Notes

What is this?

In trying to justify the year put into this archive, I have searched for everything wrong with the London website. This section will include my small tests on London, like broken link reports, comparisons of searches, and lists of the larger impacts of having a broken website. What I have written is usually just a starting point, in hopes that someone can make use of these ramblings (:

Inability to search meeting attachments (2026/05/05)

Committee and Council meetings are not properly searchable. London provides searches for agendas, however the contents of attachments—arguably the most important sources of information—are not indexed. This means that over 50,000 documents (~95% of meetings data) are essentially in an “information black hole”. They cannot be discovered, learned from, or referenced.

To demonstrate limitations of London’s search system, I have connected the YaCy search engine to my archive. Both my website and London’s have the exact same data available to them, but by indexing all documents, my archive’s results have significantly increased. Below is a list with some sample searches taken on 2026/05/05:

*searches have been filtered to exact matches by replacing spaces with “+”. Using spaces will increase the total number of results, however many of them are unrelated and will artificially inflate the totals.

Broken sources from CTV news (2026/04/11)

When you read the news, do you ever check their sources? Ideally, every article you read should have some citation for when and where they collected their information. To their credit, CTV does try to do this. But whenever they link to the city as a source, there is a serious risk of their source disappearing.

I built a script to scrape every municipal link within every CTV London article. My search went back 5 1/2 years, from 2026/04/10 to 2020/12/29. I found 153 unique links to the city website, and I checked all of them to see if they were alive (original data/document could be accessed), or dead (error page). The breakdown is as follows:

*Planning applications will all expire at some point, so the "alive link" is only temporary.

This is not healthy. London makes it impossible for news sites to reliably link their sources. Over 50% of eScribe documents were dead, and these contain documents from city council meetings. Some of the bad on the main site include homelessness prevention, fire preparation, and fireworks safety. The dead links would have been useful, had the city not killed them without a redirect or proper notice.

Below are the scripts used to collect this data, along with the list of URLs I generated for this test.
Scrape URLs (SCRIPT) | Generate Stats (SCRIPT) | Pre-scraped URL list (TEXT)

Get Involved London is broken (2026/04/07)

The City of London switched services their "Get Involved" website in late 2025, and it did not go well. Get Involved is designed for engagement on large scale projects like the London Plan, green bins, or the lengthy construction on Wellington. The site hosts timelines, comment forms, and public presentations for each project. This website is plastered on big wooden signs all over the city, next to all the major construction jobs, and on social media. This is an active website.

Despite being an active website, the city did did absolutely no checking after their update. I ran into many broken links, and months later the city still hasn't noticed. Here is a copy of the link list I sent to city staff: