After posting the previous article on Waste of Money, Waste of Electricty, I was thinking of posting it up at the official Government e-engagement site reach.gov.sg, since they mentioned in the recent response to the AIMS recommendation, that the Government will limit their online responses to posts on REACH, and online forums of mainstream newspapers like Straits Times.
I opened my Google Chrome browser, typed in reach.gov.sg in the address box. The browser was redirected to http://app.reach.gov.sg/reach/default.aspx, a pale orange bar appears at the top of the page, and that’s it. The browser’s page-loading icon continued to spin indefitinitely.
Ok, I was thinking maybe it is a browser issue. Tried Firefox. Same result. Maybe Government websites supports only Internet Explorer. Tried that, and this time even the orange bar does not appear.
I thought maybe it was a problem with some server maintenance, so I gave up. This morning, I tried it again and the same thing happened on all 3 browsers.
Now it really makes me wonder how would any one be able to provide feedback via REACH, if it is not reachable?
Update: After posting this article, I went back to the browsers, and the REACH website did return, but my Firefox reports that it took 1263.187 seconds (more than 20 mins!!) to load. Sigh.
Update 2: I proceeded to try to register. Clicked on the ‘Register’ link and I am presented with another blank page, I am not going to wait another 20 mins for the next page to load. Guess feeding back via REACH is only for people who has many 20mins to spare.
Update 3: Poll created.
Loading ...Update 4 on 12 Feb 2009: Looks like it is now ok, after checking back one week later. Maybe I can start to register and try posting my comment there.