Alaveteli

EN

Alaveteli Professional

A toolset for professional users of FOI
Everything journalists, researchers and campaigners need to conduct investigations.

Translations

Alaveteli Pro’s translations must be translated through Transifex. The Pro-specific translations are presented as an independent resource to translate.

Enabling Alaveteli Pro also enables a new help page that you’ll need to translate in the usual way.

Configuration settings

The following are all the configuration settings that you can change in config/general.yml. When you edit this file, remember it must be in the YAML syntax. It’s not complicated but — especially if you’re editing a list — be careful to get the indentation correct. If in doubt, look at the examples already in the file, and don’t use tabs.

ENABLE_ALAVETELI_PRO
PRO_SITE_NAME
PRO_CONTACT_NAME
PRO_CONTACT_EMAIL
PRO_BATCH_AUTHORITY_LIMIT
FORWARD_PRO_NONBOUNCE_RESPONSES_TO
ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE

Alaveteli Pro adds digest notifications for Pro users to help them manage their FOI requests. You must enable the Notifications Daemon when enabling Alaveteli Pro.

Alaveteli Pro enables the interface for Pro users to make batch requests. For this reason we strongly recommend using the POP polling mail retriever method. Without the POP poller batch sending is throttled to prevent overloading of the application as it ingests any auto-acknowledgement messages. This means that further batches are blocked from sending until the process exits. With a batch size of 500 authorities the process would take 8 hours to complete, preventing other users' batches getting sent and preventing the user navigating around their batch.

Signup options

There are three possibilities for allowing users to access a Pro account.

Option Description Configuration
Invite-only Admins approve or deny access requests.
  • ENABLE_ALAVETELI_PRO: true
  • ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE: false
  • ENABLE_PRO_PRICING: false
Self-service Users can add Pro to their account themselves with no intervention.
  • ENABLE_ALAVETELI_PRO: true
  • ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE: true
  • ENABLE_PRO_PRICING: false
Paid Subscriptions Users are charged a recurring subscription for access to Pro. See the pricing documentation for more details.
  • ENABLE_ALAVETELI_PRO: true
  • ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE: false
  • ENABLE_PRO_PRICING: true

Assigning your first Pro admin

Note: You need to deploy Alaveteli with Pro enabled before this step so that the database is seeded with the Pro user roles.

Alaveteli Pro introduces a new user role of pro_admin. After enabling Alaveteli Pro, you’ll need to assign the first pro_admin through the Rails console.

$ cd /var/www/www.example.com/alaveteli
$ bundle exec rails console

Within the Rails console, find the user you want to upgrade and add the pro_admin role.

user = User.find_by(email: 'admin@example.com')
user.add_role(:pro_admin)

This user will now be able to manage private requests and assign pro_admin to other users through the admin web interface. Note that pro_admin users should also have the admin role.

All the Alaveteli Professional settings

ENABLE_ALAVETELI_PRO

Enable Alaveteli Professional.

If ENABLE_ALAVETELI_PRO is set to true, Alaveteli will include extra functionality and account levels for professional FOI users, e.g. journalists. Professional users have access to a new dashboard, a more streamlined request process, and crucially, the ability to embargo their requests so that they remain private.

Enabling this is a large change, and this is still in Alpha development, so you may want to contact the Alaveteli team before doing so.

Example:

  • ENABLE_ALAVETELI_PRO: true
PRO_SITE_NAME

Site name for Alaveteli Professional.

The name to use when referring to the Alaveteli Professional parts of an Alaveteli site. For example, in the UK our Alaveteli instance is called "WhatDoTheyKnow" but we refer to the pro parts of the site as "WhatDoTheyKnow Pro".

If you don't want a different name for the pro pages, make this the same as SITE_NAME.

Example:

  • PRO_SITE_NAME: 'Alaveteli Professional'
PRO_CONTACT_NAME & PRO_CONTACT_EMAIL

Contact name and email for Alaveteli Professional.

If you want all support mail to go to the same address, make these the same as CONTACT_NAME & CONTACT_EMAIL.

Examples:

  • PRO_CONTACT_NAME: 'Alaveteli Professional Team'
  • PRO_CONTACT_EMAIL: 'pro-team@example.com'
PRO_BATCH_AUTHORITY_LIMIT
The total number of authorities that can be added to a Alaveteli Professional batch request.

Example:

  • PRO_BATCH_AUTHORITY_LIMIT: 500
FORWARD_PRO_NONBOUNCE_RESPONSES_TO
The email address to which non-bounce responses to emails sent out to Alaveteli Professional users by Alaveteli should be forwarded.

Example:

  • FORWARD_PRO_NONBOUNCE_RESPONSES_TO: pro-support@example.com
ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE
This option is only used when ENABLE_PRO_PRICING is set to false. If ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE is set to true, Alaveteli will let users upgrade their accounts to Pro without needing to enter payment details. If ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE is set to false, admins will receive an account request email and has to assign the role in the Alaveteli admin interface.

Example:

  • ENABLE_PRO_SELF_SERVE: true