Suggestions

I do use My Threads to find postings, and find it very useful.


As one of the helpers, I may post on 20 or more threads a day (on a good day!). In busier times (3 or 4 years ago), I might have posted on 40 or 50 threads in a 24 hour period.


It is hard to keep track of that number of postings ...... so I depend on My Threads to do it for me.



However, there are now very many threads in My Threads which I no longer have interest in ...... dating all the way back to 2004 .


I've suggested several times that there could/should be a function in My Threads that we could click to no longer "watch" or "follow" a particular thread.


Thus, we could prune the number of threads in My Threads, without having to delete all our posts in the threads themselves ....... as a helper I do not delete postings, thinking that they may be of use in the future, either to the original poster or a "newbie".




sylvia

If I pruned back the posts in my threads, there would be no point in posting at all.

I have been using this site for two years...first post about feb/mar 2010 and now have nearly 14,000 posts.

Perhaps 4,000 are chating posts mainly on one thread, the rest are trying to help people.

So what shall I do? remove any old help..(.none are going to be that old)..hoping the poster never returns or trawl through the chatty thread removing everything I have said?

I can understand you not needing to look at my threads when you only post on two slow moving boards, but I think it would be harder for most of us who tend to post on all (except quizzes and games)

As for the trees I have 50 people in mine...not a problem but never liked the GR layout so did not continue
I have access to over 150 trees only two are related plus another name collector who gave me access, even though I refused her access to mine...all the others are complete and utter strangers who's tree is of no interest to me

Yes, I'm sure its possible. We did something similar at work some years ago with a database that was getting too large.

Everything prior to a certain date was archived to a read only area. It could still be accessed if necessary but as it was static it didn't need backing up every day and was not considered critical to the day to day running of the business. As a result maintenance costs were reduced and performance improved.

Yes I quite agree about the priority and like you I don't need to use My Threads very often.

I wonder if they could easily limit the My Threads results to threads which have been used in the last two or three years, assuming that would help.

True Ken, and I'm not denying the fact that it needs to be sorted, but it is a question of priorities. If 1,000 members have problems because their tree is large but only 10 members can't use My threads, I know which I would tackle first.

Also, is My threads that important? I use it, maybe once a month and to be honest it wouldn't be the end of the world for me if it wasn't there.

That may be true IGP but many of those with over 10k postings are the most valued when it comes to helping others.

PS Go an error indication when I posted this but it did post OK. Had several errors this morning.

Re Rollo's point that the GR tree wasn't really intended for more than 10k or so names, a quick check of My Contacts shows that I have access to over 25 members trees with more than that figure, half of which have over 20k names....!

Again I wonder if the '10k boundary' is similar for those with thread problems. I have 7k thread postings and whilst navigating My Threads is a tad slow, it doesn't time out.

I guess the problem for GR is that there are infinitely more members with >10k names in their tree than there are those with >10k thread postings, so you can see where their priorities might lie.

Google has indexed all of the Gru postings, It is easier and faster to look for old posts using Google than through the Gru search which is so slow and clumsy that I gave up on it ages ago.

That all of the thread posts are open to anybody anywhere via Google might be something to reflect upon. Some of these large "look up" threads are outside of T&C of both Gru and the data source.

Myself I archive my threads off line and prune them back regularly.
With good reason too.

From its inception a basic principle of Gru has been that it is a lightweight, easy to use and fun application with the inherited concept (from FU ) of an online community as important as family history per se. If people want a heavy lifting application then there are the usual suspects.

Now that the sign in / start up problems are much better the focus is on performance within the site of which threads are the main gripe.

Gru was not designed for family trees of 10 000 + people ( I have seen one with 37 000 ). Neither was the message repository designed to act as a de facto database. It is somewhat naive to imagine that any computer system has the capacity for an infinite number of records. A few users are hitting the boundaries and most likely they will just have to live with it.

Take as an example the well known FreeBMD site. Enter search parameters with too many hits and you simply get a message that the required search returns too much data and you have to narrow it down. Gru's error is not to throttle the data returned as is usual.

At a rough guess I would suggest that Gru are having an interesting time extracting performance from their back end Microsoft IIS 7 servers. This is something of a black art and I wish them well. Most of the web runs on Apache. There are reasons.

Do not remember that function but certainly would be useful

:-D

Unashamed :-)

Please :-)

Also to find other people's posts.

I've mentioned doing board searches for duplicate posts one knows or suspects are there.

When a search for Cleopatra Anthony turns up three threads and two of them are monstrous great look-up threads, well, you know somebody has been posting hither and yon and wasting numerous people's time, and you want to know what has already been done so you are averted and can alert others -- but am I going to spend mine dredging through even a 20-page thread? Nope.

Google searches, e.g.

site:www.genesreunited.co.uk "cleopatra anthony"

*do* take one to the actual page of a thread where a phrase appears. So you could always try that, Joy!

I will go along with that Joy.

A few years ago, one could not only find threads in which one had posted, but also one's own posts within them; this function disappeared, but I would find it useful again if I wanted to delete all my posts within a thread.