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creative accounting?

I wonder if GR could explain the discrepancy in their seller reviews?

I started this thread after reading the reviews for GR posted on the review centre web site,

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews83373.html#Reviews

I now find it appears that GR have a link through google for seller reviews,

When you read the reviews on the link via GR supported by google their is a link for each review, to read more? if you click on the link they all take you to the original review site as posted above,
some reviews come from ciao but when you get to that site direct it also gives a different outcome

http://www.ciao.co.uk/Reviews/Genesreunited_co_uk__6391989

Their is a discrepancy using the GR link, google list 46 reviews and an overall score of 4.1 out of 5

yet both these review site rate GR at 3.0 out of 5

I noted that the GR link appears? to duplicated the better reviews which then gave them a better score

the google link is to large to post but if you enter

genes reunited reviews

into google search it should return this

Reunited™ | GenesReunited.co.uk
www.genesreunited.co.uk/ - 46 seller reviews
You +1'd this publicly. Undo
The UKs number 1 family history site with over 9 million memb

click on the 46 seller reviews link

when i was at school 3 out of 5 on one exam paper and then added to a score of 3 out of 5 on another exam paper did not give me an overall score of 4.1 out of 5

and 13 reviews on ciao plus 31 on review centre =44 NOT 46

on the ciao 7 out of 11 recommend GR but all 7 where posted before 2010

I suspect that if you analise the figures based on the last 12 months GR would have a rating of between 1 and 2 out of 5 at best


Roy

Roy

I am!


the response was fast ........ after all the complaints we've had about being ignored! :-D :-D


and it was what I wanted :-D :-D :-D




sylvia

I'm happy you are pleased with the outcome ;-)

Roy

I just have to post this



I am very pleased with GR


I got an immediate response to my email to Accounts.

It was connected with last year's problems ................. and should now be resolved for the future.




Thank you to Lisa of Accounts, and to others . :-) ;-)



sylvia

lolol

Laughing, because GR have often assumed I live in UK

I use the com.au - but was taken to co.uk for months - they took a long time to sort that one out

I'm now wondering what country's currency I will be quoted on the renewal email :-0

Zloty?

Roy


I know .................


I think the problem with the sub goes back to last year ................ when they charged my card in US $.

I complained, they reimbursed my card ............. and that reduced me to Free member status for a period of 2 days because they did it before charging the sub in £ sterling


The problem from my point of view was that Accounts converted the £ amount into US $ because I lived in Canada (!!!), and you cannot pay in £ when living overseas ..........

.......... that $ amount was already more than the GBP amount quoted in an email. I then would have had it converted to Can $ by my credit card company.

The end result was that I would have ended up paying almost twice the stated £ sterling!


Quite naturally, I didn't like that!



I THOUGHT that the correspondence in and around that meant that things were sorted out, and I wouldn't have problems this year or in the future.


After all, it was all done and sorted out within 5 days of my then sub due date of June 5.


Apparently not!


Although I am puzzled by the reference to the renewal being for 12 months.


I didn't think they had a 12 month sub at that price :-S



Last year, to ensure that I was charged in future in £ sterling, I had to declare my country of residence as the UK.





sylvia

herumph!!

Mine is due in a few weeks.

The last couple of years I've received emails from GR offering me a discount. Standard membership, I don't need to see English records.

I've been wondering if it's worth renewing.

If I get an email saying the price has gone up, that will make my mind up.

sylvia, I took this from GR's FAQ only 2 days ago, Pay particular attention to the first part of the last paragraph

On your homepage you'll see the date your subscription ends. We will also email you a couple of weeks before the renewal is due just to remind you. You'll be sent an email to the address you registered with and also to your inbox on the site. All you have to do is click on the link in the email and you'll be taken to the renewal page. On the renewal page you can also change which package you have. If you have opted for continuous membership we will still email you to remind you that the payment is going to be taken.

You can also renew by logging into the Genes Reunited website and clicking on the subscribe link on your homepage. You will then be taken through to the renewal payment screen where full instructions will be given.

If you renew your membership 2 weeks before and up to 4 weeks after your renewal date you will be renewing your membership at the price you have always paid. . You can opt for continuous membership where we will automatically take payment from your card the following year. If you renew your annual membership over 4 weeks after the renewal date, you will be renewing your membership at our current prices

http://www.genesreunited.co.za/help.page/faqs?key=185

Roy

I received an email from GR this morning saying my membership would soon be due, and telling me the new rate.

Now, I have been a member of GR since 2004, and came under a grandfather clause in 2007 when ITV bought GR that stated my membership would remain at the rate I was then paying ........... £9.95 per year.

That was the case right up until I paid my dues last year.

The new cost they have quoted me is £15.95 for 12 months, Standard membership ............ that's a 63% increase

In fact, it is more than a 100% increase over last year because I was given a 20% "loyalty discount" that reduced the amount I paid to about £7.80


Now, I DO know that this is much lower than newer members are paying ............... but I was NOT notified in advance

AND, as I have been seriously considering not renewing as a result of all the unrectified problems (and non-answers of GR staff) of the last year that have affected the Boards, this just might be the final straw!


I have been a paying member right from Day 1, but have never considered Gold or Platinum levels to be worth the extra money ............. they being much more easily accessed on other sites. In fact, GR has never carried any records since 2007 that I had not already accessed before that date.


The value of GR is in the Boards and the community, and WAS the easily used tree.


I have 2 weeks to decide what I am going to do ........................... and am currently waiting for a response to the email I've sent to GR






sylvia

editing yr tree with the "old" or classic view

click on the name you want to edit
the background for the person box will turn white
the lower half of the screen will have all of the details which you can now edit
use the scroll bar far right as needed to see more of the edit fields
when done editing click "save"
This really ez to use approach did not find favour with the team and the "new" or complicated-for-no-reason method is such a pain I'll not bither with it.

how to change the tree structure
basically you can't except at the ends of branches
you have to go to a person at the end of a branch with no more then ONE link
delete that person
and so on for the next one and again and again
now you can enter all the deleted people again from scratch
I have been complaining about this for 4 years
Now you know why OP won't change the errors in their trees even if they know its wrong.

with the "new" tree it is claimed that you can use the Ancestry approach of just changing the parent(s) or a join in the tree but I have not tried it as the possible result would be an irreversible mess.

Another approach is to export the tree to GED and edit it offline, then export back to Gru. The downside of this approach is that all notes, photos, linked contacts are lost :-(

In any case make sure you have exported yr tree to a GED file from time to time. Who knows the database may crash as it did today.

good luck


ps: a rellie in New Zealand learnt to fly - she was 79 at the time. Age is just a state of mind.

fear uncertainty doubt

for instance the database crashed this afternoon
down > 90 mins (source: Gru)
now with firefox/windows I can only login via a shortcut to my tree otherwise I still get the "undergoing mantenance" message...
fud - blocks even maintenance upgrades in the end
just a jolly good job this lot are not flying planes
dear mr Moire
pay attention
databases get broken for all sorts of reasons, often unexpectedly
the best way to avoid unhappy customers is a backup on a different subnet and power supply which can be hot switched in
too expensive ?
hmmm
maybe its the rain

:-\

Madeline - try sending a contact message to GR. Tell them the names and birth years of the people you've added by mistake.

If you get a nice helpful person, they should be able to remove the names, and you can start over again.

Hope it's not too many!
<3

Could someone please advise on the procedure to take to alter /Edit a portion of a tree. I have tried to follow the steps outlined in your editing advise but when I click on a name no "Edit" comes up. When I then turn to the other step"On the right hand side of the page an arrow will appear" This does not happen.
I am 79 years old and use my old tree as I cannot understand the new Jargon associated with the new one.
I have put a family in the wrong place.
Can anyone help please?
Mad

FUD? As in Elmer? :-D

I have a ww Ay membership. It has full Scottish census and other record transcriptions but not the images of course as these seem to be reserved to Sp as you say.

Ay def does not have much of an active scene on its discussion boards.
However chat between people sharing trees on Ay is pretty good and of course very well informed. The Ay trees are increasingly by invitation only. Some of the public trees are really wild ..

RootsWeb is nicely put together but also slow (slow as in slow rate of postings, the site itself is quick and not buggy).

There is a renegade site of ex GRu members which is fairly good.

So people hang on here for the boards but they are shrivelling .... even the "General" chat is a shadow of it once was though as plagued with hassles as ever.

None of the other sites in the UK or USA (inc BS) seem to have anything like the level of broken functionality as Gru. For most people the tree is the core function and it is broken regardless of which version you use. Hardly surprising then that board postings are way down if the core function is broken.

Is it still worth about £ 75 / half year? I doubt it. Anyway I have a week to think about it. 6 months ago I renewed, hopeful. Misplaced optimism. Will the site even exist end 2012? Who knows.

I am sure that they want to fix it. The problem is that the hodge podge of javascript and flash is beyond what can be maintained (thank you IGP).

The "new" versions is just a rearrangement of the same Flash/javascript mess so it cannot be maintained either (pls note IGP). The extreme difficulty in making robust changes has been all too obvious. Now there is a stable, if broken product, FUD says no more changes, even to fix things.

Apple has already withdrawn Flash support. The next version of IE (10) will do the same as will Android in favour of html5 and H264. Adobe have repositioned Flash for a niche market and are doing well selling expensive hml5 tool kits. Ay has great apps for iOS and Android and soon Win8.

That leaves Gru paddling a canoe to nowhere with a broken paddle and a weir up ahead ...

I like the Genealogist best of the UK sites and it is terrific for pre 1837. The downside is that it is poor at world wide stuff and my lot had (and still have) itchy feet. AyWW fits the bill very well.

My own 2c would be that the whole site will fold at some point into FB & Twitter once BS have worked out the ads revenue business model. A total rewrite of Gru not using Flash would be far too expensive.

.Times are hard in Dundee and I cannot see Gru getting eternal bail outs.

At the end of the day I guess what bugs me the most is not the bugs and other functional hassles but the sheer bloody minded refusal of GRu, its developers and support staff to enter into any kind of meaningful relationship with their customers. As with any other business over the last 100 years it is a fatal error.

Mea culpa from PM that they have screwed up and then repeating the bad behaviour is hardly convincing. :-P

:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(:-(

Scottish records? Don't make me laugh.

There's some "rule" about Scottish records only being available via Scotland's People.

Bright Solid own Scotland's People, so what's the problem?

I don't use ANY records on GR. I use the tree (old one) and the boards. IMHO the tree and the boards are the BASICS.

The basics should be fixed before any fancy new stuff is even considered.

Customer Support? They claim they don't have time to answer every email, so we get the generic response. That just makes me send another email, so what's the point? I've had some decent responses recently, but only because I was persistent.

Fed up reading "I cannot recreate your problem" - especially when I've posted the problem and other members agree with me.

I didn't have to sign in this morning, so that's an improvement.

Only saw one Error Message yesterday (why are they usually when I send a contact/reply message?)

My security software was blocking this review site for some reason ...

It looks rather as if somebody planted about half a dozen very similar posts praising the site. I wonder who would do that?

My subs run out next week. Given the general decrepitude of the site which has the look and feel of Miss Havelocks mansion I don't think I shall renew, just join the lurkers.

New members who are lured into this site by sponsored tv shows will soon be enraged as they try and use the now-not-very-new tree. The very least they could do is to set the old tree as default.

fwiw they now have new T&C which should be read, if only for the many contradictory terms and weasel words.

Virgin cable internet is pretty good (though it is best to use yr own router). Their tv is not so hot. Rang them yesterday thinking to swap to Sky ... oh don't go they cried we'll send you a new HD box with all the gizmos ... free.

I wonder what customer retention features Phil Moire is dreaming up? Access to Scottish census ? Posting for free (avail on rootschat or even gru via FB) ? Multiple trees ? Half price platinum for 6 months ? Fix bugs (too many to list?) Real time customer support over the net? Real photos & vids ? Properly implemented privacy without overcooking it ( eg assume anybody over 110 probably departed) ? Plant a stake through the phantom RR ?

The naff LR board and FB suggest the chosen path which is to do whatever is needed to bring in more advertising. Churn and poor delivery hardly matter in that context. I would not be at all surprised if many of GRu users were also customers of such paragons of customer support as 3, TalkTalk, FitnessFirst, nPower and the AA.

Just tried the link i never got any error it still works for me :-P



Roy

must have been sat on by the objects of review 'cos it now returns a 404 site not found

:-P