Family Tree viewing problem?

[suemae]

Tree viewing impossible

I have had these problems on 4 kits. It is useless the way it is. Might as well not have any trees, at least it would not tease you that you might have a connection. That goes for mine and my matches! A pure joke!

[Jeff in Colorado]

Tree search just hangs

I find on large trees if I push down into a tree the system just hangs with the circling icon. I called customer service a week or two ago and they said it is a known problem. I suggested they post a note so people know it is being worked on.

At this point the site is becoming useless past the first level. I have tried Chrome, IE and Firefox and it appears to be the same on all browsers.

Now spending time elsewhere for my research. Very disappointed.

[VivM]

Same problem, same answer. This has been going on for months with no help at all. It renders the website useless in my mind and it was their best feature two years ago.

[John McCoy]

Hint to developers: this problem wouldn't happen if the "tree" were a simple text-based pedigree chart along the lines of what we see on the GEDmatch site. The complications caused by treating ancestors on a pedigree chart as graphical objects are entirely avoidable.

[mhopk]

I have had these problems on 4 kits. It is useless the way it is. Might as well not have any trees, at least it would not tease you that you might have a connection. That goes for mine and my matches! A pure joke!

I couldn't agree more. They may as well remove the feature.

[Darren]

The engineering team is looking at overhauling the trees. I don't have a time frame yet but they know it is an issue and is on their radar to get collected. It came up at the recent conference.

-Darren
Family Tree DNA

[ConZ]

The engineering team is looking at overhauling the trees. I don't have a time frame yet but they know it is an issue and is on their radar to get collected. It came up at the recent conference.

-Darren
Family Tree DNA

They must be doing it at the moment because I can no longer access trees.

[B79648]

It should have come up before this recent conference since it's been complained about here for a while.

The trees are a big part of putting who's actually a relation into the right order. It's very aggravating when I've got a lead and can't get past the first screen of a tree to check things out.

Please, get this resolved soon. I'll be grateful and am sure others will be too.

[sunkeeper]

So here we sit on Dec 9th and the issue is still not resolved. I just don't understand why your not accountable to your customer. Even comments on the forums are still running backwards. Me thinks you need new IT proffesionals in your midst. Pretty sad.

[Polskamom]

Tree Useless

I use a desktop, Mozilla browser (sometimes Internet Expl). The boxes the names are in cuts-off the names so you can not read them.

I have to ask, "Does Family Finder even read these gripes or is this here just for us to vent?"

[B79648]

This needs to be taken care of. There is a tree I need to see. It has a lot of the people in it I've got on mine as well.

It never loads past the first page and sometimes not that far. If someone doesn't also use Ancestry so I can go there and see a tree I'm SOL on the matches here helping me at all.

I paid to get the matches after the upload, then for the mtDNA, for my son's upload, my sister's upload, the other sister came over from 23andme to test, then we pitched in and bought two more kits here to test possible members of my father's birth family. My other son and the youngest's girlfriend are next and that will also be on me.

That's enough money spent here that I expect to be able to use the trees to work out the links and make connections with people.

This is not acceptable at all.

[Illumina]

We've been having problems with our family trees for almost a year. And, unfortunately, the FTDNA staff always comes with the same old excuses that they are aware of the problem, that maybe it could be a browser issue, that the engineering team will work it out as soon as possible. And the solution never comes.

I have 6 kits that I manage and I've been having trouble seeing, exploring and editing the trees, since the new layout was released. Some of my ancestors appear to my matches as private/additional info not available, even though they're marked as deceased and died more than 100 years ago. It's really annoying!

It's useless complaining on the forum. We'd better contact FTDNA by phone or e-mail.

I believe we all should write an e-mail to FTDNA helpdesk, IT department, ET exposing the problem, expressing our insatisfaction as clients and demanding a solution. I also suggest sending a copy of our e-mail to the president and CEO of FTDNA Mr. Bennett Greenspan. His e-mail is:[email protected]

They owe us some respect. We are clients and satisfied clients will always be their best advertisement.

[Darren]

Hello all,

Bennett Greenspan is well aware of the issue as is the rest of the management team. You are welcome to voice your complaints here on the forum, or via the helpdesk. Should you feel the need to you can contact Bennett as well, but these emails will likely be forwarded to others in the company, since it is not a new issue and is currently in the pipeline for improvements. I am sorry for the inconvenience this is causing, I agree it is a large inconvenience.

-Darren
Family Tree DNA

[gtc]

As regards FTDNA's IT effort, I draw some hope from this report out of FTDNA's recent Annual Conference about a significant management change:

Max [Blankfeld] introduced Mike Alexander for an Engineering Update. Mike is head of the IT department right now. Mike has been in IT for 30 years and is from Houston. He spent 10 years at NASA working on the Space Shuttle program working with high performance computing and the operating system for the space station. After that he worked in telecommunications for 8 years at WorldCom. He managed all of the circuits with large quantities of data. For the last 10 years he has been in the financial markets. He helped to build trading systems, utilizing high performance computing to make sure things are fast. He is hoping to spend the next 10-15 years working with Max and Bennett.

Mike follows the three P’s: People, Processes, and Products. When Mike started at FTDNA, he felt that there was a problem with the balance of staff. They doubled the number of people on staff to do testing. Everyone was doing a good job but there was heavy manual testing and it was hard to keep up. Mitch did a tremendous amount of System Administration. They’ve also doubled up that staff. They created a Database Administration team and also a Technical Writer. They intend to do a better job of communicating changes to the project administrators.

Some improvements are computer programs that test Family Tree DNA, computer programs that tell them when Family Tree DNA is too slow, and they will replace computers before they break. They have replaced pictures on the wall with monitors to keep up with things.

They have rebuilt Family Finder, using high performance computing techniques. They use these techniques throughout FTDNA. These techniques make FTDNA more responsive and this helps them deliver new features quicker. They’re updating all of their computers and network hardware.