The Tax Court has been telling us for some time that it was migrating to a new case management system and making other changes starting in July 2020. On Friday, July 17 it upgraded its website. This created a problem for frequent visitors to the Court’s website such as Carl Smith and me. Because of cookies and other helpful messages embedded in our computers, we found that we could access very little at the Court’s website but it seemed like we were in the right place.
Because both Carl and I were experiencing the essentially the same problem and because we were talking to each other and not to others who might have helped us, I reached out to the Court and received an immediate response suggesting that I close out my currently open Tax Court page and go back into the Court’s website, making sure that there were no words on the access line after https://www.ustaxcourt.gov/
I followed the Court’s instructions and all of my problems went away. Perhaps Carl and I are the only dinosaurs who experienced this problem but we decided to write this short post to alert any others with our same handicap to the issue. If you experience problems as you use the new website, the Tax Court seemed quite interested in hearing about any problems or concerns that you have.
This web site contains lots of links to pages that used to exist in the Tax Court’s web site.
Also I had lots of browser tabs open to pages that used to exist in the Tax Court’s web site. When a tab refreshes, it gets redirected to the Tax Court’s main page and there is no recollection of what I used to be looking at.
Some web site owners are more kind to visitors, putting in redirects to new locations of the pages.
In a discourse on text searchability of PDF documents, I noted:
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“157. … In response to the author’s inquiry, the Tax Court’s Webmaster indicated that there were no plans to bring any keyword search facilities to the website. E-mail message from Webmaster, U.S. Tax Court, to Kenneth H. Ryesky (Oct. 11, 2000).”
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“From Pens to Pixels: Text Media Issues in Promulgating, Archiving and Using Judicial Opinions,” 4 JOURNAL OF APPELLATE PRACTICE & PROCESS 354, n. 157 at 384 (2002)
[ http://lawrepository.ualr.edu/appellatepracticeprocess/vol4/iss2/6 ].
Of course, much can happen with technology after 20 years.
It is reassuring to know that the Tax Court people are willing and able to facilitate the use of the Court’s website by the citizenry.
Maybe I’m an Old Dog who doesn’t like New Tricks, but I never like it when perfectly good websites change. If Yahoo Sports wants to know why I get all my sports scores from ESPN, it’s because they changed their website on me and I gave up trying to figure out the new one. I guess there’s no alternative to the Tax Court though. 🙂
It wasn’t broken, so of course they had to fix it.
Old website: Links stayed at the top of the page so that after checking Opinions, you could go directly to Orders.
New website: Go back home, then find your link again. Orders and opinions are on the same drop-down menu, not with separate links.
I must have been quarantined the day they took the survey to ask users what they liked and what they thought should be changed.
I always access the website on a desktop, so I don’t know how it works on a smartphone. Does it still show a rotating display of the box-like architecture? I was there once, but these photos look unfamiliar. Maybe because visitors must use a side-door entrance.
The architect explained, “what I’ve done is taken a monolithic block and broken it apart.” Sounds like a prison. Give me the Sydney Opera House, which was inspired by a peeled orange. But the home page artwork does convey the message, “this is the closely-guarded strongbox where we keep all the records you can’t access online.”