As of today, Ancestry site so broken it can't be used

Allie

Captain
Joined
Dec 17, 2014
Just venting my frustrations. For a week now, Ancestry.com has been struggling along while they "updated" the site. First the DNA results broke - according to several people on their support forum, no one has received any new matches for over a week, and the results can no longer be searched, making the results useless in any case. I can't even comment on their support page - it won't let me log in, and resetting my password does not send a message to my email. Yesterday it started having frequent outages on the hints and records system, and giving constant "this is not available, retry" messages when adding records. Today, adding new information to a tree simply doesn't work at all. I need to get some research done and it's not possible. Those people who have been able to contact them by phone report that their message is that their service is out, they don't know when it will be back up, and their customers just "have to deal with it."

To add insult to injury, they've been sending me half a dozen marketing messages a day about how this is "DNA day" and they have a sale on DNA kits. Actually I wanted to do some more testing and would have bought one - but why would I buy more of a product I can't use?

It's just about class action lawsuit time. How does one go about organizing one? I know users of other online services have successfully sued. At this point I'm paying a substantial amount of money for something that used to work fine and has no excuse for not working fine now - this tinkering isn't necessary or helpful to me as a customer, they just whimsically, willfully broke their site.
 
I was on Sunday afternoon on the library version. It was working fine there.

I go to library as don't have Ancestry at home.

Hope you have better luck later this week.
The site was working on Sunday except for the DNA results. Today it's not. According to their facebook page they know the records function isn't working.
 
What purpose would it serve for Ancestry to willfully disrupt their site?
The site was bought out by another company.

Well, according to their year end shareholder reports, their ideal customer is someone who purchases a DNA kit, pays for a month-to-month service to look at the results once, and forgets to cancel their subscription. Yearly subscribers and heavy users pay a lower rate for more service. Their shareholder report says that their strategy is to try to gain more month-to-month casual users. They don't outright say that they intend to drive regular users away, but their actions since then would seem to indicate that's the plan.

Regardless, everyone universally hated the "New Ancestry," and they refused to respond to customer complaints in any way. This update removed features, and added none of the features customers requested. As near as I can tell the company is run by monkeys randomly bouncing around a room hitting keyboards by accident.

The new upgrade of the support page which happened this week is because they have outsourced support to another company. So complaining to support is now essentially fruitless - no one at the actual company hears complaints at any point.
 
Finally they have a service outage alert on their support page! It only took them since 4 pm last night - twenty hours - to acknowledge they had a problem according to the first complaint about it on the support page. Now the mystery is how long it will take them to resolve a known issue they say they are working on.

Let's see - to migrate support to a new system - they said it would take 15 days, it actually took 25. It took Steam zero days of downtime to do the same thing, because real companies run not by monkeys get the new thing up and running before they take the old one down.

To fix the broken DNA results - over one week now, not fixed.

So at this point "we're working on it" might mean it will be up momentarily, or it might come up in three weeks, or it might never work again.
 
I haven't been on in a while but I've been unhappy with Ancestry since they implemented the new system. Then they said they weren't going to support Family Treemaker any longer while at the same time sending me advertisements to purchase the latest version. Treemaker was for me a major benefit so to lose support for it p****d me off big time.

The new corporate strategy to try and get more short-term users at the expense of long-time ones is really disturbing. It's just another example of how customer support and loyalty are viewed by many companies: just a cost they'd rather avoid for something that doesn't return enough revenue to make it worth shooting for (unless the customer is willing to pay a premium for it). Sad commentary on the state of business in this country.

Not related to Ancestry but regarding businesses trying to find ways to gouge customers I had a first-time experience last week when I started making hotel reservations for my trip to Virginia in September. Three of the places I called tried to get me to sign up for things not related to my stay - such as high-pressure sales pitches for condos or time shares - and tried to up-sell me a more expensive room than what I clearly asked for. Oh, and two of them are now sending me emails for which there is no opt out option. Really annoying and I wonder what will happen when I show up.
 
You folks taking those DNA tests are brave. The Law & Order episode where dude wakes up on a bench in Central Park minus a kidney scarred the bejesus outta me!
 
Customer service is where you get to try and figure out what the agent is saying because they are from New Delhi, India due to all the customer service jobs being shipped overseas.
Yeah heavy accents and claim to have English sounding names lol
 
If you have all-access membership, which I do, one of the things you pay for is your own special premium phone support line. I haven't used this yet but it offends me as a concept - is this line somehow better than regular customer service? If so, does that mean normal - but still paying - customers are getting shafted? Shouldn't the goal be for all customers to get adequate support?
 
Customer service is where you get to try and figure out what the agent is saying because they are from New Delhi, India due to all the customer service jobs being shipped overseas.
Ha. I just had that experience about 5 minutes ago. I actually don't mind accents ~ find them quite pleasing to the ear usually ~ but it IS a challenge when the terminology is funky...like medical stuff. At one point, both she and I bust out laughing because neither of us could pronounce the test I was calling about. :D
 
As near as I can tell the company is run by monkeys randomly bouncing around a room hitting keyboards by accident.
1) Awesome visual.

2) Thank you for posting this. I was one of those monthly subscribers. I haven't been using it as much as I thought and wasn't sure if I should keep paying the monthly fee. You helped me off the fence. :thumbsup:
 
If you have all-access membership, which I do, one of the things you pay for is your own special premium phone support line. I haven't used this yet but it offends me as a concept - is this line somehow better than regular customer service? If so, does that mean normal - but still paying - customers are getting shafted? Shouldn't the goal be for all customers to get adequate support?

Yes, you do get better service than other customers. Businesses have somehow calculated that on average customer support does not pay for itself in increased revenue and so they minimize it or try to eliminate it. However, it can generate revenue if the support itself is sold so people who are willing to pay a premium get better access; a sort of value added approach. In some businesses what support you get is dependent on how much you spend (they keep records) or have invested or on deposit (in the case of banks or investment firms). For instance, when my investments with Vanguard got to a certain amount I got a different number to call and it is, indeed, better service and that's with a company that's owned by the investors !

In short, the current business model says the way to make money is to minimize employees and brick and mortar assets while increasing impulse buys and using deceptive marketing (or just flat breaking the law if the penalty is small and the chances of prosecution minimal). The focus is on the short-term as that's how the stock market works; it doesn't reward long-term investments. So, it's better to make lots of one-time sales to the masses in the short term while minimizing overhead than it is to try and build a customer base and reward loyalty. That's the way jobs have become, too. Almost nobody views employment the way it was when I was a young man (i.e. stay with one employer a long time, work your way up, get rewarded for your good work and long-time service). Employees are just another type of office furniture and one jumps ship as soon as a slightly better offer is in view (or is laid off without notice or ceremony). Having held many jobs in a relatively short period no longer is viewed negatively. Everything in our society is moving toward the right now.
 
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I'm not a fan of getting a large list of maybes when you put in a name. You have to guess if they're responding to you or just throwing stuff against the wall.

I'm with you on that. With the new Ancestry the search engines seemed to really degenerate. Why allow one to narrow the search if it's just going to grab everything anyway ? If I say I'm looking for a William Jones who lived in California and was born between 1870 and 1880 I don't want to see a hundred other Joneses with different first names who lived elsewhere and were born ten years earlier or later.
 
One of the things I hate about any of these genealogical sites is that they steal info from everywhere on the internet and then "sell" this same information on their site. I have posted many many photographs on different sites only to find they show up on searches at other sites.
 
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