Suggestions

I got the maintenance message this morning. I use IE9 and the uk site and usually enter Genealogy Chat via the Most Popular sites facility. Today that didn't work and similarly selecting the home page via the Favourites menu also gave the maintenance message. I did try the refresh button but that had no effect at this stage.

The following procedure did work. I looked at yesterday's web history found one for a Genes messageboard (not Genealogy Chat) and tried it. It was OK and worked, selecting Genealogy Chat from the Community menu still gave the maintenance message though, but by clicking on the browser refresh icon Genealogy Chat returned to normal.

It is worth trying if you get that situation.

Ken

Don´t know about anyone else, but I don´t want to go all round the houses to access this site. It´s a bit like letting a spoiled child have it´s own way.
Having paid my subs for 5 years I just want access to the site & ALL the boards when I choose to use them.
Have no intention of changing my browser to suit Genes when it has always worked perfectly well in the past.
Just to note, in order to get access today, I have c cleaned & de fragged the computer.
Shouldn´t have to do that every time I want to access Genes. I don´t have to do it for other sites.
Incidentally, have had no response from Genes to my e mail of Friday. I know they don´t work over the weekend, but Friday is a working day in my household.
Marion

I can't access General Chat through any portal, haven't been able to for days. I can only access other things through .co.nz, which I prefer not to use and should not have to use.

This has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with anyone's browser or anyone's anything else. We were left over the weekend with a broken site, more broken than usual, and I doubt that it's going to be fixed when we wake up on Monday.

Have you all posted on my INFORM YOUR CUSTOMERS thread on this board?

"Don´t know about anyone else, but I don´t want to go all round the houses to access this site. ......

Have no intention of changing my browser to suit Genes when it has always worked perfectly well in the past."

- ditto.

No problems are being experienced with any other site.

Just in case my message was misinterpreted I do not suggest changing browser nor accessing via another country.

Basically if you get the maintenance message first try refreshing the page (which several posters have sugested). If that doesn't work try accessing via a link to a part of the web site other than the one that has just failed (your browser history should have plenty of such links). Once the Genes site has been accessed normally it seems that refreshing works if the maintenance mesage subsequently appears.

Ken

Will not let me save change of email address.

Will not let me change profile picture.

And the usual Error
Sorry. An error has occurred
We can't take you to the page you wanted. The problem has been logged and our team will be working on it.
Thanks for understanding. We're really sorry for any inconvenience!

Had a response from the Genes team by e mail this morning (just after 6 am UK time)
Guess what.
The problem is my browser.
Nothing to do with Genes.
So how come I had perfect access for around 2 hours yesterday afternoon, then it suddenly all went pear shaped again.
Have asked the Genes team, but so far, no response.
Marion

Hi Phil

It seems All GR team are ignoring the problems we are having with this site. They dont even bother reading emails never mind answer them.

I have to log in every time I come onto GR site and have done so for a while. I am using www.genesreunited.co.uk and Windows.

Jane

Hi,

We are extremely sorry for the intermittent availability of the Genes Reunited website today. We are working on fixing this as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience and apologies for the inconvenience.

Thank you, genes reunited staff for your post. However, the problem has not been occurring solely today; it has been ongoing for some weeks now, as you, yourself, announced in the announcements board.
A few years ago, you will remember granting an extra time of membership when the site had major problems - perhaps this could be considered again, in view of the ongoing intermittent issues in the site?

I am not usually the kind of person who likes to make a fuss............BUT.......as this is the only GR page i can get on to right now...............I want to make my feelings known!

I am absolutely furious.............!!! Enough is enough!

Ok, i have been a GR member for a while now............and even though i don't fully understand what is going on..................can you imagine how new members to this site must be feeling??....Soo confused i imagine as to just what they are doing wrong!..... Unbelievable really!! Grrr!

Great that they are acknowledging it


BUT there are many members who never use these boards, but have been suffering the same problems accessing their trees and records.


It would be far better to offer a blanket extension of membership of, say, 1 month, to all paying members



sylvia

Great that they are acknowledging it


BUT there are many members who never use these boards, but have been suffering the same problems accessing their trees and records.


It would be far better to offer a blanket extension of membership of, say, 1 month, to all paying members



sylvia

To be honest my main focus is my tree and the records on here. The board is not much of a main point for me to worry about if it goes down but the tree ... the online records? I paid for these things and ever since they just go down on me halfway through tracing my family (which i am sure everyone will agree is difficult enough) i just find something important and try to attach it to my tree ...

it takes forever and i know immediately its going to give me the "whoopsie site down" page. It does, i click back on my browser and it gives me the record i was wanting again so through sheer panic that i will not find this document again i try to download it .... whats that? ... taking ages to react? .... SITE DOWN! no you can't download it even though its right there, staring at you.

That, to me is the most disappointing thing because i have found things by pure pot luck in the past and still haven't been able to find them again. It's such a shame!

By the way i have Firefox, IE, and Google chrome - it does this problem on them all as the site was "down" on me this morning so i tried all the different browsers we have. Still no look, but oh surprise surprise! If you can find a link that is to any other page than the default home page web address, then it works! Although you get about an hour before it starts freezing mid crucial point of your search. So no-one should be getting an email saying it's the web browser, that's just a blatant fob off and bad customer services.

Dear All,

Am just taking a couple of minutes out from investigating the major issues that we are suffering at the moment, to give you an update from the coalface. We are both personally and professionally very disappointed in the service being offered and experienced at the moment, and are doing our very best to get these problems sorted as soon as possible. I can't be specific about the issues, in that we need to rule out all possibilities, but in the last two weeks we have both moved to new servers and also done a major release. It also appears that some of our sister sites are also suffering, such as Friends Dating, so it could be related to hardware. As soon as we have solutions to the problems we will release fixes and I will let you know. Until then we apologise unreservedly for the problems many of you have experienced.

Regards, Phil Moir

EDIT: Sorry, I wanted to add an explanation also for why you see the "Site down for maintenance" page. Behind the scenes we have various programs that check for a response from the website. The check does some minor tasks, but if it doesn't get a response in a reasonable time (10 seconds or so), it assumes the site is unavailable and forces the site to show the "site down" page. The aim is to protect the user from just having the website hang, and to protect the servers from overloading with waiting requests. At the current time, because the servers are not responding to requests as we expect, it is displaying this more frequently. We have increased the time delay, so that it is not displayed so easily. This best course of action is to hit your back button and try again after a short delay.

Thank you, Phil.
So, concerning the request from genes reunited, in the sticky in the general board - "Would it be possible for you to screen shot the error page the next time you see it and email it to [email protected]", screen shots do not need to be sent, as you are aware of it?

* If you see the page that says "site is down for essential maintenance" page, you don't need to send in a screenshot. I have spoken to Estelle in Customer Support (who will be advising the Support team) that this is not a requirement in these circumstances.

Thank you, Phil.

Thanks for the update Phil it is very much appreciated.

To keep you all updated, we have made some performance tweaks to a few core pages of the website and deployed today. You may have experienced some down time while the deployment was made, but hopefully the "site down" page will display a lot less. We will be continuing to make improvements over the next few days.