PetitionOnline

» see petitiononline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Before a petition was a share button it was a URL that somebody pasted into a forum thread. PetitionOnline made the URL. You filled in a form with a title and a block of text naming whoever you were addressing, and the site handed you back a page with a signature counter on it. Carrying that page to anyone who might sign was entirely your problem.

The site went up in 1999, built by Artifice, Inc., a small Oregon company whose actual product was 3D modeling software for architects. Kevin Michael Matthews, who had taught architecture at the University of Oregon through the 1990s, ran it. By February 2000 the trademarked slogan was in place: this is the marketplace of free ideas. By that October the petitions were filed into eight categories, four of them political divisions running from local council up to international.

It stayed free, and the volume that produced is worth stating plainly. By the end of October 2011 PetitionOnline had collected more than 93 million signatures across upward of 50,000 petitions. Nothing about the software was sophisticated. It was a form and a counter, hosted by a company that sold something else entirely, and for most of a decade it was the default answer to where you put a petition on the internet.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

The petitions were mostly hopeless and everybody involved knew it. Fans demanded that canceled television shows come back, and somebody always wanted a band reunited. Matthews said he considered every one of the fifty thousand plus petitions posted since 1999 a success, which is either generous or the only sane position available to a person running a free petition host.

A PetitionOnline link was standard payload for an angry forum thread anywhere on the web, including the Turkish boards I was reading in the early 2000s. I do not think I ever signed one. The link arriving in the thread was the ritual more than the signing was.

~ what came after ~

Change.org acquired the service in 2011 and finished a redesign on 30 October that year. The newer platform had the piece PetitionOnline never built, which was distribution. Change.org would email a petition to people statistically likely to sign it, then ask for money to push it further. That turned a petition from a link you carried yourself into something the platform carried for you, which is the shift that made online petitions a normal part of 2010s politics.

~ the page that is still up ~

petitiononline.com answers today. It serves 1,998 bytes of HTML with a short notice on it, signed The Petition Online Team, copyright 2014. It thanks everyone for how they used the site to change the world, and recommends you start a petition at Change.org instead. The stated reason is the continued cost and maintenance of the site, especially with other alternatives out there.

Somebody has renewed that domain every year since to keep a goodbye note online.

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