OC using tagga for SMS fire alerts

Save you hermits out there, most of us have heard of the wildfires raging through Orange County this past week.  Not Snoop Dog’s house! In all seriousness, these fires have been horrible, burning down homes and ruining lives.  The wildfires move very fast, giving people little time to evacuate, which is why the Orange County Register took action.  They set up an SMS alert using tagga, where their readers could text FIRE to 82442 to receive the latest fire updates.  This is by far the coolest and most practical application of tagga we’ve seen yet.  It also made this natural disaster more real to us and our hearts go out to those affected by the wildfires in Orange County.

Also, we’ve received reports from some OC residents who have had trouble unsubscribing from our alerts.  Please text STOP or FIRE UNSUB to 82442 to unsubscribe.  This unsubscribe problem arose because users were replying to the messages they received, which would not normally be a problem.  However, turns out that our SMS service provider had a bug whereby they were mistakenly sending out our messages on shortcode 83960, not 82442, meaning we were never receiving the unsubscribe messages.  We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.  If anyone else is having problems unsubscribing,  please email us (support[at]tagga.com) for help.

Chris Richardson
tagga.com developer