New Features? What's going on?

[Tenn4ever]

FTDNA was down all day (May 28, Wednesday) supposedly for maintenance to introduce "exciting" new features.

Well, it's back up tonight 12:00 am May 29 but where are the 'new features'?

[efgen]

The site was only down for a few minutes yesterday, mid-afternoon Houston time.

Yesterday's updates were mostly behind-the-scenes, so customers won't see any changes.

Elise

[mahgninnuc]

"mostly" = "totally", in this case, anyway.

[Jessant]

Nonstandard website behaviour is the cause of confusion

FTDNA was down all day (May 28, Wednesday) supposedly for maintenance to introduce "exciting" new features.

The site was only down for a few minutes yesterday, mid-afternoon Houston time.

Elise,

When FTDNA's site is down for maintenance, we are shown a maintenance message like the one Tenn4ever mentions.

What actually happens is that we are redirected from http://www.familytreedna.com/public/MyProject to http://www.familytreedna.com/maintenance.html .

A visitor's instinct when encountering a maintenance message is to periodically refresh the webpage, in hopes that normal operations will quickly resume.

However, because the user has been redirected to http://www.familytreedna.com/maintenance.html, when they refresh they will continue to receive the static maintenance message, even if the website has been back online for hours.

Unless the user is paying attention to the URL, when they refresh, they expect the project page for "MyProject" but continue to see the maintenance page, thus forming the wrong impressions about the maintenance status of familytreedna.com.

I don't think redirecting to maintenance.html is standard practice when a site is under maintenance. Rather, your IIS server should be configured so that when the site is in maintenance mode, non-webmaster requests to http://www.familytreedna.com/public/MyProject temporarily serve up the content of maintenance.html -- without redirecting away from http://www.familytreedna.com/public/MyProject.

[efgen]

Jessant,

Indeed, I'm sure a few people did what you describe. I'll pass along the feedback. Thanks!

Elise

[Caburn]

It would be better if the default message stated simply that the site was down for maintenance (ie omitting the misleading 'exciting new features' part which raises expectations that FTDNA usually fails to satisfy.)