First let me say that none of us list administrators had a say in this change for
mailing lists or the pages at USGENWEB, so though it may be awfully tempting to shoot the
messenger please refrain in doing so.
The almost entire explanation of what is going to happen as of Monday can be found
here:
http://bigfile.rootsweb.com/newsroom/
RootsWeb Announcement March 13th, 2008 by Tim
As you know, The Generations Network has hosted and funded the RootsWeb online
community since June 2000, thereby maintaining RootsWeb as the worlds oldest and largest
free genealogy website. TGN remains committed to this mission and believes that RootsWeb
is an absolutely invaluable and complementary resource to
Ancestry.com, our flagship
commercial family history site. We believe in both services and want to see both
communities prosper and grow.
As part of this goal, we have decided to transplant RootsWeb onto the
Ancestry.com
domain beginning next week. This move will not change the RootsWeb experience or alter the
ease of navigation to or within RootsWeb. RootsWeb will remain a free online experience.
What will be different is that the Web address for all RootsWeb pages will change from
www.rootsweb.com to
www.rootsweb.ancestry.com. Again, the RootsWeb experience is not
changing.
The decision to host RootsWeb on
Ancestry.com is being made for one primary reason: we
believe that the users of each of our two main websites can be better served if they have
access to the best services available on both. Simply stated, we want to introduce more
Ancestry.com users to RootsWeb and vice versa.
Today, despite the fact that
Ancestry.com and
RootsWeb.com are the two most frequently
visited family history sites on the Web, only 25 percent of visitors to
Ancestry.com
visited RootsWeb in January 2008, while only 20 percent of visitors to RootsWeb visited
Ancestry.com (according to Comscore Media Metrix). We think we will serve our users best
by doing a better job of letting them know what is available on both
Ancestry.com and
RootsWeb. Hosting RootsWeb on
Ancestry.com is the first step towards making this happen,
but we will absolutely look for more and better ways down the road to advance this goal.
Hosting RootsWeb on
Ancestry.com will also make it easier for us to make changes and
improvements to the RootsWeb experience in the future.
All old RootsWeb URLs will continue to work, whether they are bookmarks or favorites,
links to or from a hosted page or URLs manually typed in your Internet browser. We will
have a redirect in place so that all old URLs will automatically end up on the appropriate
new RootsWeb URL. You will never need to update your old favorites or links unless you
want to. We have worked to make the transition as seamless as possible for our users, and
this change should have a minimal impact on your experience with the site.
RootsWeb will remain a free online experience dedicated to providing you with a place
where our community can find their roots together. If you have questions regarding this
change please email them to feedback(a)rootsweb.com.
Thanks,
Tim Sullivan
CEO
The Generations Network, Inc.
The address for the mailing list(s) will not change addresses, but if this changes
at all I will certainly inform y'all.
As soon as I see the new archive web site address I will post it in an e-mail
Monday.
Sincerely,
Lena
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