We are implementing an anonymous option for Evo311™ ticket creation that will become available to all EvoGov customers. We are making progress on this new feature for you now, and we should have it ready soon. We intended to add this feature ready before Covid, and we are excited to finally roll it out. 

HOW ANONYMOUS 311 TICKETS WILL WORK

• When creating a new 311 ticket, there will be a new option to submit a 311 ticket anonymously. This then bypasses the form for signing up and also bypasses the login before entering ticket data. It will hide some of the unnecessary links (my tickets, login, etc.).
• When the anonymous ticket is submitted, there will still be an email address associated with the ticket so that the back end of the Evo311™ system won't have to be altered. The automatic system email address will be "311noreply@yourdomain.gov". This email address will be used for all anonymously submitted tickets, and will be completely hidden from your residents. We are adding this manually to the system now, but it will become an automatically created hidden user for all of our customers. 
• When a ticket is submitted that has the "noreply" in the email address, this will allow our system to know that it should not send alert emails or receipts to the address. This will be used for future projects (EvoAgendas™ and EvoWorkflow™ Permitting and Licensing). 
• This new anonymous ticket feature affects many areas of the Evo311™ platform. Namely the ticket intake form, ticket management interface, and ticket reports as they will need  a way to view, manage, and track anonymous tickets alongside authenticated tickets. 

POSITIVES

• Municipal staff can submit 311 tickets as a resident without fear or retribution at from coworkers or supervisors. 
• Residents can submit 311 tickets without fear of retribution from their neighbors. 
• Having both options (anonymous and authenticated) provides the best of both worlds to your residents because some residents will want to get responses on their ticket status, and those residents will then need their email addresses to be authenticated.
  
  

NEGATIVES

• There is a 100% chance that allowing anonymous 311 tickets will lead to abuse, so there will be frivolous tickets that will need to be removed from time to time. These tickets could also include upsetting language and photos uploaded into the system. You may need to have your employees sign-off on the fact that they may be exposed to upsetting content to protect your municipality legally.  
• Residents can't follow up on their anonymous tickets by logging in to review them. 
• Municipal staff can't send emails or contact the person providing updates. 
• There will be more duplicate 311 ticket entries for the same property/problem because it will be so easy to create an anonymous ticket, that the person creating it is likely to not spend the time to review what is already in the website before creating it. 

SECURITY CONCERNS

• EvoGov stores IP addresses of all submitted content submitted through our forms. This means that no submission is truly 100% anonymous. 
• We may need to state publicly on your website that IP address are stored to avoid potential legal liability of mentioning to the public that these anonymous 311 tickets are truly anonymous. Indirectly, this could lead to less frivolous tickets being submitted. 
• IP addresses can easily be spoofed using a VPN or proxy, so even though we are storing them, it is not a guarantee that the IP address reveals the actual location of the person submitting the ticket if they use a VPN while submitting the tickets.