Petitions

[Proud Liberal Dem]

Has anybody here ever had any experience with doing petitions, online or in person, and what has the result been? Are petitions useful, useless, or something else? I want to start up a petition and, given what I'm starting the petition for, likely to be more received/noticed online and I posted a thread on another site asking for some advice regarding the process of petitioning and one of the posters (the only responder so far) laughed and basically said that he didn't think that any online petition has ever been successful/useful. Of course, I've signed a few online petitions for things that did eventually end up happening, although I suppose that I can't conclusively prove that it was the petition and not other factors but if they're not useful at all then what's the point of starting them in the first place and what other means might a person use to demonstrate widespread support for something other than a petition?

[MonkeyFunk]

1. I agree

that an online petition is pretty useless.

The only time I've seen a petition of any sort accomplish anything was trying to convince a congressman to support a particular bill, and we gathered a few thousand signatures of his constituents and presented it to him at a townhall meeting. He agreed to change his position on the bill.