Ha!, FindMyPast trawling for new customers. ? !
No surprise, and not many of FindMyPast's former, and disgruntled customers would be likely to be very surprised, or sympathetic.
Perhaps FindMyPast's April 2014 efforts to screw it's own site functionality and usability and former intuitiveness, and at the same time to screw and infuriate a huge proportion of it's own paying customer base, and cause many of them to publicly and very angrily and vociferously state that if FindMyPast didn't fix the mess that it had made of it's own site rapido, that they would not renew their subscriptions.
Literally overnight, FindMyPast trashed a formerly great, and much praised site, at least the British version was, but i believe that prior to April 2014 the new and "improved" junk version was the version that FindMyPast had already been sticking it's overseas customers with.
It took them several months to restore some semblance of functionality to the site, and they had to resort to pleading with their users to tell them what needed fixing, which was pretty much everything on the site, and their customers had already been bombarding them for over a month with specific information about what needed fixing, but FindMyPast had been arrogantly replying that the new site was really great and was an improvement, and that the problems with the usability of the site were imaginary and were a result of customers not being willing to be adaptable, before they had to eventually climb down and apologise for the catastrophe that they had created, and they also gave existing subscribers an extra months free subscription.
Even professional genealogists and researchers who were experienced FindMyPast users were complaining that the site was no longer fit for purpose, a phrase which got frequent use.
There were so many fixes needed that whenever FindMyPast tried to repair one feature, they seemed to break some other feature without realising the actual effect that their latest tweak had produced.
Prior to that there were hundreds of approving customer reviews of FindMyPast on product review sites, and a negative comment about FindMyPast was almost impossible to find, but overnight a flood of furiously negative customer reviews were posted and they just kept continuing at an incredible rate.
They even stopped answering the customer service phones for several weeks because of the constant flood of customer complaint calls.
Users renamed the site as Lostmypast.
The wikipedia mention of the debacle puts it very mildly in comparison with the level of outrage that was created and voiced loudly and publicly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findmypast#New_user_interface_.282014.29I wonder what their balance sheet has been like since then, I must check that out.
