It’s been a wild couple of weeks in the office(s) of sunset_flowers. Without engaging in any promotional activity (except for notifying community law and tenant advocacy groups), our landlord search tool went somewhat viral, being used by over 15,300 unique users in the first 4 days.
This heavy traffic overwhelmed our server, causing long search times and rendering our tool unusable in peak hours. In response to this we quickly switched to a dedicated server to cope with the demand. Soon after this change however, we also realised that a portion of the load on our server was suspicious in nature, and was likely the result of small scale DoS attacks, which we installed measures to block.
We see the popularity of our tool as evidence of the dream it presents – one in which renters and communities can challenge vast power of private landholders. Unsurprisingly, this has come with push back from both landlords, and those that believe in the status quo of meritocracy. This has been evident in many of the emails that we receive – in which political grievances are expressed through angry, bigoted and often abusive comments. Some of these emails are borderline satirical – and we hope we can share a hilarious portion of these in the future.
Alongside the recent tech changes (and working our regular jobs outside of digital activism), we have also been discussing the legality of our tool with state departments. Though our tool was designed in accordance with New Zealand legislation, and is much more restricted in its search function than other land information search tools such as Terranet and Property Guru (which are also bound by the same data limitations), we have been facing additional scrutiny from state departments, which we believe is motivated by political pressure. We also believe that it is political opponents of the tool who are responsible for the DoS attacks, and hope to make a separate blog post about this in future.
In the recent week our traffic has calmed to around 1,000 unique users per day. So far a total 191,000 searches have been made. Again, we wish to thank our supporters for their kind words, and restate our intention to provide pathways to challenge the power of landlords, even in the face opposition.
Ngā mihi,
sunset_flowers
xoxo
sunset_flowers 