Frank RHODES bn Cinderford, but will New Ancestry agree ? (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Saturday, March 05, 2016, 15:36 (2967 days ago) @ selbyfamily

Hi Sheila, hope you're well ?.
Yes that 1891 Census is indeed this family, thanks.

Thanks for your kind comments re my problems with the new Ancestry site, I'm genuinely very pleased you're happy with it, long may that continue. It may be that the improvements have made it easier to find records, which is great. I can only speak from my experience, which does seem to echo that of a great many other experienced Ancestry researchers worldwide. I've only been using it for about 5 years, but in that time I have spent many hundreds of hours plotting several extensive and accurate family trees, and I've often corrected and contributed toward's the site's records and accuracy. Yet I now find that many of the records I had attached to "my" trees, plus my own detailed notes, have in many cases being utterly ruined or removed from these trees. The site is less user-friendly and over-complicated to operate in some key ways, especially when plotting trees as most users want, and the foul new colour scheme genuinely gives me headaches just looking at it.
However, as said, I'm glad that you are happy with it and I hope many others are too. I'm always happy to see improvments, but I'm not a believer in "fixing" things that are not broken, nevermind wholesale changes for changes' sake. They clearly forced an unproven system onto their paying customers whilst it was at early Beta stage at best, with far too many glitches. They hadn't consulted their users as to what we wanted, then determinedly ignored polite and sensible comments from well-meaning and knowledgable users, and now have the gall to publically but very-belatedly "thank" us all for effectively doing their product development for them. That said, I see the new site is still misleading and misdirecting users; I genuinely fear for people less knowledgable than yourself, I think a lot of FH newcomers are going to create "interesting", "entertaining" but wholly often inaccurate trees. Sorry, but I'm firmly convinced these changes were made purely for the short-term benefit of the owners' purses, and not for the benefit of it's users or genealogy as a whole.

Not just me
http://www.forest-of-dean.net/fodmembers/index.php?mode=thread&id=46379
http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.ancestry.com
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/en-gb/600/803/575/save-ancestrycom-classic/
etc
Rant over, I'll try not to mention it in future.

Wishing you continued success with your researches, thank Heaven for great sites such as this one.
Best wishes, Jeff.