New Year's Resolutions

A couple of suggested New Year's resolutions for Ancestry's programmers:

1) Communicate with Ancestry.com users.
2) Finish what you start.

Sometimes new features are just sprung on users with no explanation. No opt out and all Ancestry employees can say is, "That feature is being tested and until it is widely available, all I can do is acknowledge it is intentional - not an error." Helpful, really helpful.
Other times things are taken away with no notice whatsoever. If you're like me you probably hadn't noticed that links for locations are gone. We can no longer click on the location of an event and be taken to a map. It doesn't take much effort to use Google Maps instead but that's not the point. Lack of communication is the point. Apparently communication within the company is not a priority either. In this thread it took Ancestry employees over two weeks to figure out the feature had been discontinued.
Photo tagging disappeared when "global commenting" was added. Apparently it's never coming back. Has Ancestry said anything about this other than a random comment on their message boards?
Meanwhile, the programmers continue to add new features without ever fixing issues with existing ones.

MEDIA

✿ Photo labels - Portrait / Family Photo, Site / Building / Place, Headstone, Document / Certificate, Other - have been around since at least 2009 but they have yet to serve a purpose. You cannot sort or search within a tree's photo gallery by label. You cannot include/exclude a photo label in a global photo search. I'm so glad I went through my entire gallery and assigned the appropriate label to each item. It's been so helpful. </sarcasm>
✿ Photo captions and comments cannot be formatted. If you're typing and hit return it looks as if you've started a new paragraph, until you save the caption/comment and view it. The return is not recognized. Same goes for the transcription section for "Document / Certificate" images.
✿ Formatting doesn't always work on stories either. Write a story in a word processing program, copy and paste to Ancestry and it looks fine. Save and suddenly all bold, italics, font changes, and paragraph indications are gone. Luckily you don't have to re-type everything but you do need to re-do all the formatting despite the fact that it looks fine on the editing page.

AFTER THE JUMP: Search, Hints & FTM, Records, Messages & Invites, Gift Memberships, and more.

Pet Peeve: Ancestry Search Sliders

I posted this issue on Ancestry.com's Facebook page the day the sliders were introduced and it was acknowledged by one of Ancestry's genealogists. Of course, like all reported issues, she said that it would be passed on to the appropriate department. Unfortunately my psychic ability was failing me and I didn't think of getting a screen cap. Since I have been banned from the page all my comments and posts there are unavailable. Disappointing. Here's the problem...

[Above] On the left is the view from a search results page. If you were to hover over the surname slider on Ancestry.com you would find it's set to "exact, sounds like and similar." Open up the full "Edit Search" box and you'll see the view on the right. It shows the surname search set to "default settings" which should be the broadest search possible.

[Below] Move the slider to "Broad" and click the "Update" button. How does that appear in the search box? "Restrict to exact, Soundex, phonetic, similar." Ummm...

Okay. Let's try editing the surname search in the edit box rather than with the sliders.

[Above] Well that's an improvement. (Is the sarcasm coming through?) I couldn't find one setting that appeared the same way in both boxes. Ugh!

The programmers added the sliders when the "old" search was retired over 7 months ago and they have known about the problem since then. Apparently they have no intention of fixing it. Instead they are working on adding features we don't need. Like this one:

The filmstrip icon is shown above on a census record but is available on other collections as well. Click it and this appears:

If you hover over an image on the filmstrip a thumbnail about twice the size of the filmstrip image pops up. Even in the larger pop-up most, maybe even all, records are completely illegible. So how is this helpful? We can already skip to whatever page we want by changing the page number and using the 'enter' key. So Ancestry's programmers are replacing the out-of-date, slowing-down-the-page, old search code with newer, we-don't-need-this, slowing-down-the-page, useless feature code. Meanwhile features we've been asking for, e.g. ability to organize photos and DNA comparison tools, are nowhere to be found. Well done, Ancestry.


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Do They Use Their Company's Product?

Today's post has been interrupted to bring you the following rant. The photos from Monday's tree will be featured in a future post.
You'll probably be surprised to hear that this post will not be about Ancestry finally doing away with the "old" search. Dragging out the search change for five years was dumb but this move is, in my opinion, much worse.
Most, if not all, of you will recognize this as the bottom of the advanced search box:

The "Collection Priority" only works if you click the "Show only" box because why make something a one-step process when you can make it two, especially when the first step accomplishes absolutely nothing. That's a whole other rant, sorry. Back to the image.
Below the drop-down you can choose which collections you want included in your search results: Historical records, Stories & publications, Family trees, and Photos & maps. It should come as no surprise to regular readers of my blog that I never check the Family trees or Photos & maps boxes.
A SIDE NOTE: Both the drop-down and the check boxes are "sticky" meaning that they won't change until you change them. If you go on vacation and forget that you were working only with collections involving Australian maps just before you left you might be very confused by your search results when you come back to look for records of your Native American ancestors. 

The options for the unchecked boxes are still there, a click away, but those results are not included in the main search results. Until now. Family trees are still filtered out, thank goodness. The issue is with the photo portion of Photos & maps. Here is an example:

For this search I had Historical records and Stories & publications checked. Unfortunately the first four results are photos. There is a portrait, a headstone, a document and something on a private tree. This has to be a glitch right? If I say something it will be fixed and I can go back to seeing the results I want to see, right? I posted that last image on Ancestry.com's Facebook page and an employee responded:

"OK, I checked on this and as I mentioned it's coming up in results because it's a database and because it includes scanned documents that are historical records, it is categorized as such. Since there is no way to separate out the different kinds of media in the collection with search, that is why you're seeing images. Hope that clarifies it for you. Have a good day!"

Seriously?!!? Apparently Ancestry's decision makers are not familiar with the loads of crap posted on clickophile trees. Making it worse is the fact that photos already on our tree and those that are ignored hints do not get filtered out. In the search example above two of the four images are already attached and a third was ignored as a hint.
I searched from another profile with the same two boxes checked and 10 of the first 15 results, six family photos and four documents, were items I uploaded. The other 5 were for photos on a private tree.
It looks like removing the "Show only" check removes photos from the first page of search results but depending on the profile it could cause other issues. Basically Ancestry's programmers are making the first page of search results useless. Do they use their company's product?
Photos on Ancestry can be categorized. It's very useful. For what, I have no idea. The category options are Portrait/Family Photo, Site/Building/Place, Headstone, Document/Certificate, and Other. You can't sort the photos by category in the profile's gallery or in the tree's gallery. You can't search for images by category. But since there are some documents uploaded as photos Ancestry is adding all photos to the historical records search. Now we have no way to stay away from the Disney Princess, Care Bear insanity while we're searching for records. What a terrific idea. (sigh)


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