Family Historian User Group

Has anyone else seen this new (I think) item - and if you have, can you tame it?

On the front page of Ancestry (accessed via a browser) there is what I might call a tool bar across the top, thus: Immediately to the right of "Hire an Expert" are three icons: a bell, a leaf, and a message.

The leaf icon gives access to Hints and its highlight circle has recently changed colour from green to red - goodness knows why, I saw some excuse that said "Red means New". No it doesn't, Red means Danger, but let's ignore that one...

My plea for any balm refers to the (new?) bell icon, which gives access to a list of Notifications, thus: The vast majority of these "notifications" are a waste of space, it seems to me since, as you see in my sample, they just refer you to a hint. Look Mr Ancestry, if I'm ignoring your hints, I'm certainly not going to take any more notice of them if you hassle me about them in Notifications as well.

Has anyone found a way to suppress these Notifications?

I did try to get in touch with Ancestry Support and ended up in a WhatsApp conversation with someone who might have been real but who answered suspiciously quickly as if "they" were actually a bot. Carbon based or AI, it became clear that they didn't have the faintest idea what I was talking about because they told me all about Hints and how to switch them on and off. I did follow their instructions and yes, it did exactly what I suspected and just switched Hints to other peoples' trees off.

I don't want to switch Ancestry Hints off - not even the Hints to other peoples' trees - because they can be useful, but I'm utterly incapable of dealing with them all as they appear. I'd just like to switch the Notifications off - can anyone help?

Play around with Account Settings > Communications

No, I'm pretty sure you can't switch them off. I've tried every knob, button and switch on every UI to no effect. And it is driving me insane, I absolutely hate the new bell icon. The best I can suggest, as you've probably already found yourself, is to click on it, and then quickly click again, which clears the red flag. I initially spent some time clearing down the notifications themselves, but as you say they are utterly pointless anyway, so I just ignore them now. Ancestry clearly do not panel-test these new features on actual users as surely they wouldn't make it out into the wild if they did?!

Does Account Settings > Communications > Trees do it? I had Email notifications switched off, but Push notifications were on. I've now turned them both off for all my trees, so let's see what happens...

Incidentally, it does raise another issue - only one of my trees was identified by name on that screen, the others having just 9-digit numeric identifiers Not a problem though - I've turned them all off!

I review the hints occasionally, (when the numbers have built up) and read all messages, but the bell icon I ignore. To be honest I don’t recall ever seeing a bell notification.

BTW Adrian, could the hint change to red, to distinguish it from FMP, who use green?

Have you tried this? I use Ancestry.com. I don't know if Ancestry.co.uk is the same.

Go to Settings > Trees and scroll down to Hint Notifications.


Then click on the ">" next to "New hint indicator at top of page" and uncheck the options.


Bill

ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑15 Oct 2022 10:52 Play around with Account Settings > Communications

Mark1834 wrote: ↑15 Oct 2022 11:58 Does Account Settings > Communications > Trees do it? ...

I tried suppressing "Trees / Discoveries / Push" for my tree this morning, but got 2 more bell icon Notifications this evening. So I'm not totally sure what that does...

BillH wrote: ↑15 Oct 2022 15:33 Have you tried this? ... Go to Settings > Trees and scroll down to Hint Notifications. ... Then click on the ">" next to "New hint indicator at top of page" and uncheck the options.

That controls the hints under the leaf icon, not the Notifications under the bell icon. I just unchecked it and lost all the hints to my main tree (under the leaf icon) while not affecting what's under the bell icon for the same tree. Though I seem to still see hints on the profiles of the individuals in that tree.

Thanks for the ideas but, as Adrian Cook says, it doesn't look like you can switch them off. And if Ancestry Support is so clueless as to not even understand the issue... (Though I'm sure it doesn't help that the word "Notification" appears in relation to both bell icon and leaf icon stuff.)

Oh well... worth a try. I have hints turned off so I don't get any bell icon notifications for hints. I only turned them on for the screen print I posted.

Bill

BillH wrote: ↑15 Oct 2022 20:48 ... I have hints turned off so I don't get any bell icon notifications for hints. ...

Yes, I have them switched on - originally I didn't because I was like, "Who needs this stuff?" Somehow, I found that I did because one hint was for my great-great aunt and contained her picture in her naturalisation(?) application. Since then, I tolerate them for the occasional jewel like that.

I did have hints turned on at first and did find quite a few things that way. But I upload an updated tree to Ancestry about 3 or 4 times a year and I got tired of having the hints reset each time so that I kept getting bombarded with the same ones over and over again.

Bill

If you use a browser like Firefox you can download the add-in "Stylus" and then "edit the style" of the Ancestry pages to "hide" the bell icon - then just forget it.

Needs a bit of knowledge of CCS but that can be picked up online. For instance on this Forum I have a Stylus amendment that reads: "li.bg2" (the selector) in the above refers to items in the notifications pull-down that are "new"; the (rule) "background-color: yellow;" is hopefully self-explanatory (even though it uses American English).
May do the trick for "the Ancestry Bell" - apply your rule to URL's on the domain "ancestry.co.uk" etc.

You may find the selector changes if you have new notifications - in which case set up another rule or put in an extra selector separated by a comma.

You find the selector through using the code inspector screen (F12 on Firefox), then the selector with the top left icon. If your tag has an id (unique) use tag#id, but if you wish to target a tag with a class (potentially many occurrences) use tag.class - tag by itself selects all tags of the stated type.
The "!important" part of the rule helps over-ride determined web-developers wishes!

davidf wrote: ↑16 Oct 2022 14:45 If you use a browser like Firefox you can download the add-in "Stylus" and then "edit the style" of the Ancestry pages to "hide" the bell icon - then just forget it. ...

Tempting... IIRC I did something similar when the Firefox developers decided that tabs weren't really tabs (Sarcasm warning: How stupid could the rest of us be to think that? ), tabs were actually buttons. I think that they closed that loop - or I forgot to carry forward the mod because now my Firefox browser has tabuttons at the top. Which is my experience in similar areas - it is not permitted to want something different from the great and good (Ancestry, Firefox, [insert name of political party], etc...) and the kludge eventually fails. Or, of course, the rotten lot actually produce something useful in the bit that I've hidden and I don't realise.

Yes I think it was about a year ago that the "tab labels" got detached from the actual tab content - because "they wanted you to realise that they could be dragged" (what the tab labels, or the tabs and labels - separating them made it look as if your could really scramble things). The "soft aqua" theme however does at least make sure that the tab toolbar and the tab label are the same colour and that the other tab labels are clearly separate!

I seem to remember finding a hack on-line to dig into the Firefox user-chrome to "sort it", but that mod is now as good as redundant with my chosen theme.

However a bit of knowledge of CSS is never a bad thing and if websites made it easier to make mods - or even if actual applications used CSS, so that we could manage modifications! (Still pondering how to specify that requirement - with suitable interface. Handling data references is apparently OK for FH users, but "style references" is a step too far!)