Do you have suggestions for improving ancestry.com?

[Ray T]

Trying to pick an alternative to Ancestry is like trying to choose a toilet at Glastonbury.

Glen, that's a brilliant analogy - really made me laugh.

Or to quote an ex-colleague, after putting down the ‘phone to somebody - “Talking to him is like talking to a bag of sprouts.”

[AllanUK]

Seems to me that there is a fundamental misunderstanding at work here.

Ancestry are not looking for suggestions that involve improving/fixing their product that would involve extra expenditure (for no extra return).

The improvements they are looking for are to their profit margin and income stream.

I totally agree!!

[gingernut1]

Have a good clean out of all the 'empty accounts'.  ie those that have no tree or DNA results.   I know of people who have joined umpteen times for the free weekend etc- under different names and not used them again once the offer runs out.

[BumbleB]

Have a good clean out of all the 'empty accounts'.  ie those that have no tree or DNA results.   I know of people who have joined umpteen times for the free weekend etc- under different names and not used them again once the offer runs out.

BUT not all of us who have Ancestry accounts WANT to put our trees onto Ancestry, nor do some of us WANT or feel the need to do DNA tests.  OH and I have had a basic Ancestry UK account for a large number of years AND what we do with it is entirely up to us. 

[Nick_Ips]

Have a good clean out of all the 'empty accounts'.  ie those that have no tree or DNA results.   I know of people who have joined umpteen times for the free weekend etc- under different names and not used them again once the offer runs out.

BUT not all of us who have Ancestry accounts WANT to put our trees onto Ancestry, nor do some of us WANT or feel the need to do DNA tests.  OH and I have had a basic Ancestry UK account for a large number of years AND what we do with it is entirely up to us. 

Completely agree.  The idea of the thread is about ideas to improve Ancestry.  There's a bit too much desire to have things removed that people don't personally like, without thinking how other people want or need to use the site.

Likewise, folk perhaps don't understand if Ancestry doesn't make a profit it eventually won't exist.  If it doesn't exist then we'll all (those of us who use it) be worse off.  I don't see nationalisation of Ancestry happening anytime soon - so it has to operate commercially.

I also don't understand how an account which doesn't contain a tree or DNA results can have an adverse impact on any other individual?

[Biggles50]

Have a good clean out of all the 'empty accounts'.  ie those that have no tree or DNA results.   I know of people who have joined umpteen times for the free weekend etc- under different names and not used them again once the offer runs out.

BUT not all of us who have Ancestry accounts WANT to put our trees onto Ancestry, nor do some of us WANT or feel the need to do DNA tests.  OH and I have had a basic Ancestry UK account for a large number of years AND what we do with it is entirely up to us. 

Completely agree.  The idea of the thread is about ideas to improve Ancestry.  There's a bit too much desire to have things removed that people don't personally like, without thinking how other people want or need to use the site.

Likewise, folk perhaps don't understand if Ancestry doesn't make a profit it eventually won't exist.  If it doesn't exist then we'll all (those of us who use it) be worse off.  I don't see nationalisation of Ancestry happening anytime soon - so it has to operate commercially.

I also don't understand how an account which doesn't contain a tree or DNA results can have an adverse impact on any other individual?

Those of us who have had our DNA tested have thousands of DNA matches that are nearly impossible to ID due to no trees and a user name that means zilch.

Having these useless DNA matches clogs up the system.

What is totally inconsiderate is for people to invoke the Privacy rubbish as their get out.

If you do not want to be Identified then make your Family Tree Private.

If you do not want your DNA results visible to others then make them Private.

Your Privacy concerns are then as good as it gets.

[Nick_Ips]

Those of us who have had our DNA tested have thousands of DNA matches that are nearly impossible to ID due to no trees and a user name that means zilch.

Having these useless DNA matches clogs up the system.

What is totally inconsiderate is for people to invoke the Privacy rubbish as their get out.

If you do not want to be Identified then make your Family Tree Private.

If you do not want your DNA results visible to others then make them Private.

Your Privacy concerns are then as good as it gets.

On the contrary - the information would only be 'private' up to the moment in time someone manages to breach Ancestry's security.  It isn't like a data breach of a company holding this kind of information hasn't happened before -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4grggw4n56o

And 'It can't happen to us' is so out of date.

The problem you have with excess matches could be resolved by having the filter tools to exclude results where there is no tree and/or a lack of contact information.  And/or defaulting accounts to private.  There's no need to risk breaching other people's privacy to achieve what you'd like.

If someone sets up an account without contact information and with a random username I'd take it as a strong hint they don't want you contacting them... and that if you did manage to make contact with them the contact wouldn't be very productive.

[Zaphod99]

My original idea when I started this thread was to wait a few days and then consolidate all the suggestions and send them to Ancestry.

The response has been much greater than I anticipated, so I cannot spend the time consolidating everything, but I will forward this thread link to Ancestry and leave it open so that people can add to it in the future.

Perhaps just one or two of the suggestions might get listened to.

Zaph

[Steve3180]

This is my Ancestry wishlist from a point of view of ease of implementation, obviously Chromosome Browser is no. 1 on everyone's list but would require a lot of screen development, this list is more the things they could give us fairly easily.

1. Segment data download - simple download of zip file containing the matching segments between dna matches.

2. Triangulation - show which Shared Matches actually triangulate.

2b. Include triangulation segment data in 1.

3. Admit that outside of the USA the place name database is a total mess and start fixing it.
Adding Parish Names, Township Names and Registration District Names would be a good place to start.

4. More fully integrate the DNA and Tree data sets so that for example the normal (and quite good) search function could be filtered by dna matches.
This would allow more complex searches than just surname and location to be carried out on the trees of dna matches.

5. Add the ability to save the searches for future use.

6. Add logic functions to the filtering of dna matches. Give us AND, OR, NOT and brackets so that we just see the matches we want to. Admittedly this would be more work than the others but would be really useful.

The real improvement I'd like to see is stop treating everybody the same, make all the limits they hard code in be changeable so that they can be adjusted to suit our particular needs. Oh and stop making it so easy to add the wrong data to peoples trees, not sure how to do this though.