Suggestions

Hi Guys - thought you might like to see the message my wife has just sent to the site. - wonder if it will do any good?

To

Support
Subject

This Site Does Not Work!!!!!!
Query

Dear Sirs,
This account is in my husband's name but this is a joint venture. My husband had been very patient with you BUT NOW YOU GOT ME! We took out the Premium membership in 21st July 2012 at a cost of £109.85. So far we have been able to use the full site for a measly 6 DAYS!! For the last 18 days we have been fobbed off with excuses and platitudes of 'please be patient, we are fixing it' Would you have accepted our plea of 'we are fixing it - please be patient' if our payment had not gone through?? This product we have been sold is not fit for purpose and is a disgrace. READ YOUR FORUM - it is not our computer, IT IS YOUR SITE. Why have you spent time and resourses tarting up the colour, which by the way is horrible, when there are serious issues here which means we cannot use the site? I am so angry, disappointed, and sick and tired of not being able to use what we have paid for, and at your inability to fix what is broken that I will be informing everyone I know to use another site for their family tree building, and lets face it there are plenty around, which are run by competent staff who actually know what they are doing and can keep the thing running! Are we going to get any allowance for the time this site has been down, or are you just another load of cowboys whose motto is stick the suckers, take the mone and run???? FIX THE DAMN THING! Yvonne McLoughlin

Whether the site is working properly or not I would not have paid over £100 for membership of this site.

Other sites offer better records for a similar price.

By "down" do you mean that the tree is not working properly for you?


Like Rollo and GB, I have had no problem accessing the site, and working on the Boards ....... and have also found it much faster.

I have seen no other complaints about the site being down, even from people who have been having problems upgrading their tree.



It has been found by many people that using Google Chrome as your browser may result in better functioning of the tree.



Like GB, I also would not have paid over £100 for the premier membership on here.


You can build your tree for free on here

or pay approximately £20 per year to build your tree, participate on these baords, and send pms to possible contacts.


Records are much better from other sites ...... some of them even free!




sylvia

The annual sub for premium is £80 a year so you must have purchased something else with it?

Also no problems with the site not working

James, I almost hate to admit that, having had continuous membership since 2003, it costs me a measly £9.75 per annum. Great value - good friendships - pity about some of the probs people are having.


Stick with standard membership and ask for help on the boards.


If you hover your cursor over people's avatars, you can see how long they have been members and how much experience of using the boards they have. Hope this helps.

HI all - thanks for your replies. When we first took out platinum membership in early July the site worked fine, we spent hours building our trees and researching in the census forms and birth/death/marriages etc. After 6 days we could no longer see our full tree but could see our immediate ancestors and our decendents - in separate windows. Now we can only see our immediate family! This co-incided with the change in the look of the tree. We can still view the whole of the tree of a lady with whom we found a good connection but we can't see ours. We can still research the census forms and the other certs, but cannot see any of the people we have put in. I take your point about the cost, but as the site was, for the first 6 days, we were happy with it. I do not like the idea of just paying the standard rate and then picking the brains of people who possibly have paid full membership and I feel it is unfair to do so, and hovering over the avatar of others does not tell you if they have paid the full rate or not. I have tried to access our tree on another computer using Googe chrome and it is exactly the same as this. So no joy there. We have had replies from GU saying they know there is a proplem and they are working on it and to please be patient, but honestly this is frustrating the hell out of me now. In five weeks we have been able to access our full tree for only 6 days! :-( :-P

James, see my post on the link below

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards/board/general_chat/thread/1308300

Roy

Good to see you James. :-D


Please don't be afraid to pick the brains of the people on the boards - many of us are here daily to see how we can help fellow members.

Some of those who help are very experienced and talented researchers and would be pleased to see if they can knock down any brick walls you may have.


Hope some of the above advice helps you to solve a few of your tree problems. Cx

James

Maybe they will refund if it is not "fit for purpose". I think they have a legal requiremnet to do that, and may be worth pursuing via Trading Standards.

I am a basic member, have been for 9 years and it has been excellent value and have not realised the extent of the support available via community till I got very frustrated when old tree was removed finally a couple of weeks ago. "Community" is good fun and I would happily pay £20 rather than £9 something.

Not sure if you subscribe to other sites, but they are all fairly expensive but such good value (and I speak as one who spent the first 10 years of family history without a computer, travelling round all the graveyards, pouring through micro-fish in days before you dipped your feet in water, visiting all the Family History Centres in many towns. Cost me vastly more than, say, £200 pa, and I found out an awful lot less in those days.

John, the tree is free so there is nothing to refund.

KenSE. Not sure James and Yvonne paid sub for tree - that was part of their package. They were researching and trying to get value for their sub. And if you pay for something that is not fit for purpose, I think there may be a legal requirement to refund their £109.85.

I have not been following everybody's problems with site, but it does sound as if quite a few now feel they should be offered compensation for problems encountered.

There are some exceptionally helpful people on here who are trying to manage customer dissatisfaction on behalf of Genes. They are not paid by Genes and I really think they should be - what have Genes done to help customers with all these glitches?

The tree on GR is free,

you pay for additional services and not for the tree

It is free to register with Genes Reunited. You can build your family tree, use the search facilities to find possible matches to your family name, add notes against relations in your tree, post photos on your family tree and receive emails from other members and reply to these emails. Also, if you already have experience in researching your family history you can import your Gedcom file in to your Genes Reunited family tree.

They offer 2 types of subscription these are an addition to the free membership

1). Standard

2). Platinum

to see what these packages offer in addition to the free membership see

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/help/faqs?key=177

and

http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/help/faqs?key=177#Subscriptionsandrenewals

Roy

Also .......................


I believe there is something in the T&Cs that you will not get a refund IF you have accessed the site and used the records (or posted on the Boards)


There seems to be a 2 day period during which you can ask for a refund as long as you have not accessed the site.


This has been stated by GR several times in the past



And the guys are quite right ............


the tree is free ...................... anyone who pays a subscription pays for the extras that are ascribed to each subscription level.






sylvia

How do you know it´s not working if you haven´t accessed it :-S

Thanks for your help and advice Rollo and others. Not being picky about the refund, it is just maddening that it worked perfectly for 6 days and then didn't.

Wisechild, there is a button on the top which says FULL TREE - when we clicked on this during the first 6 days we got to see our full tree, now when we click on it it does nothing ergo we cannot access it ergo it is not working properly!

If you click FULL the full tree should open but you will still need to navigate the tree using either the navigation tool (bottom left of the page) or by clicking on the page and dragging it to the relation your looking for

If it does not work then contact GR with details of exactly what you are doing and exactly what is or is not happening,

They cannot pinpoint your problem without a full explanation

Roy

Hi Unknown.
Sorry, you misunderstood what I was asking. My fault, I didn´t make it clear.
What I meant was, how can GR refuse a refund because you have accessed the site.
If you hadn´t accessed it, you wouldn´t know it wasn´t working would you?
If you buy a new washing machine, you don´t know whether it works or not until you have tried it.

Hi Roy - when we click on full tree all we are getting is immediate family consisting of 6 persons. We have over 100 persons in full tree. During our first 6 days when we clicked on this we got the full tree. Then we couldn't get the full tree but we could get ancestors and decendants. Now we only get immediate no matter which button we click on. We have emailed GR over and over and over - see the original post of 14th August (that was about the 5th email we had sent them). We sent this to GR and copied it here. It is not just us who are having problems either. All we get back from GR is 'we know there is a problem, we are trying to fix it, pleae be patient' But honestly would anyone be happy if you paid out what we have for this site and only get to use the full facilites for 6 days, this is now 5 weeks we have not been able to see the full tree and it only went chips when GR launched their new look site - sorry but I need to add an 'h' into the word s ite, because that's what it is now.

James, Did you visit the thread that i posted for you to look at on page one of this thread 15 Aug 2012 23:51?

I suggested several ways for Richard that could help members with some problems viewing the site one of which was clearing your cache and giving the reason why clearing your cache is required,

If you did not read that post then may be it could help you but if you did and if you tried the solutions i suggested then I can only suggest that you continue to inundate GR with your problem but If the problem is your cache the GR will not be able to do that for you


http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards/board/general_chat/thread/1308300

How you clearing your cache will depend on what browser your using

see http://kb.iu.edu/data/ahic.html


Good luck

Roy