Missourinet

Crash Reports back online

The Missouri State Highway Patrol was unable to transmit crash reports to our website from Monday morning (6/5/06) until Wednesday morning (6/7/06) due to some sort of software glitch at MSHP headquarters in Jefferson City. The problem was related to a system upgrade prepartory to posting crash repforts on the official MSHP website.

The techies at MSHP finally got everything sorted out this morning and retransmitted the missed reports. Looks like everything is back to normal. Those of you paying close attention to the reports will notice a couple of minor changes:

• Reports now include gender.
• Street addresses have been removed. City and state only.
• Date of Birth (DOB) has been replaced with Age.
• Insurance company appears in a slightly different place on the report

Once the reports begin appearing on the MSHP website (July 10, 2006), we'll pull them from Missourinet.com. We will, however, continue to support our premium service until current subscriptions expire next spring.

Online crash reports have been wildly popular since day one. Last month (May) crash reports accounted for more than one million page views by 50,000+ unique visitors.

Target date for MSHP Crash Reports

The Missouri State Highway Patrol is shooting for July 10, 2006, to begin posting crash (they don't like the term "accident") reports on their website. Sounds like they've got things pretty much ready to go but want to test the new system internally for a few weeks and then get through the 4th of July weekend before rolling out the new service.

A couple of changes to what you've been seeing: Date of Birth will be replaced with age; and reports will be online for 29 days.

MSHP taking over crash reports

We were recently informed by the Missouri State Highway Patrol that they will begin posting their crash reports to the MSHP website. This means it will no longer be necessary --or practical-- for The Missourinet to maintain our crash reports page. We don't have a lot of information to share at this point, but there will probably be a news release from MSHP and we'll post that. We're not even sure when all this happens but probably in June or July. We plan to keep our premium service, Crash Reports dB, online until current subscriptions expire. That will be about a year from now. We're not accepting new subscriptions.

Before we began posting crash reports to our website, the only way to get a report was to call your local troop headquarters and have the dispatcher read it to you. Or request that a report be mailed (or faxed?) to you.

Last month, our crash reports site generated almost one million page view and was used by approximately 40,000 unique visitors. It has proven to be a valuable and useful service, just as we knew it would. And it has been a free service since the beginning. Even after we began offering an premium subscription service a few years ago, we continued to offer the basic service at no charge.

We're delighted the Missouri State Highway Patrol has decided to offer these reports on their website. It is our hope and expectation the new service will be even better than we've been able to provide.

Crash Reports screenshots

In an effort to help visitors to the Crash Reports section of our site understand the difference between our free, public service and our subscription service...we've added some screenshots. The reports are exactly the same but the premium service archives all the reports and makes them searchable. We no longer offer a free trial but you can get a good feel for the premium service by looking at the screenshots.

MSHP Crash Reports: Date/Time Stamp

Far and away the most popular content on Missourinet.com is our Missouri State Highway Patrol Crash Reports. As traffic on this part of our site grows, we've had a few outages. We're upgrading hardware and software to deal with this. Following such outages, the MSHP re-transmits any missed reports. Now here's the confusing part... the actual report has all of the correct date/time information, but they appear on our website with the date/time they were resubmitted. For example, if they resend a report --that was filed on Saturday-- on Monday... the date/time will be the time it hit our website. We know, that's confusing but it's the best we can do for now. The solution is to eleminate any down-time and we're working on that.