General Chat

This is received today in relation to me only receiving letter A - several times now. Initially was told it was a problem Technical team were looking at but now this ----

Thanks for your email. Hot matches looks at each individual in your tree, then it goes through the database and brings back to first 100 matches with these people. This page will refresh roughly every 14 days bringing you the next 100 matches. If you have a large tree then it is more than likely that the first 100 matches will only equal the first letter of the alphabet. We set the limit to 100 matches as any more can be quite overwhelming.

Super Hot Matches are a way of providing you with closer matches for names in your tree. Super Hot Matches match relations in other members’ trees whose name, year of birth and parents match relations in your tree, providing a stronger match than normal hot matches.

Although we run the matches every 14 days this does not mean we can guarantee you matches each time. If you do not get any new ones after 14 days then it just means there weren't any. Hopefully you will get some new ones next time.

I hope this helps.

Roll on improvements to hot matches!

I let my membership lapse for a year and now I'm back I have 36 pages of the damn things. Most of them seem to be single matches and therefore pretty useless, but I'm damned if I'm going to go through them individually to delete them.

Until they bring back the facility to delete en masse I will just let them build up. It's not my website they're clogging up!

Elizabeth, you are absolutely right.

I was part of a £5 million name and address matching project a few years ago for a well known BBank, and whilst it was a lot more sophisticated than GR could ever hope to achieve, at the end of the day it relied in the Human No: One Eye Ball to make the final decision.

I must come back to the placenames for birth - when Genes started to do the "Super Hot Matches" there were complaints from members that these were all names they had found out already. And if you require exact matches of place-names you could miss out on a lot - the place of birth registration is often a long way from the actual place of birth, and censuses may show anything from village to district, to county, or even country - and a lot of misleading information can come from Ancestry who seems to have a default to the American addresses - some of mine from Northumberland are shown as Blyth Pennsylvania, or as Cowpen orTynemouth ,which would never turn up if a search depended on a place name being a good match.
When checking Hot Matches I have something like Autoroute open so that I can check which county some strange placename is!

Howard,

That is the way it works....! Nothing to do with recently added names.

The HotMatch system takes a batch of your names, (it used to be limited to 100, but not sure if that is still the same) and looks for matches in other trees. So, if Adams was in the selection then that is why you have got a list of possible matches.

You don't have to scroll back to the top to reply. Just hit Add. It didn't work properly previously but it does now.

If your screen judders when you try to use the boards, then it could be that your screen resolution is not compatible. It needs to be set at 1024 x 768 pixels. You also need to ensure that the screen is sized for your monitor. Use the Scroll wheel to make it fit whatever screen you have with the minimum of dark green either side, and no overlap.

Also, make sure you clear your temp files regularly. The GR site does load rather a lot of data down to your PC and will not work if you keep running out of cache space.

Janet,

Deleting your tree because of HotMatches is a bit like shooting yourself in the foot.

On a scale of one to ten, for each 9 of my matches which comes through the dedicated hard work I put in searching other members trees and vice versa, 1 comes from Hot Matches.

Regarding:-
What does it mean when it suddenly now says "delete all matches with" this person, instead of just "delete" ?

I can only assume that this was changed because a number of members complained that they were not aware that hitting delete cleared all matches for the other member, not just an individual one. This had been raised on other threads. So now, when you delete a Hot Match you will be removing all matches with that member. It isn't possible to delete a couple of matches and then leave the rest. Once you have deleted a Hot Match it is not possible to see it again.

Whilst not to everyone's taste, Hot Matches are a useful tool and do come up with connections that you might otherwise not be aware of. If you decide you don't like Hot Matches at all you can just unsubscribe from them on the My Account page

Hi again

Another round of Hot match mayhem!

Still haven't fixed the "back to square one" bug.

I had three pages today, of which about two individuals were matches, 5 mouse clicks and some key strokes to discard every one. life's too short.

Almost all of the matches were the "Adams family" I haven't just added these people and I can't believe that all of these other members have suddenly and almost exclusively added the Adams's so how does it work?

In order to reply to this thread, I had to scroll back to the top, not a great problem I know but another thoughtless inefficency and now I am replying I get the page jumping up and down so that I can't see what I'm typing (not always)

There have been so many complaints about this site, the management must be impervious. There's only one outcome if you keep going backwards.

Howard

Hi Helen in Kent,

I was there for Genes Connected as well - I still think that was a better name for what we're about too!

I agree with what you say about hot matches: even in its original format you got taken back to page 1 AAAAGGGGHHHH!

Which bit of Kent are you in? I'm in NW Kent.

janice

Hi Janice!

Hot matches have always been awful : in the days when some of them were fairly useful the deletion process was just as painful as it is today.

I know a lot of people say this but I am seriously thinking about cancelling membership, especially now it costs me twice as much as some other people as I don't want automatic renewal. I just don't see the point some days as I subscribe to Ancestry at vast expense and GR doesn't seem to offer so much any more. I was one of the original members of Genes Connected so have been hanging around since the very beginning, I think my membership number is 83 thousand and something.

Having said that I have 6 months to run so I have a while to consider. I really only take part in the social side of the boards now. And threads like this!

What does it mean when it suddenly now says "delete all matches with" this person, instead of just "delete" ?

What I fear, and struggle to find the time to cope with, is this:
that when you get a matches entry for a second time, with a member who you already have another entry from and are keeping it, but you want to delete the new one, will the old one vanish too?

Nobody can possibly have requested that as an improvement.

And that just proves that some staff know what is happening ... and maybe others haven't told others ....
- because one member of staff replied that members had requested it .... doh!!
:-)

I think this is a fault, bug or call it what you will, rather than a deliberate change at the request of members. If you look at FAQ's in Help it says:-

"We are aware that when you delete or discard a hot match you are returned to the first page of the hot matches. This is something our technical team are working on and hope to have corrected very soon. Sorry for the inconvenience!"

I agree with Inspector GP that is what I want them to fix too. And I have emailed them about it. But they say changes are at the requests of members?? So WHO requested that one?

And I liked hot matches and have found some good contacts in the past.

They might not be able to match place names but matching continents surely can't be that difficult!!

Snap Helen!

I've never seen GR reply before either, except to a PM.

I gave up with Hot Matches a long time ago for all the reasons mentioned by the rest of you. I never look at them now.

Does GR have a department for making things harder for their customers than they already are?

The old method of deleting 'dud' hot matches was ok. This new system takes twice as long. Why can't I just tick all the relevant boxes and delete the whole lot in one go (as I used to) instead of doing it one by one.

Does anyone there actually use their limited brain power to think these changes through before they impose them on the long-suffering customers?

This is a disgrace.

Janet, you say ..." I have noticed that for some time in addition to new hot matches I have other names whom I have never contacted and they are not in my contacts list. They are just there as they supposedly match names in my tree."

I can't see a problem with that. Isn't it what HotMatches are supposed to do?

Sadly the 'old' way wasn't any better either.

My main gripe with the current version is that after making a deletion, or sending a message to someone, you should return to the same point in the Hotmatch list where you came from, not back to the beginning. If they were to fix this then it would work ok as far as I am concerned.

As far as not matching place names is concerned, the reasons for not doing so have been debated regularly on here so I won't repeat them again.. It is not going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable.

I agree that GR don't seem to have any method for assessing the impact of changes on customers. As the genealogy market becomes more competitive, the GR team seem to be losing the plot.

Hi All


I received, what I imagine is a standard response to my emailed moan, which went on about them doing their best but they can't suit everyone. If they suited somebody it would be a step in the right direction.

Howard