General Chat

OK.
I've thought long & hard about what to say and have now sent off my complaint.
But now I'm worried that they won't understand it - I used a long word instead of a four letter one i.e crud!

Here's another fun bit.

I don't check the gmail account I use for Ancestry all that often. I looked the other day to see whether I had any reply, and I had a message saying they were sorry but my application to be on their advisory panel for Ancestry.ca had been rejected.

Odd, that, since I hadn't applied. Then I saw the earlier email inviting me to apply, and the later one apologizing for rejecting me, since the rejection message had been sent by error to everyone who had received the invitation message.

Whaddaya think, should I apply? ;)

So you were offering an informed personal opinion about the inconsequential enchancements which detract from the serviceability and functionality of the site. Hmmm I like the four letter word better!!

Yes. Of course you should. After all they have invited you to apply. I would completedly ignore the rejection message. It never arrived!!

You will however need to think up alternative words for crud. Advisory panel experts need a good vocabulary.

On second thought, variations on the word "no" might also be appropriate.

Hi Janey,

I contacted you a few days ago now regarding "error correction submissions" on the ancestry.co.uk website.

Their new look website doesn't include error correction submitters notes.

Good news for you, it looks like they are going to address this problem click on the link below for detail.

http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2009/08/03/updates-to-the-enhanced-image-page/#comments

Best Wishes Bill

Thank you so much, Bill. I've just never paid enough attention to the stuff at Ancestry other than actual records to hunt this kind of thing up.

I've skimmed that page -- it is the "blog" for an individual who seems to be a marketing honcho at Ancestry (and thus denies all responsibility for anything).

There are complaints about the loss of "customer contributed content" - as well as about the new clutter on the images, and loss of functionality in some browsers, etc etc - but apparently there isn't a definitive response to that yet.

I urge everybody to take a look and add to the thread there if the spirit moves them!

Thank you again, Bill! -- I'm going to paste here what you sent by PM. I had indeed not seen this:

>>>>> Viewing Alternate Information on the record page
Some of you have asked about the comments that were entered when corrections were made in the previous system. We reviewed quite few of them, and I’d say about 70 to 80% are not that useful, things like “Last name was wrong”. However, I know some of you feel quite strongly that they should be restored because there some with some really useful information in some of them. So restore them we will. I’ll let you know when I have an exact date for that but, I’m guessing a week or so.


Hurrayyyy!

One thing I'm glad of - there is now a facility for removing changes one has previously made. (I'd tried everything in the past - even reporting errors I'd made as abuse!)

And also this week, someone has contacted me about the father of my weird gr-grfather and pointed out that I may have identified someone else as him in a census - says the person is male, with the male spelling of the given name, but it is more likely a female person I'd identified in other censuses and records and whose connection with my family, if any, I'd been trying to figure out! What a demnably bizarre coincidence. So there's me removing that one, I think. ;)

I'm going to copy the rest of the info in another post for anyone else interested to try to wade their way through ...

the rest, from the Ancestry blog:



New vs Old Search

I know this isn’t really about the enhanced image page, but some of you have ended up in in the New Search interface and would like to go back to old. If at the top of the Ancestry.com search homepage you see this:

click on “Old Search” and you’ll see the previous search experience. Clicking on “New Search” gets you to the current one. The enhanced image page is available on the 11 data collections we told you about on launch in both searches.



The most full screen you can get

If you really want to maximize your image, and you are on IE6, IE7 or I think most versions of Firefox. First click Maximize Image. Then press your F11 key. This will be the same as Toggle Full Screen on the original image page.

It makes a big difference if you are on 800×600. And it works on any page, not just image pages. (I’ll figure out where to put the link on the new page. But it might help some of you get where you want to be quicker.)

And print current view was tested with the F11 toggle and it works in IE and Firefox.



Printing

We should have the issues worked out with the print current view, and some of the other IE and Vista problems on the enhanced image page. (This is of 11am PT, 2pm ET, and 7pm GMT). If you were previously having trouble printing, please try it again. If you are still having trouble with printing, either post a comment or send me an email, my email address is in my bio below, with this information: Your OS (such as Vista, XP, MacOs), your browser verision (such as IE8, Firefox 3.0.5) and the url of the page you are trying to print.

This should also solve the saving issues some of you were having as well. Again, if you are still having issues, please include the above information as well what you are trying to save it to: shoebox, tree or hard disk.



On the record page, you should be able to see what alternates have been posted by others now: ...

Update!

I just clicked on a corrected-name link in the 1861 census, and the user's notes were visible.

So I hunted up one of my own and clicked on the corrected-name link -- and all of my notes have been restored!

Ancestry responded to outcry. It's a miracle. ;)

OK, so miracles do happen. Don't stop there. Persuade them to change the view original census page screen. Would we like to have it over two pages? The original on one page and the breakdown/transcription/notes info on another page.

It's far too squinty like it is. Of course I keep mixing up which scroll bar I should be using.

I'm getting used to it. ;)

I still haven't figured out any need for it -- especially since the name-correction and comment notes have been restored to their rightful place on the census record page itself!

I suspect they are very married to this one.

Hey, I take no credit whatsoever for the restoration of the notes. I don't think I ever even got an auto-reply to that email.