Thanks for forwarding this, Freddie. I thought I was just being
paranoid when my radar went up during the several weeks outage last year.
I assumed management of the Photograph Andrew County Tombstones (PACT)
project earlier this year, which was hosted on Rootsweb. Right away, I
wondered why the "Hosted by Rootsweb" banner was missing. The site is
huge -- over 4GB -- so the first thing I did was redesign the pages to
use SSI for the headers and footers -- and included a "Hosted by
Rootsweb" link in the footer.
After just a month or two, the banner suddenly appeared. Of course I
had no problem with THAT -- Rootsweb (Ancestry) has been hosting this
huge site for over ten years for free, and that was much appreciated.
Unfortunately, the new code for the banner messed up the SSI for the
headers/footers. The result was a beautiful banner, and then just
gibberish on the page. When tech support was contacted about it, we
were told that the site was corrupt and it was up to the site owner to
fix it. After a fruitless message or two, I did fix it -- I moved it.
I'm convinced this was pretty much what they wanted anyway, and though
it took about three weeks to do it, it was worth it. I wasn't going to
wait for the next shoe to drop.
Kris
On 6/12/2015 10:06 AM, Freddie Spradlin via wrote:
FYI
-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Stowell via
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2015 5:49 AM
To: state-coord(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: [STATE-COORD] Rootsweb - support or the lack thereof
Wondering how many of you know of the goings on of issues with Rootsweb?
A number of years ago after Ancestry bought out Rootsweb, things started
changing, which I suppose most would expect after such an acquisition.
A couple of years ago issues arose with the query boards that to date have
not been fixed.
Around April 1st of this year, Ancestry instituted a new wave of change,
which changed the banners on sites to include a search feature which
directed visitors away from the sites to Ancestry's search engine.
Thankfully people like, Joy Fisher, figured out the code changes needed so
CCs could get back the banner that reads USGenWeb.
Another change that occurred at that time was that the link between the
query boards and the mailing lists was broken / changed and the boards
tried to send HTML to the mailing lists. For listowners who released the
messages, they discovered that most of the message released was advertising
for Ancestry and perhaps 5% a genealogy query.
Two months ago I took over an abandoned county and Rootsweb sent a new
password. Unfortunately the new password did not work. Contact back to
Rootsweb and received canned replies and finally = we can't change the
password to something that will work. Huh? Thus my only course of action
was to move the site elsewhere and someday perhaps I'll get access to find
out what else is in the account that I can't see by just drilling down
through the pages I can see on Rootsweb.
Sadly the same thing happened in other states who I suppose happen to have
counties hosted on that particular server and needed a password change.
The canned reply on this was, we know of the situation and it has been
given to the engineers to fix but we have no time line on when the fix will
occur.
Recently a news story indicated that Ancestry itself may be on the buyer's
block which would most likely entail more change.
Since a good number of counties remain on Rootsweb, the CCs need to be
aware that services we've used for nearly 20 years may change or cease to
exist as we know them today.
Tim Stowell
co-SC MNGenWeb
ASC NYGenWeb