Updated the design of our main page and forum

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This was a complete LIE as you altered the program that we were all using and had got used to. The only fault with this was YOURSELVES not answering promptly.

You started answering Queries so promptly in July that Alan and I complimented you on this. But it seems as if we should not have, as you are doing the same NOT ANSWERING . Some Queries are still unanswerd since AUGUST and you must have at least 20 not answered

I said at the time that your new program was not any good.

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Since then we have had a tremendous amount of what you call GLITCHES but I maintain are ERRORS by your programmers .Are you or they sure they understand what they are doing.

It looks to me that e are seeing the first signs of the DEMISE of Tribal Pages, as you do not get this ignoring from other Family Tree sites .

Your Membership is falling and Paying Members are converting to your Free site.

Regards

Les

I really have no idea but, guessing, I wonder if there has been changes of staff at Tribalpages. As you said in your message their response was excellent for a period.

I don't have any problems with their program myself but I have noted the non answering of some members questions.

All the Best

Les

I have just updated my tree and modified my home page, and did not run into any problems doing so. What kinds of issues am I not seeing?

The only thing I am running into is my sources display URL in them as a possible tag, but no URL tags from my imported gedcom are displaying, is that one of the kinds of problems you are talking about?

I just figured I could go without URL tags, converting those in my gedcom to PUBL tags, which may not be meant for URLs but does seem to work, as long as there is only one PUBL entry in the source.

The Story Pages are a complete mess as they have now moved Photos to bottom of page and you still cannot do anything with them in relation to Paragraphs. On the Story List they have removed search. They have asked me wa

hat is the error, and where. I have sent them two screen shots, which they have completely ignored. The photo albums are nothing like they were. I honestly believe they do not know what they are doing,and are so ignorant by refusing to answer

all the best

Les

I must confess I do not use stories here. Instead, I have my own site where I can do whatever I want with the html pages. I had decided it was easier for me to put my public trees at Rootsweb Worldconnect, and what they displayed was more complete, but Ancestry decided to rewrite the software and the results are a disaster so I am back here now.

There will be a lot of people checking out TP because of what happened to WorldConnect. I have some issues here, but I can work around them and don't want to figure out what other free family tree site might work better that is publicly accessible.

Yes, I have member trees at ancestry, but they are nowhere near as complete as what I do with my trees on my own local computer, and being able to update the TP tree with my local tree is a huge plus.

About their programmers - a techie friend suggested that they just don't make programmers like they used to, that instead of coding things by hand, it is all point and click. That scares me (I do some programming), but I doubt that is the issue here.

IF Manta is correct, TP only has 3 employees...how many members are there here? It is pretty easy to see how easy they can get behind with responding to complaints. That has happened a good chunk of the time over the years.

I think what may be happening, which I see at other genealogy sites as well, is they have deadlines and push stuff out before it has been thoroughly tested. Ancestry has done an even worse job with what they have done to our free WorldConnect trees, stopping displaying data that was available on the old version and all kinds of other issues.

So compared to that, TP is heaven, although I know it is aggravating to have them not respond.

But instead of posting this issue here, which they are under no obligation to respond to, I would complain about each particular issue in a separate post on the Requests board, and get people to chime in that it is an issue for them as well.

Your other posts about the current status here scare me as I want to move more trees here from WorldConnect, and am figuring out how to work with what tags they do and do not recognize.

Remember revenue from memberships is not their only source - the ads at the top of every free tree page are aggressive and driving me nuts the way they load and make what I see jump around, but am waiting for a good sale to decide if it is worth it.

Anyhow, for me, besides not depending on stories here, I also do not do much with photos here. But do understand that photos need to appear where appropriate next to or between the right paragraphs. As a possible solution to that not dependant on them, try calling in an image with a standard image tag, probably from another web site if you have access to one that lets you hot link photos without adding a lot of site garbage.

You have been here a long time, I would try hard to make it work by finding workarounds i

https://vyepar.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=vyepar&view=78&ver=19780&storyid=61628

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Your comment

Remember revenue from memberships is not their only source - the ads

at the top of every free tree page are aggressive and driving me nuts

the way they load and make what I see jump around, but am waiting for

a good sale to decide if it is worth it.

Havent you heard of ADBLOCK

I always tryworkarounds, but as I am aying for a program, this should

not be needed as anything sold should be fit for purpose

Regards

Les

I'm REALLY hoping this little experiment here works out.

Welcome aboard! If you have specific questions about the differences between the sites, please start a new topic devoted to technicalities of the transfer.

For deceased people showing as living, there are tools to change the settings for them. Go into Settings, there are a number of options there where you can change whether someone wrongly marked as living to deceased.

I prefer to fix these in my offline tree, so as not to have to redo the Living People stuff every time I upload. I do not recall exactly what I did, will have to check my gedcom, but I think putting anything in a DEAT DATE or PLAC field should trigger TP thinking they are truly deceased.

I have one example I just checked has date unknown in the BIRT DATE field, and the same in the DEAT DATE field. It is my I184 in the current iteration of my tree, his name shows fine.

The only other major hassles I can think of are aliases are not recognized here, and not all data in sources is displayed. Both have taken complicated fixes and are better addressed in a different topic if you wish. I gave up and wrote a script to modify the ALIAses for each person so they show up as notes, and those will show in my next update, are not shown right now.

The sources need a topic all of their own, too many issues, I had to play around with what gedcom tags were recognized and what were not.

But I am happy enough here that I am not going to check out other options, although I already have an alternate version of my trees at another free site where I do all my own coding and it is all pure text on html pages. But many family members just cannot relate to plain text trees, as you likely know. And I cannot write the code to create the kind of on-demand reports that are a feature of worldconnect.

The other bummer in some respects is free sites are not available here ot search engines, for that you have to subscribe.
Related Link:Click Here

My other reply has not yet appeared, but wanted to say I now see you have a bunch of posts about specific features being broken in the Stories feature. I don't know how many people use Stories or include pictures, so it is possible that it is not a priority for them to fix. But if that is the case, it would be better to say so rather than leave you hanging.

In the future, when there are other technical mess-ups on the site, I think it would be more effective to ask if others are having the same problem, possibly putting up a post redirecting visitors to the genealogy forum to this one if they use the stories feature and want to see it fixed.

If you know how to write html and can get a specific URL for one of the images that gets misplaced, you might try just inserting the html that would call or lead to that image, into the body of the story and see if it then would appear where you want it.

I will confess I am guessing about this, but it sounds like they are dictating where photos go rather than let you code them into the body, as this is meant to be easy to use and not require knowledge of html, but if they let you insert an img tag where you want specific images to appear in the body of the text, that might be a solution for you.

I just tried seeing if we can get the direct URLs to specific images in our photo albums, and at least for those, doing a "right click" brought up a menu in firefox and I selected "copy image location" and then when I pasted that URL into a new tab in my browser as a test, it was a direct link to just the image. I would guess you can do the same for your story images.

then the code for an image tag would be something like:

<img src="http:..the-url-to-the-image.jpg">

If you stick that in the body using the raw html, do they still move the images elsewhere? Maybe it is more hassle than just using a provided box to put the image, but might enable you to work with their changing images to an undesirable location.

There are options to an image reference such as being able to put in an alt tag or control whether there is a border, but let's see first if you can move images where you want them this way.

I think if we are discussing images in stories, it should be under a topic with the same name? But I do not want to lost this thread.

Anyhow, I found I had a test story already on my site, I just added an image to the story through their default utility, and my browser put the image to the right, not the bottom! So placement is not necessarily the bottom.

Then, I tested whether I could put the image into the story wherever I wanted it, instead of letting them place it, and I was able to do that as I suggested. It would take a bit of playing around with the html to get it right, but I see it can be done.

Then, looking at some of your older posts on this issue, I am getting the impression that you know how to do the html method for inserting the images, and were simply complaining that a feature they had added which automated locating and sizing of the image was working for a while and then stopped working. Is that right?

If they have messed up a feature that previously worked, then maybe some other code they wrote broke it, and they need to figure out how to get it back. But that is not necessarily a simple task, I know as I have spent days and nights trying to get code to work that stopped working because of a simple change.

But TP Support, it would be nice if you could say if you are working on this, and it is just taking time, acknowledging you are aware of the issue. Or that other problems have been more pressing and you will get back to this when you can.

Especially as I think a lot of people are now shopping around looking for where to move their messed up Rootsweb WorldConnect trees, responsiveness to issues on a timely basis vs, taking forever with no response could make a big difference in whether people decide to move their trees here or not, whether or not they are interested in stories.

I have simply advised them to put the option of DRAG and DROP and DRAG and RESIZE this works perfectly

Regards

Les
Related Link:Click Here

If you go to this LINk

https://www.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=vyepar&view=78&ver=19773&storyid=82696

you will see photographs entered to tell the story as it should be , and not a lot of photographs at the bottom of the page of a Story,which you can only ZOOM..

I have also told TP how to do this, Place a Photograph any where on the page, reduce it place photos in line, or staggered. It is so easy.

As I say they do not answer. I have asked them to put the SEARCH button back in the STORY LIST. They have asked me what I mean and where. I have sent them two SCREEN SHOTS of this. that I have checked with my five year old Great Grandson, if he understood it. He concurred and he is just starting coding

If over the years you would have been reading the FORUMS, easier then than now, you would see what i mean.

Look also at this LINK to my GUEST book, where you will see hundreds of THANK YOU's for my HELP.

Here is the LINk.

https://www.tribalpages.com/tribe/browse?userid=vyepar&view=10&ver=19773

hope you look at both of these LINKS and I would appreciate your comments

All the best

Les
Related Link:Click Here

I am well aware that you have helped many people over the years. And I believe your word that you have done a great job with html in stories. The only viable means of browsing for me is a text browser since I use dialup and a slow computer, so I cannot see any of the fancy stuff you have added to that page, just a lot of white space and iframe code.

But I am not the audience you are writing your pages for. Most people have no problems with viewing image-filled webpages. For me, they are too painful to view as the pages take forever to load and I have better things to do with my time.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, TP should be responding rather than being silent with regards to having messed up the features that had been implemented. their not doing so on a timely basis, even if it is just to apologize for a delay due to higher priorities, is not good PR.

We cannot read their minds as to why they so often fail to respond. We can theorize, but only they know their reasons. I would hope it is simply that finding what broke the image insertion and manipulation in stories is not easy and taking time.l

I have not put FANCY stuff for Members only what they can use and have asked for ,to make their site Original to them I do not believee it is a waste of time either to look at these as they just take seconds to load. As you say you have not got much too use. PC is ideal

Just looked at your 584 one photograph one Test Story site

Basic colour and yet I haven a choice ofthousands of colours to use also Textures. Plus you can add a Photograph Background if you wish.

I honestly thought that you really had a a Family Tree worthlooking at, but it is still the Basic TP Tree.

Did you get my message about Using ADBLOCK as you did not seem to know about this, aso you are commenting on my HTML without ever seeing it. Did you also look at my GUEST BOOK

Link below

As I asked you for your comments, but didnot know youwre very limited to do this

Regards

Les
Related Link:Click Here