Ancestry.com is tone deaf on its problems

[rp76226]

My number 1 complaint about Ancestry.com is that so many of their Member Tree hints contain no new information as they are exactly the same information already on my tree. When you have a large tree with over 200,000 hints, you cannot afford this total waste of time. I've complained for years to no avail. They just don't care. Maybe if enough people complained, they would get off their butts and actually do something helpful. Here are more issues that they do nothing about.
Ancestry.com and Family TreeMaker – Needed Hint Improvements Logic

Give us the option to filter hints to present only the "good", strongly correlated hints. Hints that I would like never to see by usage of this filter include:

No more hints covering years when it would be impossible for the person to be alive because they were born 100 or more years before the date on the hint, for example 1900s census and immigration hints for people born in the 1700s.

No new children hints for children born before their parents were born or when their parents were too young to have children or after the mother has died or more than a year after the father has died.

No hints with events that occurred after the person died or before he/she was born.

No hints with parents who are different from the parents already listed on my Tree.

Stop showing family tree hints that have no new information and no need for me to review it.

Most especially, No more Member Tree hints with no new information.

No more of the often repeated same garbage hint of other family trees (shown for dozens of my people on the tree) with so little information on them (for example a last name with no first name on one person and nothing for other people in the same family) that it is impossible to match up enough correlation to confirm that we are talking about the same family.

On "other siblings" hints, show us all the siblings already shown on our Tree so that we don't duplicate these siblings.

No hints on people born in different nations than the nation we are showing on the Tree for that birth.

Once I accept a census hint, stop showing me the same census hint that I previously accepted, for every member of that family, again and again, Doing so makes it very easy to accept wasteful duplicate people and information, plus it is also a giant waste of my time.

No Social Security hints for people who died before Social Security was enacted.

Give me all the information on the hints when I accept it. I am noticing some hints that initially show parents or a spouse for a person on my tree where I have no parents or a spouse, but when I go to “review” the hint in order to accept it onto my tree, the new parents and spouse are not shown on the screen presented, and therefore not added to my Tree when I accept the hint.

In the same manner as I can go to my alphabetical index of people on the tree and select to show me just the people with hints, add two features – show me the people with no known relationship to the Home person and also show me duplicated people.

Old Ancestry had two options to add family - either one at a time or several members together on one screen. New Ancestry does not appear to have that second option - a real time saver when multiple members need to be added.

[MarcuccioV]

I feel your pain. I generally ignore all hints for months on end & try to go through them all at once -- yes, a daunting task but often necessary. I use the "ignore" link far more often than not...

Not to mention almost ALL the hints I get are from my father's (non- Italian) side. I get practically ZERO for my mother's (Italian) side -- & when I do they are ALWAYS red herrings...

I have a tiny sliver of Italian on my father's side from who I believe is his maternal 3GGm (my 4GGm) -- and she seems to be the ONLY relative on his side I have yet to get a hint for...

[KathyLPV]

Hey rp76226
I totally agree with you! I have 2 sites where I posted mia famiglia - on Geneanet & Geni [facebook's answer to genealogy. I also have a limited "guest membership" line on Ancestry.
Ancestry has sent me "Hints" of my husband's bisnonno e bisnonna - both of whom died in Prato, IT. BUT Ancestry's Hint shows them in a 1900s USA Census ! And Every time I get those hints, I reply to that hint, telling them that they need to work on their algorithm - IF they did, it would see neither Ever came to the USA. What do I get back - a "response" that they'll look into it . . . and nothing else.
- warning do Not put any of your line on Geni - Then, I only put about 650 of my Line on Geni, But recently my line was "taken over" by a "non-relative", who supposedly found another 4,350 names of my ancestors in my family. ALL from Ancestry! He even had one family listed - that my cousin in IT said worked for my bisnonna! The name was similar, but no banana, and certainly no relative. But he insisted, & would have changed the name had I not complained to the Geni folks. Ancestry has gone the way of so many conglomerates, over indulgence and being too big for their britches! And SO many Incorrect additions, without documentation, sources, or validation.
So Yes, more people need to complain & do so every time they get a phony 'Hint" Thanks for your post rp.

[MariaMadonna]

My genealogist friend likens it to a video game -- point and click.