The new Find My Past is coming......

I also started to get this error (repeatedly) and thinking that I was the only one affected, I gave up for the day.

I did send a rather snotty email to FMP asking to be reconnected to the previous search system or to be sent a refund of the remaining 6 months of my World subscription. I was told that I could not access the old system (for technical reasons!?!) and was offered a free extension to my subscription.

I think FMP should have run the two systems in parallel until the new one was working adequately for most/all subscribers with any updates only being applied to the new system. That is what a professional computer operation would have done.

Perhaps I should have gone with Ancestry originally but I don't like their search results being more than I ask for. Having said that, I now find that FMP are heading the same way with dates/locations being ignored with some searches! I search for someone in Richmond, Surrey in 1890 and get back people from Devon in 1930's !!! At least the surname matched.

Yes, v-e-r-y, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w. There is only so much coffee that one can drink in a day. . . and this at a time when everyone in UK should be tucked-up in bed and asleep.

 

Bob said:
I was told that I could not access the old system (for technical reasons!?!) and was offered a free extension to my subscription.

That's like complaining in a restaurant about the terrible food and being offered a free meal in the future. As if you'd go back!

I am NOT gloating, but I am still (as of yesterday afternoon) getting onto the old FMP, and right glad I am of it!

 

Well, things are improving. Today, I happened to scroll down past the individual census information and found data for every member of the household, just like in the old search. I think they will probably get there in the end. It is just a question of how long it will take and whether enough people will still be there when they have made all the required updates. Hang in there, if you possibly can.

 

FMP this morning is quicker. Come to think of it....the 'old site' was often slow in the afternoon; timing-out with 'try again later' etc. messages.

 

Is that an acronym for "Bob spiers Or Bryman"?

 

Cripes, are you the same person???

 

Cripes, is that as in Can't Really Impersonate People Every Submission ? Or did you have something else in mind?

Yes. I am myself, or was last time I looked, although my name has been changed to protect the guilty. It should be Brymum, but that's another story.

 

I was about to make the same point myself

 

Absolutely not but it was Bryman who made the observation on this occasion

 

My previous comment that I could have both old and new FMP sites running at the same time has now been well and truly ditched. I tried the old site tab in my Firefox browser and it opened as such then paused, paused a bit more and a bit more, and finally the old format disappeared and was Welcomed to their new Site. Of course the new search site was still in limbo - I guess likely accounted for by the final switchover from old to new -but it appears it is the new site take it or leave it.

I have to admit it performed better today still with some idiosyncrasies (will mention another time if they continue) but produced some viable results thank goodness.

 

I'm sure the eagle eyed forum administrators wouldn't allow someone to post under an alias like that!! They'd see red!

 

It was all our fault Bob! Here is the reply from FMP

"It sounds like the problem is that your computer has 'cached' the last page that you looked at and is not recognising a newer version of this findmypast website page. You simply need to clear your browsing history and then sign back in to the site again. This is different according to which browser you're using, so please refer to the help pages for your browser to find out how to do this."

Of course it works today and my husband had cleared the cache so is it us or is it them!
I wonder what the next problem will be.

 

This seems to be a standard reply from FMP support - I have seen this same wording posted on other forums & mailing lists in answer to a variety of problem with the new site. It is also the exact same wording that I received in reply to the issue I raised with them (see earlier in this thread) and this was despite my telling them I had already tried deleting all my browser history, cookies and temporary internet files without it solving the problem.

It reminds me of the so-called support I was eligible for when I purchased this computer - the only answer they ever seemed to have, whatever the problem, was the somewhat drastic approach to restore my computer to factory defaults.

 

Oh yes, drag me into it why don't you! Surely you know FMP is never wrong and if they say your computer has cached the last page visited, then we need to look no further. Let that be a lesson for us all. For my own part I realise I was expecting too much to expect their site to perform with computers caching all over the place, and Sahara blown dust upsetting their database searches. I feel almost ashamed to have brought the matter up in the first place.

I think an email is called for to praise FMP for their diligence in spotting who was to blame for the almost total shut down. And now we all know!

 

Having finally been invited to use the new FMP site I was prepared to be disappointed and I was. One of the areas I was hoping they would improve was the "My records" section. I've used it for several years to "salt away" odds and ends as well as census checks from other sites. I was really hoping they would make it searchable by name, as a chronological list of the date of my search is not very useful . They still have not and even worse when I looked the records again I noticed that the record summary is entered as first name comma last name and the notes as last name comma first name which doesn't seem to augur well. Is there any clever way for now that I can export the "my records" data base to a Excel type file and make it completely searchable?

 

Sorry Bob - it won't happen again

 

You're forgiven of course

 

Well, as of today I am with everyone else in the new version. Damn.