General Chat

As some of you may have seen I am very unhappy about the service I received for the money I paid to GR.

If the moderators on this site are interested I would like to suggest you write down ways you would like to see the site improved. Maybe your comments could be sent to the web designers.

Apparently I am not the only member who has problems and we are sure it is not our computers as they work very well on all other web sites.

So please do put forward your complaints and back it up with idea - please try not to be totally negative but helpful.

I just want the pages to load promptly and not lose information I have clicked on to. Maybe someone could look into this and tell us why the site is so slow. This will surely lose members eventually because of this problem. My messages keep jumping about the page too. Can someone tell us why.

Eventually when we have enough suggestions I will e-mail a link to the contact page.

Thanks

Lin

I thought I encountered most of my problems because we are not on Broadband. I too find it slow to load and at one point I was not getting full dates just the year of birth or death from other trees, whereas before I was getting day and month and year. I sent in a complaint asking if they had changed the format or was it their software at fault. They said they would get back to me - they didn't get back to me, however, they corrected the fault. I now have to sit and wait for the plant to water and germinate and grow etc before I get into my tree which does take an age.

I also would like them to get a software package that can link up people a lot better.
At the moment it is not possible to link up someone who appears twice in a tree, for example, brothers and sisters who married each other, or cousins who got married in my tree. I have to enter that person twice or leave one person out of one family and just put them in the other family as a spouse. It is not satisfactory – the total number of people in my tree is false because some are in there twice.
It obviously can be done as I have seen trees where this has happened but they have downloaded their information on to Genes from another site.

That any good to you Lin.

Perse

a less tedious way of deleting contacts, messages, old thread posts, would be nice.......
Bob

and in the older days were we not able to see our actual Posts, instead of threads which contained our postings?

Bob

I am reasonably happy with the service I get for what I pay. However there is one gripe and that is about hot matches. It takes me ages to delete those that are not relevant and if GR put a location filter, maybe by county or distance, (say 25 miles) it would save a lot of work. I can understand Joe Bloggs 1880 London being Hotmatched with Joe Bloggs 1880 Middlesex, I can also understand Josephine Bloggs 1920 Newcastle being Hotmatched with Josephine Bloggs 1920 Co.Durham, but Joe Bloggs 1870 Cornwall hotmatched with Joe Bloggs 1870 Yorkshire is ridiculous.

Well now that GR has been sold off by ITV to a 'proper' genealogy company, why not wait and see what changes that brings first??



ps - there are NO moderators on this site

I reckon I get a pretty good deal for a tenner a year, lolol, although I know some folk pay double that. On the whole, I am ok with the site... there are glitches every so often, but there are on other sites I belong to, as well... I do agree that this site often runs very slowly, and would like a mention from the powers that be if there is any site work going on that could cause a problem with access... I think more people would be happier if that were the case.

Love

Daff xxxxx

I must say that I don't have any problems with the speed of pages changing etc., although I do have a very fast broadband speed.

I just find the site doesn't seem to get so many people coming on to it these days so the threads themselves move quite slowly.

Moderators would be a great idea, but can't see it happening any time soon.
Even if you send complaints to GR you tend to get standard or automated replies.

As McAnne says, lets hope the new owners will improve the site without changing it so radically that we don't know what we are doing!!

Kath. x

I am constantly irrated by hot matches - having a smith on tree I am inundated with non matches. If you give a place of birth surely they should match to that or at least county. I cant be bothered with rest. If they could give you to optional lists - one 5 star matches and other everything below then you could please yourself as to open

Matching place of birth is difficult, the only way, I can see around the problem is for that field to have a dropdown menu of legitimate place names.( and a worldwide list, would be vitually endless?)
not forgetting that places 200 years ago, may be known by different names today,
and also many believed Places of birth are probably a " educated " Guess anyway.

A person believed to have been born in Bethnal Green could loosely have been born, london, B green ,middlesex, uk, england, GB or anywhere similar.

I (Mea Culpa) have sometimes put UK just to fill in that field, but now I may have found Hackney to be the nearest area name......
Bob

So if there are no moderators who deletes the unsuitable posts which I have seen a few times?

Perhaps most of us are pretty safe here, I used to be a moderator and so I understand the concept and what goes on behind the scenes. But volunteer moderators are a good thing and can help the system run smoothly.

I also think we have to suggest ways to improve the site and not ask the site managers to do something which is beyond their control. i.e. the way the Census records are laid out.

Lin

Most deleted posts are deleted by the poster themselves for various reasons i.e. if the information they have found has already been added to the thread.

Any posts deleted by GenesReunited are only deleted after an ordinary member complains to GR about something which goes against GR's rules.

Kath. x

I have no problems with words jumping or not being able to type into the box and i consider I do get value for money. However, I do wish that when we send a message to GR Admin they would give us the courtesy of answering our questions and not send out stock replies this can be very irritating as often the reply has no connection to the question.

I do often have difficulty getting into messages by clicking on the word message at the top of the page and usually have to access my messages via the email they send to me. But I don't know if that is a GR problem, or a problem with my own system.

Oooooh be careful!

I wanted fairer pricing of membership subscriptions as there were several different prices being charged without just reason. I got together a list of people who felt the same as me and also contacted Genes to get their opinion, which was never forthcoming, on the matter. After initially replying with a 'bog-standard' response, they could offer no reasonable explanation as to why there were different rates for the same service. It ended up with Genes basically threatening to terminate my membership if I continued to pursue the matter and they took the thread with all the names and comments from members off the boards stating I was breeching T & C of the site.

Hope you have success in your campaign!

Lyn x

well since last March I have been continually signing in - over and over again, sometimes three times just to get in. Complained over and over again and have been given lengthy explanations of things to do regarding cookies etc. All to no avail. Tonight I answered another member's pm on GR/au, and lo and behold, everything is fine - no more signing in!!!! So I am now staying with it - cannot believe it

http://www.genesreunited.com.au

Can I ask why there isn't a Genesreunited.ca?

A "back to top" facility would be handy.

Re complaints-customer help; Since having some repairs to my lappy I have been unable to access any records, so have to use Ancestry for this.

Complained to GR, and despite telling them I need plain English, all I got back was gobbldegook. So that means that my fee is wasted. Did someone mention £10, I'm sure I paid £80.

I found the ageing on hotmatches very useful, so much quicker to just view the new hotmatches. I complained when they removed it but they said that was how it was going to stay.

Anne's suggestion way well help in the short term. However, ff you don't clear out your browser files periodically, i.e. cookies, temp files, browsing history etc, then the likelihood is that you will start to see the same problems with the .au site in the fullness of time.

The site does seem to require a fair deal of space within your browser in order for its pages to load correctly. Most of the performance problems members have mentioned can be avoided if you tidy up regularly. If you have an older PC or are using an old browser version, then increasing the size of the browser temp file space can help.

A number of members use CCleaner for housekeeping. It also allows you to preserve those cookies you need for those sites you log into regularly, rather than clearing the lot, so you don't loose your log in details.

Your screen also needs to be sized properly. The page should be set to 1024 x 768 pixels. You also need to size it so the width fits across the screen correctly.

Use the scroll wheel whilst pressing Ctrl to make the page wide enough to fit across the screen, with no dark borders either side and no left-right scrollbar. The dark bar at the top of the page which has the buttons on it should fit across in one line without taking up a second line.

If you have a small screen then give yourself more vertical space by pressing F11. Psess F11 again to get your browser buttons back.


As far as brothers marrying sisters etc, I can't really get worked up about this. Most of us have a small handful or none at all, I see the GR tree as a means of storing the names that I wish to connect with other members, not for producing pretty displays. My main tree is kept on FTM and I use that if I wish to produce reports and trees. Incidentally, uploading a gedcom with multiple sibling marriages doesn't entirely work either.

Bob's idea of having a list of place names is a good idea, but it gets blown away as soon as someone uploads a gedcom.

You don't have to use Hotmatches, Personally I find them useful although I find most of my contacts by searching manually. A good idea might be a facility to turn off a particularly common name.

I'm basically happy on here apart rom one main drawback and that is the fact that GR do not alert members when there has been a reply to their message. Neither do they post guidelines for finding replies.

This has caused some unpleasantness in the past when people have not replied to information found for them. I now spend quite a bit of time (when convenient to me), pm'ing folk to tell them that someone has given them some info. The majority, and I mean the majority, are new and did not know how to respond either because they were waiting for an alert or because there were no guidelines to follow.

Other genealogy sites can send alerts so why can't Genes?

GR do send alerts re PM's. I'm not sure, though that I would want one every time someone adds to a thread of mine. I could see that being an annoyance, rather than a help.

I also don't understand the need for guidelines for finding replies. What would those guidelines be?