Modern Software Experience

2014-12-28

Ancestry.com Logo

Discontinuation

FamilySearch databases

Late last year, several hyperbolic press releases touted trades that FamilySearch made with Ancestry.com, MyHeritage and FindMyPast. Early this year, Ancestry.com customers experienced what these agreements really meant; Ancestry.com was blindly copying FamilySearch databases, regardless of quality, and not even performing sanity checks! How can you work in this industry and not know that FamilySearch is infamous for its low quality databases? This was reported in January of this year, it's December now, and Ancestry.com still isn't performing any quality checks to keep the worst FamilySearch databases out.

retiring services

On 2014 Jun 4, Ancestry.com announced that it would retire several major services on 2014 Sep 5; Mundia, MyFamily.com, MyCanvas and their older DNA tests. Genealogy.com was not retired, but continues in a modified, non-interactive form; some articles, the GenForum message boards and the Family Tree Maker homepages will remain available in read-only form.

Mundia

Mundia, introduced in 2009, was a modern interface for their database of Ancestry Member Trees. In 2010, they introduced of genealogy badges, with users having to unlock features by earning a game score...
Mundia had been criticised in 2013 already for Mundia being slow, buggy, off-line a lot and showing private Ancestry.com Member Trees.
Early in 2014, several genealogy bloggers complained about sign-in problems.
The Ancestry.com Member Trees continue to be available.

Third parties came forward offering their services as myfamily.com alternatives.

MyFamily.com

MyFamily.com allowed users to create websites private to their family. The MyFamily.com 2.0 site did not offer all features of original site, yet in May of 2010, Ancestry.com let the entire development staff go, and practically nothing has happened since.
Before closing the site down, Ancestry.com offered users the ability to download a ZIP file containing their data. Comments on Ancestry.com's announcement show that users have not only been disappointed by lack of updates and the discontinuation, but also by these ZIP files, which contain only part of their data.

Third parties came forward offering their services as myfamily.com alternatives. FamilyLobby positions itself as a full replacement, while Spokt introduced Mayflower, a tool to migrate your data from MyFamily to a new private hub on Spokt.com. They claimed and offered better MyFamily.com export than Ancestry.com itself.

MyCanvas

MyCanvas is a book printing service with a chequered history. Ancestry.com practically forced MyCanvas on its New Family Tree Maker customers, by initially not providing any book printing within New Family Tree Maker itself, but only the paid MyCanvas service, and now they planned to retire it without providing these customers a good alternative.
On 2014 Aug 19, Ancestry.com announced that MyCanvas would not be retired, but sold to Alexander's, the printing company that's handling MyCanvas orders anyway.

Y-DNA and mtDNA tests

Ancestry.com's retirement of its Y-DNA and mtDNA tests drew the most vocal criticism, because they did not merely retire the tests, but also destroyed irreplaceable data and the samples! That is irreversible behaviour, and stupefied outrage predictable ensued.

DDoS

A bit later in June, Ancestry.com suffered several DDoS attacks, bringing down all major Ancestry.com sites; Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, Fold3, Find A Grave, and RootsWeb. Ancestry.com took its sweet time bringing servers back online, and the flood of complaints highlighted how dependent many users have become on a single company.

Family Tree Maker

While bringing their sites back online, Ancestry.com deliberately disabled Family Tree Maker search and Sync for days. Ancestry.com's New Family Tree Maker defaults to online mode, despite the fact that this online mode is so buggy that - as reported years ago already - New FTM may crash when there is no Internet connection available.
The many complaints about Family Tree Maker not working right highlighted how kludgy and problematic Family Tree Maker's online mode is.

After Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP, but while Microsoft still supports Windows Vista, Ancestry.com's Family Tree Maker stopped supporting Windows XP, Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9. Users of Family Tree Maker were presented with the following message:

We’re making updates that may impact your Family Tree Maker experience. Starting in October 2014, Ancestry Web Search within Family Tree Maker software will have reduced functionality or may not be supported by Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista or Internet Explorer 8 or 9. Moving forward, Microsoft Windows 7 or 8 will be required for Ancestry Web Search functionality to work properly.

New Family Tree Maker is the one product Ancestry.com should have discontinued, even if they don't have any replacement for it yet.

Family Tree Maker 2015

Family Tree Maker 1.0 was introduced in 1989, 25 years ago. This year, New Family Tree Maker has become the very lowest rated product on GenSoftReviews. Ancestry.com gave a 25% discount on Family Tree Maker 2014 during the latter half of August to celebrate 25 years of Family Tree Maker, apparently completely oblivious to the fact they have managed to destroy Family Tree Maker's reputation.
Ancestry.com introduced New Family Tree Maker in 2007 over the protests of Beta testers who told them to wait, and never really took the time to fix its broken user interface, its software defects or design flaws. The story of New Family Tree Maker is one of one disappointing update after another.

The problems with New Family Tree Maker are such that Ancestry.com once again failed in their intention to release a new version every year; they did not introduce an update called Family Tree Maker 2015.
That a cash-rich company like Ancestry.com still hasn't hired a senior software architect and user experience designer to fix the New Family Tree Maker mess is reprehensible. Then again, considering just how awful this product remains after seven years on the market, a more realistic conclusion may be that this product is beyond hope of rescue. New Family Tree Maker is the one product Ancestry.com should have discontinued, even if they don't have any replacement for it yet.

Family Tree Maker 2014 file format change

Users were upset when the November 2014 Service Pack (Service Pack 3 by my count, Service Pack 4 according to Ancestry.com) changed the file format. It wasn't a minor database change; Ancestry.com actually switched Family Tree Maker from using the VistaDB database engine to using SQLite. Ancestry.com isn't the first company to change a product's file format in a minor release, but many New Family Tree Maker users are already completely fed up with Ancestry.com.

Family Tree Maker World Express

Mid 2013, Ancestry.com silently introduced Family Tree Maker World Express (FTMWE), a lite edition of New Family Tree Maker. This is especially significant because, unlike most vendors of desktop genealogy software, Ancestry.com did not offer any lite or trial edition yet.
The first release of Family Tree Maker World Express was based on Family Tree Maker 2012, and only available in German and Swedish releases. An English release did not appear. Right now, Family Tree Maker World Express seems like an experiment that Ancestry.com forgot about.

Find A Grave

Ancestry.com did release a new product; the long-awaited Find A Grave app for Android. Ancestry.com acquired Find A Grave late in 2013, and announced that they would develop a mobile app. They introduced Find A Grave for iOS in March, and Find A Grave for Android in December.
Ancestry also updated its Ancestry app several times. It is amazing just how poor their desktop software is, and how great their Ancestry app is.

conclusion

During 2014, Ancestry.com introduced new and updated database, upgraded their Ancestry app, and introduced the Find A Grave app, but that's about all they did right.
Ancestry.com kept peddling the monstrosity known as New Family Tree Maker. There were multiple service packs, but the product remains so poor that for the second time in a row, even Ancestry.com marketroids felt unable to charge for a yearly upgrade by slapping a new major version number on one of these. Ancestry.com dumped unverified FamilySearch databases onto their users.

Throughout 2014, Ancestry.com firmly reaffirmed its position as the company that genealogists love to hate.

Most people had already forgotten about GenForum, and no one is mourning the loss of Mundia.com, which was just a pretty face on Ancestry.com Member Trees anyway, and these are still around. However, yanking the MyFamily.com site without providing users a good alternative, or even an acceptable export of their data is downright unprofessional and irresponsible. People may dislike change and complain when it happens, but the MyFamily.com complainants have a very good point; Ancestry.com loves to profile itself as the leading family history, and here they were, actively destroying the compiled family histories users had built on one of their sites.
And then there's the deliberately destruction of irreplaceable DNA test results and samples... that is so wrong in so many ways.

All that said, however upset users are with Ancestry.com, they would be even more upset if Ancestry.com discontinued itself. Throughout 2014, Ancestry.com firmly reaffirmed its position as the company that genealogists love to hate.

links

FamilySearch databases

discontinued

AncestryDNA

Distributed Denial of Service

Family Tree Maker

mobile apps

 

Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.