Has the match program gone on the fritz again?

[larryhm]

Yesterday my brother's matches had 3 matches came up. Today had the full list. Been looking at setting the known relationship between my brother's kit and me as I manage both kits. All of a sudden, most of my 36 pages of matches have just disappeared. I now have 2 pages. When I logged back out and then in, I then got the maintenance message.

What is going on??

Wouldn't usual sensible customer-service business practice be to inform people that maintenance is going to happen than just doing it?? But then nothing seems usual here as I am beginning to discover.

[jsarnacki]

Yes, Darren mentioned they are aware of the problem. I sent them a ticket for my mom's kit anyway and they also told me they are aware and working on fixing it.

[jsarnacki]

I just logged back into my mom's... it now says her test was ordered yesterday and expected back after 6/24! GRRR!!!!! Her myOrigins are there, but now it has been reset as if it hadn't been run at all. Like I said, at gedmatch her results are working just fine!!!

[Alangaq]

I'm in the same boat.. Half Brother's kit was delayed, then showed the next day, but matches would not populate. took a chance and downloaded the raw data, and then uploaded to GEDmatch (which is free AND run by volunteers) and within a couple hours tokenizing was done, and I could run one-too-many on his kit, in contrast with ftDNA which seems to have gone all wonky... this morning he showed up on my match list and his match list had populated, then within an hour or so, it all dropped off...

I am so glad that I have bought the last kit that I will need from ftDNA.. I just wonder how long these guys will stay in business, and when they finally do tank, what will become of their database and our data? I don't imagine it will be good..

[JDP1144]

Just shows how poor FTDNA's IT department is.

Can't get any of the problems fixed and every so-called update never works until they play with it for a month after
they install it. Time to replace some incompetent people, either their technicians or the feeble management. Or close the doors.

[larryhm]

It's got worse!!....

Logged in today. My brother does not show on my matches. I still only have 2 pages and my brother's results are all gone! On top of this, his ID is showing 'Awaiting Results' again with a delay from 17th June before results can be obtained and no origin data ....

Thank goodness I downloaded the data when available and loaded to GEDmatch before this fiasco. Does this now have to be deleted and started again because of this??

My confidence levels are just inspired at this point

[bongocomm]

Can't trust FTDNA.

Unbelievable!!!! My son's FF results posted yesterday... right before the deadline they had set. It was incomplete though... just 4 matches and nothing else.. no origins, etc. tried to download raw and got errors.

Logged in today and now it is back to Awaiting Results and is delayed a month+. What other company would EVER get away with that???

I help hundreds of people looking for family members. I NEVER recommend FTDNA, EVER. Many of those people are somewhat fragile and these months of delays (Y DNA took more than 6 months) would be very upsetting.

[larryhm]

still have lost my matches

Brother's matches appearing. However, I still only have 2 pages of matches when had 36 up until last week. I would be worried about the reputation of this company if I owned it with the number of things that are going wrong in just the last month or so. Doesn't IT have a test system that things are tried out and tested on before deploying a solution in the live environment?

[telly441]

Family finder matches, Y-DNA matches, and Big-Y matches are all still having issues. It has been going on now for more then 30 days and still no real effort to fix the problem.

Does FTDNA still have any kind of IT department? Do they not test any changes on a mirrored system? Does Greenspan even care that his company is failing?

[K. L. Adams]

Family finder matches, Y-DNA matches, and Big-Y matches are all still having issues. It has been going on now for more then 30 days and still no real effort to fix the problem.

Does FTDNA still have any kind of IT department? Do they not test any changes on a mirrored system? Does Greenspan even care that his company is failing?

I have seen lots of discussions of problems with family finder matches, but have not seen a whole lot of trouble with Y-DNA, mtDNA and Big Y matches.

My matches for every mtDNA, yDNA and family finder are still the same matches, nothing has dropped, except when they add some new matches as new kits are completed.

I'm wondering if these database problems are impacting a large amount of customers????

Another thought, wonder if some matches could drop if someone changes privacy settings?

Anyway, for what it is worth, I have none of these problems that are being reported for multiple kits.

[larryhm]

Anyway, for what it is worth, I have none of these problems that are being reported for multiple kits.

Well, I am glad for you that you are not experiencing any problems. I still have over 30 pages now gone missing yet my brother's kit which only was completed a few weeks ago has 39 pages. I have read on other threads where people have lost all the old information. Mine seem to be just the distant relatives that I have and a few new matches but none of the speculative ones.

Luckily, I downloaded the data to GEDmatch so I can view some info here but this is not acceptable when people are paying for a service. My mother's kit has just been batched. So can I expect the same results with her kit as my brother's kit had? How can we rely on any of the results when the company doesn't even offer an explanation of what has happened.

[K. L. Adams]

Well, I am glad for you that you are not experiencing any problems. I still have over 30 pages now gone missing yet my brother's kit which only was completed a few weeks ago has 39 pages. I have read on other threads where people have lost all the old information. Mine seem to be just the distant relatives that I have and a few new matches but none of the speculative ones.

Luckily, I downloaded the data to GEDmatch so I can view some info here but this is not acceptable when people are paying for a service. My mother's kit has just been batched. So can I expect the same results with her kit as my brother's kit had? How can we rely on any of the results when the company doesn't even offer an explanation of what has happened.

Larry,

I am a database guy, if you write a query, the query is not prejudiced, which means it will not produce results for me, because it likes me better than you.

I'm leaning towards that you jumped in as they were in process of posting/refining results and as more criteria that came into play the query filtered out more data that really was of no use to you.

I am assuming the 39 pages you were discussing was the family finder results.

So, as a database guy, when I see only a few with this kind of problems verses the many (many, many thousands of kits)and I know code and queries run the same for all or fail for all, this must be some kind of problem limited to individual user accounts.

This is all speculation for my part.

In your situation, you will have little trust unless you gain back the 30 pages of missing data.

I am truly sorry that you are having problems, hopefully you will CALL the help desk and receive answers to your issues.

Best wishes, K. L. Adams

[larryhm]

Larry,

I am a database guy, if you write a query, the query is not prejudiced, which means it will not produce results for me, because it likes me better than you.

I'm leaning towards that you jumped in as they were in process of posting/refining results and as more criteria that came into play the query filtered out more data that really was of no use to you.

I work in IT too as a developer and on a Help Desk so I know the system is not prejudiced but it is rather patronizing of you to assume that no-one else realizes this. Your previous comment of 'I'm fine and not been affected' doesn't help those people who have been affected.

All that lots of people see is that they have lost data and there has been no attempt by FTDNA to explain what has happened. Just because they do not all complain here does not mean it is only a 'few' individuals and by the comments on here, it sounds like calling the Help Desk would be next to useless. Also being in IT, I would think that best practice is to have a test system to test programs and changes before deploying to the live environment to ensure things like this do not happen.

[K. L. Adams]

I work in IT too as a developer and on a Help Desk so I know the system is not prejudiced but it is rather patronizing of you to assume that no-one else realizes this. Your previous comment of 'I'm fine and not been affected' doesn't help those people who have been affected.

All that lots of people see is that they have lost data and there has been no attempt by FTDNA to explain what has happened. Just because they do not all complain here does not mean it is only a 'few' individuals and by the comments on here, it sounds like calling the Help Desk would be next to useless. Also being in IT, I would think that best practice is to have a test system to test programs and changes before deploying to the live environment to ensure things like this do not happen.

Look my friend, you may work as an IT type working as on a help desk, but you are certainly not a database application design guy or you would not have made those comments, especially about losing Data.

If the user account DNA results is loaded properly, which I understand there was some mistakes for some family finder accounts, the query is going to filter the required data from the database, PERIOD.

So, if your mtDNA results are loaded properly in your account. The program will query/filter those mtDNA results across the entire ftDNA database.

No data is ever LOST in the back-end database maintained by ftDNA, it all comes to your desktop delivered by an advanced query that filters data based on your results.

My yDNA is going to bring different results than your yDNA, unless we are both close matches. Same deal for all the other DNA tests.

but.....

The query running behind the scenes is the same, it is only the DNA results of each user that is different that is being filtered on a very large database.

So, either you have the correct results loaded now for your page count or you do not have the correct results loaded into your account, but you knew that as an IT/helpdesk guy, so no need for me to waste your time anymore.

[dna]

I have seen lots of discussions of problems with family finder matches, but have not seen a whole lot of trouble with Y-DNA, mtDNA and Big Y matches. [----] Anyway, for what it is worth, I have none of these problems that are being reported for multiple kits.

Please then check whether in your Big Y results you can see Shared Novel Variants for anybody whose results were posted after the 28th of April.

It appears that you would be the only one not experiencing that particular issue.

W. (Mr.)