The cutest project we've ever worked on... so far

In 2025 Xequals became the web development partner to one of New Zealand's most popular annual competitions; The Bird of the Year Competition ran by Forest & Bird.

Bird of the Year is famous not only in New Zealand - a country mad crazy about birds - but also internationally, thanks to the John Oliver show covering the event in 2023, which led to an unprecedented explosion of web traffic, have a look at the video below!

So... let's get into the details!

Xequals was brought on 2025 not only as a long-term technical support partner but also to achieve some immediate new improvements, system overhauls, and user experience enhancements.

New and improved voting systems

Top of our task list was to overhaul and improve the voting system; both in terms of usability, and performance. Careful, considered thought went into how to build a robust new voting system that was easy to use and ensured fair vote counting.

Working with our partners at Dragonfly Data Science

The database of voting results now gets sent to Dragonfly Data Science’s app, an R Shiny app that can retrieve data from the website and use it for calculating, tracking, and creating sophisticated dashboards of real time voting activity.

Brand communications and front-end

We were tasked with implementing a series of front-end UI/UX tweaks and general usability improvements, focused mainly on the voting process and donor journey.

• UI UX improvements on the de-coupled Gatsby javascript front-end
• Careful work on the voting form to enforce clever bot protection and human verification for one-person-one-vote
• 2025 brand collateral and design implementation

Other improvements:

• Rate-limiting & throttling was included (using Use Drupal’s Flood API) for:
  IP addresses, preventing rapid, repeated requests.
  Email addresses, blocking users from attempting to vote multiple times using the same email address.
• Disposable emails are blocked. A service detects and blocks throwaway email addresses
• API requests from the frontend to Drupal used to be protected with a Basic Authentication header. This was replaced with a more secure method to ensure that each request has not been tampered with or is unauthorized.
• One vote per email address. This was enforced by the new custom voting module. People who could not find their verification email are able to enter their email address for the email to be resent.
• Backend load testing showed the system now supports realistic peak loads with strong performance and resilience. All test results and performance metrics suggest the system is ready for production usage at high scale.
  
  All in and all we used our in-depth expertise - over one century of in-house working knowledge of the Drupal website framework - to rapidly and efficiently manage a high value development sprint.
  
  Do you need an experienced Drupal website technical support partner? Get in touch.

Below: A new voting system specifically for New Zealand schools, that can now register multiple votes for entire classrooms.

It’s been a thrilling ride collaborating with Bird of the Year and Dragonfly on this project. The passion and creativity it sparked in our team was so much fun, and we can’t wait to see what feathered surprises next year’s competition will bring!

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