Suggestions

I don't know if there is a way of finding out if someone subscribes to GR or does not.

I have found loads of possible links to my family tree and I have send out loads of emails to find out if there is a link

Why does no one answer it is fustrating ??

If they are not a paying member I know they cannot send a message but receive the message, there should be way or a note to say unable to reply membership lapsed or free member cannot reply. It will stop me from wasting time on that particular link.

Can anyone help

Thanks

Anybody you have sent a msg to will be added to yr contact list whether they reply or not. If you go to the home page you will see a list of yr contacts who have made recent changes. If the people you have contacted do not figure here over a month it is likely they belong to the large cohort of inactive members.

Another way of finding active members is to use the search trees facility and put in just a surname plus place / date range of interest and setting it to "last 14 days" or whatever. Any matches will be for active members.

That being said some members never reply to messages anyway for a variety of reasons. Free members can reply to messages.

Genes RU claim a huge membership in the millions. However there seems to be a lot of dark matter - site visit stats can be found here:
http://www.check-tools.com/domains/g/genesreunited.co.uk.html

Industry stats suggest that GRU has been flat lining for the last year with unique page visits somewhere around 20 000 / day. However they claim that recent reliability and performance problems are due to the big rise in site usage ... hmm. It is quite usual for message boards to display how many members are on line. GRU never do this, either for the site or individual boards.

Free Members CAN reply to messages sent to them by other members, so this is not an issue.

The site has no concept of a 'Lapsed Member' either, although it would be a good idea to show the last time each member performed an action within the site automatically against their name. As Rollo says, one you have made contact it is possible to see subsequent activity for each of your contacts.

I find I get the best results by searching for possible new contacts who have added to their tree within the past 14 days - this often gets a 100% success rate for replies. You can do this through Surname summary, but be warned, if you have a large tree - say several thousand names - you are likely to get the dreaded time-out message as you move around from page to page.

It seems to be happening more lately, I have a few unanswered envelopes. But I did get a response yesterday from someone who has been unwell for a couple of months.

I sent a contact message this week to someone who had a few matching names - he replied saying he had no such names, there's no connection.

So I looked again, for this couple and their children.. and grandchildren.. and they all came up, matched to the person I had contacted!

How strange.

Ah well, his loss, I have that branch going back to my 8th great-grandparents born in 1659 in Orkney.

I have said before and suggested to GR that i subscribe to several sites where when you look at another members details it will say if and when that member was last active

GR could do this but i suspect that they don't because it would show that their claims of having x amount of millions of members, (whether active) would then be brought into question?

Also this board is the Suggestions board? i am yet to see any evidence that GR even look at this board

Roy