer to both Indiana Recorders and Michigan Registers of Deeds. These offices with slightly different names operate in roughly the same manner in both States.

Mass updates to a "behind the scenes" field in the Recorder's offices may slow updates and alerts for several weeks.

Doxpop partners with 46 Indiana Recorders and 2 Michigan Registers of Deeds that use the CSI Title 1 system for document indexing. CSI recently made a change to their system to improve image storage that is altering every document index record in a manner that is not visible to users, but affects image storage, and hence Doxpop's system.

Processing 23 million updates takes some time, even for a computer... To moderate the impact, CSI is upgrading the counties in several groups rather than simultaneously across the entire state. As each county is upgrading, our update process will fall behind for a day or two while we process the changes, and then everything will go back to normal.

What this means for you as a researcher is that it will be important to keep an eye on the "last updated" timestamp for each county you search in during August so you know how current the index is. To find this, go to the list of Indiana Doxpop Recorder Partner Counties, or Michigan Register of Deeds Partner Counties and click on the name of the county in the leftmost column. This will open a county details page, and in the green Recorder or Register pane, the last update timestamp is at the top:

This change will not trigger alerts on Doxpop's Property Watch System.

As always, if you've got any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to call 866-369-7671 or email support@doxpop.com. 

Doxpop services are unaffected by the recent county cyber attacks and widespread outages.

It has been a hard couple of weeks for the information technology world, so we decided to take a moment and reassure you that Doxpop has been unaffected by the various cyber security issues plaguing the rest of the world.

Recently, both Monroe and Clay Counties became victims of ransomware cyber attacks that crippled county IT systems for roughly a week in both cases. Doxpop provides access to court records from both counties, and recorded documents in Monroe County. 

During both of these local outages, Doxpop's services and the integrity of the data we glean from the county systems were unaffected. This is one of the advantages of having a "mirrored" database of records, because in both situations, Doxpop was able to provide online access to records that the counties were temporarily unable to provide locally.

Today, (Friday, 7/19) many organizations using Microsoft's Azure and 365 services experienced outages. While we don't know all of the details, at this point it appears that a flawed update from the CrowdStrike cyber security firm was the root cause. 

Fortunately, Doxpop does not depend on Windows or CrowdStrike services, so we have been completely unaffected.

The CrowdStrike issue may lead to disruptions elsewhere that affect our users, as CrowdStrike provides security services for the Indiana Office of Technology, and through an IOT program, is also used in many counties. It's reasonable to expect all of this to be cleared up by the end of the day, but it's also a good day to exercise patience and understanding if someone you interact with in local government is affected.

Edit/Update at 4:30 PM on 7/19:

Above, I predicted that surely this will all be cleared up by the end of the day... Way too optimistic!

Now we know more about the nature of the problem. It was caused by the automatic download of an update to the CrowdStrike system. My optimistic prediction was based on the notion that a patch could be deployed automatically in the same manner. -Unfortunately, this is not true. The problem renders the computer unable to boot, so of course it never gets far enough for an automated download of a patch to be applied remotely. That means most organizations will have to send a technician on-site to every affected computer, boot it into "safe" mode, delete the damaging file, then reboot in normal mode to download the patch.

That means many IT support firms that have been able to provide remote support in the past are suddenly having to dispatch people to travel to every site they support. It will be a long weekend for these folks, and it seems likely that many sites will still be dealing with this next week.

The bottom line still holds though: Doxpop is unaffected. ...And if you're reading this message your computer must be working as well (congratulations!) Have a calm weekend, and don't take any downloads from strangers.

Two new features released today: E-Filing Templates and Drafts.

This morning, Doxpop released a couple of great new features to make your E-Filing easier!

Starting today, you'll see information referring to drafts and templates appear on several of the pages you use regularly for E-Filing.

Before we get into the details, we know that if this is a busy day, "Learning new stuff" might not be something you're eager to do. If that's the case, just ignore the new links, and the system will continue to work as it always has. ...But please come back later and learn when you have a free moment.

For those of you who have a few minutes to explore, here's what awaits you in the new features:

The first new feature is Templates:

In brief, templates are designed to help people who frequently file a particular type of case. You can set up a template that pre-fills the filing location, case type, plaintiff, representation, service contacts, and payment. (Or just some of these.) When you file a new case using your template, it jump-starts the process for you, saving time and reducing the chance for errors.

We have put together a brief (3:48) video that shows you how templates work:

Click here to view full screen on YouTube

There is also a help section that explains templates, available here:

https://www.doxpop.com/prod/in/help/HelpTopic?shortName=templates

The second new feature is multiple drafts:

Since day one, Doxpop has always saved your most recent initial and subsequent e-filing drafts so you can wander off to do other work, and come back to find your envelope still there. Now we're allowing you to save as many drafts as you wish, so you can switch between envelopes without losing your work.

Drafts are useful when you want to pause one filing and set it aside so you can work on a different filing. They are also useful in situations where you want to prepare a complete filing so you can submit it later in a matter of seconds.

Here's a short video that demonstrates how drafts allow you to juggle competing priorities and deal with interruptions:

Click here to view full screen on YouTube

Our online help system has a section on drafts available here:

https://www.doxpop.com/prod/in/help/HelpTopic?shortName=drafts

Please don't hesitate to give us a call if you have questions about either of these new features. Our number is 866-369-7671, or you can email support@doxpop.com.

Expect intermittent e-filing outages from 7:00 AM through 2:00 PM on Saturday, June 29

The State's EFM vendor will be doing maintenance on several components of the E-Filing system from 7:00 AM to 2:00 PM EDT on Saturday, June 29th, 2024. 

During this maintenance window, the E-Filing system may be intermittently unavailable. Note that it won't hurt to try filing during this time, and if the EFM is unavailable when you try to submit, your envelope will be saved so you can submit later.

Updates to the Tax Warrant system have fallen behind due to a technical issue.

Doxpop's Tax Warrant information is current as of 7:30 AM on Monday, September 25th. However, updates have not been applied since that time due to a technical issue. <b>The Court and Recorded Document data feeds are not affected by this outage.</b>

We're working hard to resolve this problem, and will post an update as soon as the data feed resumes!