Thanyou bertieburrell, not for agreeing with me, but for addressing the issues of the topic and the comments about the topic, and not the poster of the comments or their motives for making their comments, or their right to have or to express their views without being told that merely having or expressing any views or facts about a topic is a rant.
Your experiences all sound soooo familiar. Their techies get flak, and often deservedly so, but the actual underlying technology is really powerful, and potentially very flexible, if it was applied properly, but it's like a car with a powerful engine connected to the wrong sized wheels by an inadequate gearing system, but it has really all been caused by the new marketing clique who now call the shots, and who's business acumen seems to be on a par with their technical skills and lack of understanding of, and indifference to customer requirements.
There just seems to be a fundamental lack of common sense with much of what they do and with how they do it, one just looks at some aspects of it and thinks, WHY would you want to do that and WHY would you want to do it in that way, really they just couldn't have messed up more effectively if they had deliberately tried to, and yes the tweaking is still going on, and things that weren't broken are still being broken, and things that are broken aren't being fixed.
At the time professional genealogists were commonly using the phrase "not fit for purpose" and senior I.T. professionals who specialised in product testing and database management were saying exactly what you said about the lack of testing or quality assurance.
I can't think of any product, either online or offline, that received such frequent and consistently high praise and customer loyalty from so many of it's customers, and instead of treating that as the valuable asset and resource that it really was, they just treated it with contempt and threw it down the drain, until that is they were forced to admit what a mess they had made of the site and pleaded with their customers for ideas about how to restore at least some of it's functionality, which is exactly what the customers had already been doing for a month.
A £1 offer isn't likely to reverse their financial problems, and if those problems persist, as they seem likely to, the eventual outcome seems pretty obvious, and if that happens doubtless the media professionals who created the mess will walk away with substantial termination bonuses.
I'm not in the least p*ssed off, I'm angry, and more than I'm angry I'm frustrated about what a bad thing has been needlessly done to what was such a great thing, and I'm particularly frustrated that not much is being done, or is likely to be done, about it.
If it does hit the skids, that would be the biggest tragedy of all, because even in it's present state much of it is still better than any equivalent, it's like the NHS, sometimes it bombs, and bombs really badly, but when it works well it can be superb, and the particular tragedy with FindMyPast is that so much of it's present problems could so easily be corrected if the people in charge had the will and the humility to admit that they got it badly wrong.
Of course though, mustn't grumble, that wouldn't be British, best to leave complaining about poor quality products and services to those American folk, they seem to think that is a reasonable and valid way to respond to such issues.
