[doublesocket]

The flip side of this is local government technology. Truly some of the worst crimes against web development have been committed by local councils, or rather their outsourcing partners.

The service that takes that crown in my experience is tarantopermits.com, a parking permit management system that fills me with rage just thinking about it.

[dazc]

I often wonder why so many Local Authorities and Gov Departments have to have their own unique web portals?

There must be a massive cost-saving opportunity here.

[doublesocket]

Absolutely, there's massive duplication of functionality. I think it's partly incompetence and partly a control thing.

[chinabot]

All a control thing, incompetence is just a side effect.

[hooverd]

Well, they probably want to be able to update them as things change without waiting so many weeks on a ticket to central IT. I can't imagine they're doing anything unique though, so the best of both worlds could be central IT providing tools and managed hosting.

[gadders]

It takes the piss that you have to pay to park outside your own house anyway.

I mean, a nominal fee enough to correlate car registration with owners address, but not £210 like google told me it costs in Wandsworth. I bet about £10 of that goes to the council.

[hgomersall]

Why? Do you own that bit of road?

[gerdesj]

Are you sure:

"Welcome to tarantopermits.com"

"This domain name is parked for FREE by fasthosts.co.uk"

[doublesocket]

Yes, they're so incompetent they haven't changed their parking page. See google search results:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tarantope...

It's all on subdomains, e.g. https://wandsworth.tarantopermits.com