CAPTCHA won't last long, as Monroe County gets new web host, new domain name
People who wanted to visit the Monroe County government website over the last few weeks might have first been challenged to prove they were humans, by completing a CAPTCHA—which made them pick all the chairs (or clocks) in a grid of images. The acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
This past Thursday, The B Square asked Greg Crohn, Monroe County's chief technology officer about the new test. Crohn responded by saying that the CAPTCHA test is not anything that he put in place. And it does not sound like it will stay in place much longer.
The test was installed by the current website host, which is EGov Strategies LLC "without notifying us," Crohn wrote. The county is soon getting a different web host. The test is configured so that it does not appear on every single visit, so infrequent visitors to the site might not have noticed anything different.
Crohn added, "I'm very much looking forward to getting our new site in operation."
That was a reference to an item approved by county commissioners at their meeting on Thursday morning (April 17), which approved a contract to migrate the website to a new host.
Monroe County will be paying $9,000 for the migration of the content and $3,000 for the first year of hosting. Doing the work will be Tyler Technologies in cooperation with the Indiana State Office of Technology (IOT).
As a part of the transition, Crohn told commissioners that the URL for the county's website will be changing, from co.monroe.in.us to monroecounty.in.gov. That means email addresses for county staff and elected officials will also eventually be switched over. But in the short term, Crohn said the only noticeable difference will be that website visitors will be automatically redirected to the new URL.
The separate payment of $9,000 just for the migration is due to the sheer volume of the county's website content. Crohn told county commissioners that in preparation for the migration, 12,000 different HTML files have been "painstakingly whittled down" to just 1,500. That's been accomplished in part by putting some content in the county's SharePoint system—a Microsoft platform used for document storage and organization.
Crohn told commissioners that hosting through the state of Indiana will allow for “a much cleaner, improved website.” Crohn allowed that the county’s website is the subject of frequent complaints. He said, “I do get a lot of criticisms about how our current site looks and things people would like to see changed.” Crohn said that there will be more flexibility with the new website. Among the specific improvements that Crohn mentioned was a better way to search for things on the site.
