Ancestry Search issues

[jorghes]

My connection seems to continually switch between the ".com.au" site and the ".com" site. I notice when "Catalogue" becomes "Catalog" and the lovely little checkbox limiting card catalogue results to Australia vanishes - it doesn't log me out anymore, although every so often I get a "sign in to see this record" page - to which I press the back button and try again and usually it works the second time. It doesn't seem to cause any problems for me, probably because I have just as many relatives in the UK and USA as I do in Australia, and 90% of the time I'm delving into a different country's records anyway. (last month it was the Netherlands...)

I have no idea why it happens.

 

[DavidL]

One quirk annoying me is that my regular list of "hints" comes up in a variety of languages. This week it is Spanish. Last week it was one of the Scandi languages. Not a big problem, as the information remains fairly obvious. I can't complain, anyway, as I let my membership lapse last week.

 

[Susan]

I have been taking notice of when I get the .com site, or told I need to log in, and it's always after editing a search. If I do a new search, I don't have a problem.

But an older problem has returned. At random times when working on a profile, I get a page with a picture of a man panning for gold and the message "We're sorry. The page you tried to access is no longer available". It just happened after adding a 1939 register entry to a profile. This is not a serious problem as all I need to do is click on Home, then Last Viewed and I'm back to the profile, but it is time consuming.


I have also noticed that the .co.uk site develops temporary quirks at around 9.45 pm UK time. Two days ago I had 'this page is temporarily unavailable' for all person Facts for about 10 minutes, though Lifestory, Hints and Gallery were unaffected. Yesterday evening I could not 'ignore' any historic insights for 15 minutes.

 

[peter]

I would guess that the problems we're experiencing are related to peaks in demand, and Ancestry's attempt to balance the load across their servers rounds the world. I remember similar problems at FamilySearch over a decade ago, and Findmypast has also had problems over the years.

 

[Pauline]

I don't usually use the .com site, as aside from other considerations, I haven't set up a personalised homepage there so my Quick Links are not available. However, I've now logged myself in there while still using the .co.uk site for searching, and will see if it makes any difference to this redirection issue.

Having tried this for a while, I find keeping myself logged in at both sites doesn't stop the redirection to the .com site but it does prevent the continual requests to sign in. Often I do not notice that I am on the wrong site until I click to go to the Ancestry homepage, and find it's not my personalised homepage.

So I guess it's an improvement of sorts.

 

[At home in NZ]

I select a database on the .co.uk site, enter the details and get a list of results with no data in them because I'm now on the .com site and not registered there.

Not having looked at the Forum for a while I'm a bit late in joining this discussion. I do not understand why you say you get no results because you are not registered there.
I am subscribed to ancesty.co.uk and am permanently logged in (except when Ancestry kicks me out for no apparent reason). I haven't experienced the problem you describe but,

You can easily return to the site by using 'Visit our other sites' at the bottom right of every page.

Using the 'Collection Focus' in the Search should ensure you only see results from the chosen Country regardless of which site you are currently in, it seems to work OK for me.

 

[Susan]

It hasn't happened for a few weeks now, but what was happening is that I would fill in the search box, click search on the .co.uk site, but the list of results would be on the .com site, with no details given because I was not logged in there. It was easy enough to get back to .co.uk but I found it annoying that I had to do so. And after 10 years of using Ancestry I have only realised as a result of this thread that I can log in to the .com site using my .co.uk password!

I have discovered that most of the problems, such as going to the .com site, being told I need to log in to see the results, results page showing only 20 results instead of 50, only occurred if I edited the search. Starting a new search did not cause any odd results.

 

[peter]

I have discovered that most of the problems, such as going to the .com site, being told I need to log in to see the results, results page showing only 20 results instead of 50, only occurred if I edited the search. Starting a new search did not cause any odd results.

Editing a search at Ancestry often takes me to a different search form, so I try to avoid it, and use the back button instead.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

I got alerted to this the other week when a FTAnalyzer user mentioned that it kept redirecting them to the UK site when their subscription was on the US site. This always worked in the past as their site honoroed where you had logged in irrespective of where the dataset was located. So I needed to add an option to specify which site to use. Most annoying.