16 September 2013

Social Disgrace II

Today and Friday will be my last posts on the ineptitude of Ancestry's social media. Writing about the crazy trees is much more enjoyable. I find people paying to add nonsense to their trees amusing. On the other hand, people getting paid by our subscription dollars when they should be flipping burgers or working at Wal-Mart is just infuriating.
Most of this will be about the Ancestry.com (not .ca, .co.uk or .com.au) Facebook page because it's the only social media site I waste time on. If there are issues with Ancestry's other social media, including the other Facebook pages, feel free to discuss them in the comments.
Let's start with the "About" page. It looks like website addresses are the only thing Facebook allows in the "Contact Info" section. Is "Mission" really the next best option for a phone number and email address? Is the mission of Ancestry.com to hear our thoughts and comments and to let us know about the initials at the end of comments by the page?


Maybe it's just a coincidence but the initials started showing up on posts soon after this comment was made by an admin.


That's right, an admin is claiming that Ancestry.com has customer support 24/7/365. I can hear your laughter from here. Maybe the initials will be used to identify admins in need of another training session. I'm sure someone will claim the initials are for the benefit of those who use the page. If that were the case wouldn't it be easier to use first names?
Of course requiring your team to identify their comments doesn't mean they will actually do it. This admin either forgot or decided not to sign their work. [The screen cap is from last week.] Lecturing fans in front of hundreds, possibly thousands, is usually frowned upon by most companies.


After all that the admin didn't even bother to tell Troy about Mundia.com.
Admins can't stand to look bad. You can see from the time stamp on this screen cap that I commented after the Ancestry.com admin but their post has been edited.


While viewing the edits is not possible on the Facebook app, anyone using a browser can click "Edited" and see exactly what was changed. This admin edited their answer to basically add my comment to theirs. I would have a lot more respect for them if they had just commented again and said, "I hadn't thought of that."


This comment took the admin three tries.


Editing is only possible with comments, not an original post. In the case of a post admins will post, delete and post again. On pages it's possible to create a post that will go live at a later time. Once you create the post and set the time (an hour, a week or a month from now) you can see exactly what it will look like. There really is no excuse for deleting and re-posting. So far I think the record is posting the same thing three times before they just gave up. The admin couldn't spell genealogy correctly in any of them. *head/desk*
[Thanks to Aggie for grabbing the screen cap!]


Admins seem to think we'll believe whatever they tell us. This one would like us to believe that a fan can make someone else's post disappear from the page. Anyone who has visited the page when the porn spammers are around knows that isn't possible. We can report something as spam and even report that it violates Facebook community guidelines but unless an admin removes it, or Facebook removes it which could takes months, the post will still be visible the next time we visit the page. The fact is that a few of the admins are actively censoring posts. I'll go into that more on Friday.


There's the admin that refuses to learn how to spell. It doesn't matter how many times she is told that "cashe" is not a word. There are at least half a dozen instances just this weekend.


There's the admin that either doesn't know what is available for free on the site they work for or can't be bothered to tell potential customers.


Then there is the admin that makes no sense at all. He/she says Janet's comment is correct and then states the exact opposite. [Note: This is before the use of initials.]


Much more coming on Friday. I'll start writing that post as soon as the headache from this one goes away :-P


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2 comments:

  1. Well what do you want from the Facebook staff? No one is allowed to be smarter than the boss, Kristie, and that is a VERY low bar to meet.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well what do you want from the Facebook staff? No one is allowed to be smarter than the boss, Kristie, and that is a VERY low bar to meet.

    ReplyDelete