Bringing Down a Website in One Step

The Ancestry Insider explains this morning how even a well-intentioned effort to make genealogical data more accessible can step on the toes of other webmasters. (I would add that Mr. Morse offers a tutorial on how to subvert his own well-intentioned efforts.)

Law and ethics have a hard time keeping pace with technology. Some of you old-timers might recall the Genealogy Message Searcher. That was a tool at GenCircles that cached and searched messages from the Ancestry.com and GenForum boards simultaneously, but was shut down in 2002 over concerns that it violated Genealogy.com's new terms of service. With the help of Google, I just created The New Genealogy Message Searcher in about two minutes. Granted, it's not nearly as functional or comprehensive as the original, and doesn't provide links to cached copies, but... Wait, are those lawyers from Utah I hear outside my door?

A Categorically Different Ancestry.com

I powered up my backup computer this evening and accidentally tried logging into the Ancestry.com message boards using my old username (the one I used before the Fall 2006 update). This sent me into an alternative universe where all the messages posted in the last few months had vanished, the "Home" link pointed to www.ancestrystage.com (presumably the in-house domain used for development), and the main message board page included a few unexpected categories. Only after clearing my cookies and logging in again did I arrive at the Ancestry.com we all know and love.

For those of you interested in this sort of thing, The Generations Network also owns the domains myancestrystage.com, myfamilystage.com, and genealogystage.com.

The Wrong Forum For Genealogy?

A genealogy discussion forum has been added to craigslist. Something tells me the regulars aren't going to be helpful.

One heavily edited example:

Query
Looking for photos of Willie Ross, my great-grandfather. He was hung in Bottneau, ND, March 6, 1903, the last public hanging in North Dakota.

Response #1
One of my uncles was the last man hanged in California. I have been looking for his tree for several years.

Response #2
It was cut down about 1935.

When a Good Website Goes Bad

As we all know, griping has replaced baseball as America's national pastime. We love to gripe, and the Internet has provided a new playing-field for the sport. Genealogists gripe as well as anybody, so when GenSuck was introduced in 2000 it was an instant hit among those with axes to grind and chips to shoulder.

GenSuck was the brainchild of David Podmajersky and Steve Johnson, whose other projects include Interment.net and Genealogy and How. They say they launched GenSuck "to provide our point of view on what takes place within the genealogy industry." In the early days, the founders posted their discussions of the genealogical topics of the day, and invited visitors to weigh in.

More free-wheeling was the message board, to which anyone could post his grievances—whether against Ancestry.com, Rootsweb, or the guy who invented GEDCOMs. Many of the threads on the board provided useful warnings about deceptive business practices and irresponsible genealogists and, under the watchful eyes of the founders and moderators, generally avoided the flame wars that inevitably occur when gripers congregate.

Dave and Steve have in the past year allowed GenSuck to track its own course, and the results are not pretty. A handful of trolls have invaded the message board, making life miserable for everyone else. An example:

Question: "Can someone please explain to me why the gift shop at the DAR can take credit cards but not the library?"

Answer: "Could it be that the gift shop is run by a business that is not directly controlled by the DAR? What kind of moron wouldn't carry enough cash to cover the $6 admission fee to the DAR library?"

GenSuck offered a needed outlet for the genealogical community's frustration, and no good alternative has yet appeared. There are still a hardy few who attempt to fight against the tide of incivility on the board. But without a diligent moderator, their efforts are doomed to fail. GenSuck will linger on the web for years, like a mugger awaiting his next easy mark.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the GenForum

Though there are dozens of forums and message boards available for the genealogically inclined (see Cyndi's List for a good number of them), I frequent only two—GenForum and the message boards of Ancestry.com/Rootsweb.com. Both are now owned by mega-company MyFamily.com, but aside from past misguided attempts to place pop-up ads on the Ancestry boards, and the occasional page-size ad in the GenForum header, the forums seem to function independent of the for-fee portions of the sites.

So which is better? I have always found GenForum easier to navigate. The "Jump to Forum" feature makes it easy to surf from one surname to another, while on the Ancestry boards the same action requires two clicks: one to search for the surname, and then another to reach the forum.

In GenForum one can search within any forum, but don't try to "Search all of GenForum." The search engine hasn't worked for years (though, curiously, the powers-that-be have continued to keep the search box on each page). There once was a way around this, when Google indexed every message on the forum. By limiting your Google search to the GenForum site, you could find any message you needed. Now, though, it is predominantly the index pages which are spidered and appear in Google search results, undoubtedly because MyFamily.com prohibits large-scale spidering of individual messages.

The Ancestry.com global search engine works, but even its "Advanced Search" doesn't permit searching for phrases. So, if I search for "John Smith," the results are messages in which both first and last names appear—whether together or apart (127,878 of them in all). A better way to search: use Google. Individual Ancestry.com messages are spidered (though not cached). Searching for "John Smith" with Google: 193 results.

Which forum is better may depend on what surname, topic or locality you're interested in, and how active the community is in that area. Ancestry.com has more categories of topics than GenForum, but you may find that your topic is not visited often by serious, helpful researchers. And a forum is only as good as the help given.