Family Historian User Group

I wanted to call to your attention a recent post on the Ancestry blog from their Chief Technical Officer, Scott Sorensen:

An Update from Scott Sorensen – Chief Technology Officer
http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2013 ... om+blog%29

He discusses several site performance issues.

One section near the bottom of the post says:

New Site Alerts Page – Outside of the site banners, we have created a new page on our customer help section that will keep you updated real-time about site issues. You can get to this section by clicking the “Get Help” in the upper right hand corner on Ancestry.com. It’s not available for all geographies yet, but we’re working to make that possible. This should be your go-to spot if you’re ever curious about what’s happening with the site, as we have a team in place that will work hard to communicate regularly as we have planned maintenance or as site issues arise.

Since he says not all geographies have this yet, you may not be able to see it on the UK site. However, if you are a subscriber, you may be able to log into the US site with your regular login and see the banners which the US users see. If you are having technical difficulty, give that a try and let me know what happens.

It's interesting to see a technical person admit what I feel has been intuitively obvious all along -- Ancestry, in trying to provide hints and trees and Member Connect, and suggested records, and all this other gunk which doesn't pertain to searching record collections and retrieving records, has bitten off more than it can chew.

IMHO it would be far more useful to have a service with accurate indices and less of the 'pushbutton research' add-ons. The US City Directory collection is especially bad -- if I can't find people in a certain date range, when other evidence shows that they had continuous residence in the same house, it's a good bet that their names are in the directories in those missing years, but Ancesty's OCR has failed to produce a record for them in the index.

jmurphy wrote: ... It's interesting to see a technical person admit what I feel has been intuitively obvious all along -- Ancestry, in trying to provide hints and trees and Member Connect, and suggested records, and all this other gunk which doesn't pertain to searching record collections and retrieving records, has bitten off more than it can chew ...

Sorry - I don't follow your logic at all. Assuming I understand your description of the Site Alerts page correctly, this doesn't imply that Ancestry has bitten off more than it can chew. It's simply standard practice - "Tell the customers what's going on". Because things are never perfect in real life and every so often, even with the most robust site in the world, things will go awry.

As for your comment about accurate indexes, the choice is not between an accurately indexed City Directory collection and an inaccurately indexed one. The choice is between an inaccurately indexed one and (virtually) no directories at all. It is simply not viable to index all those directories manually, so OCR technology needs to be used. If the original documents are small and the original films taken at small magnification (neither of which are Ancestry's responsibility, I suspect) then you're on a loser straight away. Interestingly, my gut feeling is that later documents and films are better, implying the original paper and / or film are higher quality, as the OCR system is the same in both cases.

For a couple of months now I've been having problems with ancestry.co.uk using Chrome.

When I click on menus, particulary drop down ones, I get no response at all, and today, after clearing all my cache, history and cookies in Chrome, I can't even log in - clicking the Sign In button does nothing. The only button on the home page that responds is the "14 Day Free Trial - Sign Up" !!!

Fortunately Firefox does work, though all my bookmarks to various parts of Ancestry are in Chrome.

Bl..dy annoying!!!

davidm_uk wrote:For a couple of months now I've been having problems with ancestry.co.uk using Chrome.
...

Disturbing - the other day I was reading about someone who was having problems downloading books from the FamilySearch library. Nothing happened beyond the spinning wheel / egg-timer. After some experiments, it turns out it works in Firefox and Safari but not in Chrome.

AB

David, you can easily import all your bookmarks from Chrome into Firefox as explained here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/im ... gle-chrome

Click the Bookmarks button to the right of the navigation toolbar, or in the Menu Bar at the top click Bookmarks.
Then Show All Bookmarks > Import and Backup > Import Data from Another Browser > Chrome and follow the dialogue to import Bookmarks.

I have found that when you first open a page in chrome then input text into a box, click OK or press enter. Chrome just reloads the page and you have to start again. 2nd attempt works though

I have been using Ancestry on Chrome all morning with no trouble at all. Yesterday there were problems but there was a warning message in a yellow strip across the top of the Ancestry Home page stating that they were experiencing problems.

AdrianBruce wrote:

jmurphy wrote: ... It's interesting to see a technical person admit what I feel has been intuitively obvious all along -- Ancestry, in trying to provide hints and trees and Member Connect, and suggested records, and all this other gunk which doesn't pertain to searching record collections and retrieving records, has bitten off more than it can chew ...

Sorry - I don't follow your logic at all. Assuming I understand your description of the Site Alerts page correctly, this doesn't imply that Ancestry has bitten off more than it can chew. It's simply standard practice - "Tell the customers what's going on". Because things are never perfect in real life and every so often, even with the most robust site in the world, things will go awry.

"Tell the customers what is going on" should be standard practice, I agree -- but Ancestry has been particularly bad about it, if the comments I've seen on the Ancestry blog are anything to go by.

My remarks that Ancestry has bitten off more than it can chew are a non-IT person's way of saying that their current setup won't scale up any longer -- that is my interpretation of this part of the blog post:

As I mentioned in my last post, the amount of data that we host on the site, along with the complexity of the services we offer (trees, search, records, hinting, etc.), has led us to a point where we began to experience performance and stability issues with our site. In the past, we’ve been able to add hardware to keep up with needs, but now we have to make smart and purposeful changes to our infrastructure, which are taking time for us to execute. - See more at: http://blogs.ancestry.com/ancestry/2013 ... Hnv1f.dpuf

As for your other point:

AdrianBruce wrote:As for your comment about accurate indexes, the choice is not between an accurately indexed City Directory collection and an inaccurately indexed one. The choice is between an inaccurately indexed one and (virtually) no directories at all. It is simply not viable to index all those directories manually, so OCR technology needs to be used. If the original documents are small and the original films taken at small magnification (neither of which are Ancestry's responsibility, I suspect) then you're on a loser straight away. Interestingly, my gut feeling is that later documents and films are better, implying the original paper and / or film are higher quality, as the OCR system is the same in both cases.

I understand why OCR technology needs to be used, and its limitations. What I don't like is that if I find a place where the OCR has not worked, and it has simply skipped several lines of entries on a page, there is no way to do anything about it. For one of the large commercial databases I use as part of my job, every detail page about a product has a link on the bottom of the page that says "Notify our database administration group about errors in the data". There is a way to submit feedback to Ancestry if you can't retrieve an image, but that's it.
The only solution they have is for people to submit corrections to the index lines which are already there.

If I had a service like that, I would want to have a means whereby errors found by users could be reported to a forum, like this one, properly tagged with place and surname and publication date, so that users who were working on those families or in those areas could search for alerts for records which an ordinary search won't find. That to me would be better than the scenario they have now, where one of my husband's relatives was
"corrected" to have her mother's maiden name in a census index, as if it were her own maiden name, and gross mistakes in indexing can't be addressed at all.

Edited to add: it's nice to see that this thread might end up being useful as a catch-all for "I'm having technical problems with Ancestry" posts where we can help each other. Maybe there are similar areas on Ancestry's forums, but the forum software is so primitive, I don't often go there.

jmurphy wrote: My remarks that Ancestry has bitten off more than it can chew are a non-IT person's way of saying that their current setup won't scale up any longer

... What I don't like is that if I find a place where the OCR has not worked, and it has simply skipped several lines of entries on a page, there is no way to do anything about it.

OK - those quotes re scaling make sense, though I would suggest that if they are making "smart and purposeful changes to our infrastructure, which are taking time for us to execute" (as if they would make purposeless changes?), then they are chewing away and haven't bitten off more than they can chew. Yet.

And your expanded comments about the OCR and lack of correctability now also strike something of a chord with me. I have also found pages that seemingly have not been OCR'd as there is no correction facility for those pages. Whether or not your suggestion of a forum would be of any use, I don't know. Judging by the standard of some user complaints on, say, Family Search (e.g. "Please can we have the IGI back, because I want to search it?" - even though it has less data than the current set-up), I am less than confident - but certainly, user reporting options in most family history databases often leave something to be desired.

I may have found my problem, still testing but all the Ancestry menus now seem to be working. For some time (years) I've been using the MVPS Hosts file to stop pop up adds etc.

see here http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm for more info on what it does.

In W7 it can be found at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\HOSTS (I think it was the same in XP).

This had worked very well, but I noticed that on some of the Ancestry pages some frames were just loading as blanks, though from their context they seemed to be adds. On the off chance that Ancestry was doing something "behind the scenes" I've temporarily renamed my hosts file to hostsxxx, so that windows doesn't find it, and it can easily be put back again.

Ancestry now seems to work with Chrome as it used to, so it seems that the hosts file was blocking something important.

Next stage is to plough through the hosts file and try and work out what entries are causing the problem, so that I can remove these and leave everything else in place.

If anyone else has problems with Chrome and wants to try this, do post back what you find. For the techies out there you might even want check and see if you have a hosts file, and what's in it (it will open in notepad - it's just a text file).

I use Ancestry with Chrome all the time with no problems at all. I don't have any blockers of any sort though..... in case that helps.
Anne

I have found that the quickest way to find out if ancestry is experiencing probs is to go to their Facebook site.