Now, about the Mormon Megacorp ...

[iverglas]

I deal with Ancestry. If you really want to find stuff, you don't have a lot of choice. For Canadian records, for instance, there is a group busily transcribing the 1901 and 1911 censuses, and you can go to the British Columbia government's website and play with its irritating search feature for BMDs, but if you want to be able to search a whole lot of records at once, and have decent facilities for fuzzy searches, Ancestry's about the only game in town for the time periods covered by censuses and BMD registrations in the UK, the US and Canada.

I use the Ancestry.co.uk portal mainly, because almost everything I'm looking for is English, and because by going through there I can subscribe to a UK records package only for a fraction of the great big universal package that people in the US seem to get stuck with. My grandparents all emigrated to Canada in the first quarter of the 20th century from England. Lucky me, I realize as I watch some of you guys here try to find records from eighteen different parts of the world in different time periods.

Last week, Ancestry -- which charges a fortune for its services and has about the worst customer relations practices I've ever seen anywhere -- started using flash ads at the UK site. I swear, some of them are designed to instigate epileptic seizures. They're horrific; I've never seen anything like it. And they pop up on every search results page. And the best part is that they're all for things I can't buy anyway -- home insurance in the UK, e.g.

I tried playing with the ActiveX settings in IE. Disable the thing that stops the flash ads, and you've disabled the viewer that you need to see good images of documents at Ancestry. Quelle catch-22. Oh, why am I using IE, you ask? Because I have to. I use Firefox for everything else under the sun, but whatever it is that Ancestry uses for that image viewing, Firefox won't do it. ... Oh good grief, I just tried Firefox -- I downloaded the enhanced viewer in Firefox yesterday, and I couldn't get an image ... and now I can. Maybe this whole thing becomes moot.

Okay, I just took a look at ancestry.com, and things don't seem to be nearly as bad as they are at .co.uk. But this flash business will only get worse, sooner or later. (At ancestry.ca, it's still business as usual; the market isn't likely big enough for the big advertisers to bother with.) But what the heck. I'm going to pass this on.

http://www.bbshare.com/

"No! Flash" It's a dinky little file that takes 30 seconds to download and install, and bingo, click that icon and NO MORE FLASH ADS. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, no more flash ads. But if you happen to want something to play in flash, you just click that icon and reload.

It's freeware devised by someone whose first language appears not to be English, and you'll get warnings from Windows when you go to run it, but GoogleAnswers recommends it:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=539114

... I found another option which is quite small, sits in
the system tray and can be enabled and disabled with a click.
It's called No! Flash, from BBshare.

It will:
- Enable/Disable Flash (Macromedia Shockwave Flash Player)
- Enable/Disable Script (Popup Ads, Animated Ads...)
- Enable/Disable Images (GIF, JPG ...)
- Enable/Disable Videos
- Enable/Disable Animations (GIF Animation)
- Enable/Disable Background Sounds

It's also free, though the registered version, for $10, will do
a lot more:
- Block known Datamining, aggressive advertising, Parasites,
Browser hijackers, and tracking components in MS Internet Explorer.
- Update block list from internet
http://www.bbshare.com/Default.aspx?tabid=53

I installed and tried it, and it's a fine program. ...

I just checked, and it isn't blocking the annoying crud on the left side of the "myDU" page here, which I'm reading in Firefox -- and Firefox's uncheck-play thingy doesn't work on that either. So it's purely for IE, if anybody's still using it. ;)


I have a whole load of gripes about Ancestry I'd just love to share -- some of them are actually instructive, for Ancestry users ;) -- but I'm tired to the bone right now from work, so I'll let someone else pick up that ball if s/he's interested.

[Cybergata]

1. Try Using Opera Browser

It has a whole lot of settings, and I don't see any of the advertising stuff. It is a little more difficult to use than FireFox, but they have great people on their forums who always have answers. Actually most of the questions that can be asked are answered in FAQs.
<http://www.opera.com/download/">

I've been having major freeze problems with FireFox since the last two updates. From reading their forums, it seems to be a common annoyance, and no one has the answer. I don't have any of those problems with Opera. In fact you can disable most of the things that the program you downloaded with Opera and don't need that program.

[iverglas]

2. sadly

I think you really do have to use IE with Ancestry.

But hey -- those Firefox freeze problems! Is that what it is? I go to click a link, or type in a box, or load a page, and I have to wait 3-4 seconds while something grinds away in the black box? It started with me a couple of weeks ago. Downloaded the most recent update this morning, and it's still happening. That just sucks. I'm really not interested at all in playing with that stuff, a browser is a tool and no more, and I don't want to know how it works or how to fix its snits. I was actually really happy with my netscape 2 or whatever it was, up until a year or so ago ... just like I was with WP4.2 10 years ago. But maybe I'll check out Opera; thanks!


Meanwhile, though, that No! Flash is working like a dream with Ancestry's obnoxious ads. And Ancestry hasn't sent even one of its robot answers (wegotamessagefromyouandifwedon'thearfromyouwewillassumeyourproblemwassolved) to my query about what it plans to do the first time its ads prompt a seizure.

[Cybergata]

4. Opera works find with Ancestry.com

From the beginning I didn't have any problems using Opera with ancestry.com. A while back they made all sorts of changes and pages were showing up weird. I wrote them a long letter complaining, and told them that if they didn't make their web pages support Opera, I wouldn't renew my membership. About two weeks later, they were fixed and it works perfectly now. We Opera people are pretty annoying. We are dedicated to our browser. IE just doesn't come close to it.

[Cybergata]

5. Singing more praises of Opera

I hadn't noticed the annoying bouncing ads on RootsWeb.com until I had the sound of my computer on. All I had to do is go to Tools, quick preferences, edit site preferences, then content, and uncheck all the boxes. All sound annoying jumping I-Pods, animation, even gif and jpg files are gone from all of RootsWeb.com. I don't know if other browsers have an immediate deal with individual website settings, but this is one wonderful, easy tool Opera has.

[catchnrelease]

3. Interesting

I have been using Firefox for most of the time I've subscribed to Ancestry. (We used Netscape until about a year and a half ago.) I do get an occasional glitch when looking at the actual censuses mainly. An error message comes up and makes the site close, but then another box comes up which asks if I want to "restore the session". So I just click yes and it goes right back to the image where I left off. I hadn't actually figured out what causes it, whether it's Firefox, Ancestry or some bug in the 'puter. It is annoying, but so far I can live with it. And no popup things or flash ads. Haven't seen any of that.

Overall, except for the obvious expense which I split with another family member, I can't complain too much about Ancestry. Have had 3 customer service interactions with them, 2 by phone---one was very poor one was very good, and one by email which was ok. I have been able to get a good bit of info from the site and have made a couple of contacts with distant relatives which led to more family data. So that was great. I've only been a subscriber for 2 years, so maybe at some point soon I'll have gotten all that would be of use to me. (I only have the US package.)

Any tips, warnings or advice you have about working with Ancestry would be greatly appreciated, Iverglas, once you've rested up. Today is my Friday, so I know how you feel! :boring: