I agree with the 5 years subscription concept, but we know who those two are- what about the OTHER 3 million subscribers who only EVER bought a ONE year deal- they are the target of my concern.
The number of 5 year subscriptions would at a guess have to be in lower percentile of total subscriptions. Therefore we should make recomendations and have procedures in place for the highrer percentile of normal 1 or 2 year subscriptions.
About users who post a tree and then don't touch it - this is a sensitive issue. Some people prefer to "host" their trees online at places like MyHeritage. It's a cultural thing, as most early genealogy sites were just that - a place to host your tree - and not much more. So a lot of people who pioneered working online have this kind of mind set - that your family tree gets posted online and other people can see it, but you don't really do a lot more than that with it.
The fact that family history web sites have come a long way since then and integrated many social networking features that make it possible not only to record your family history and search ancestors, but also contact famliy members, keep up to date with each other, send invites and get event notifications, create charts and reports, view statistics and so many other things, just doesn't occur to some people.
I'm generalizing here and I apologize if whoever reads this doesn't fit in that category. There are many reasons why a person might choose to upload their tree and not touch it. I invite other people who read this post to elaborate...
A lot of those people have really large trees that benefit the community at MyHeritage. (IMHO) for this reason their trees should be included in Smart Matches. For example, my little 170 person family tree got a match with someone who had a huge tree. I confirmed the match and it helped me get to other people like myself who have little trees that I would otherwise have a hard time reaching.
In essence, those large trees are like hubs that bring people together. So it's a real question whether or not to kill matches on trees like that. I hope you will appreciate that the issue is not a simple question of whether or not to allow Smart Matching on large trees that aren't "active" per say.
I am also of the opinion that old trees have interesting things to offer. Even though the data is old so are the people in the old tree. Not much happens there.
When it comes to research of real old people(historic people) much can happen with found documents etc. which give new knowledge and perhaps make big changes in the relations between people. There the old trees can be a problem if you dont be careful. Maybe you have some data which is correct and you are fooled to change to the old data by mistake. Therefor it is essential to not copy data right of without checking which sources is used for the data.
I am right now working with the swedish nobility (1100-1600) and even though I'm not finished with corrections I get Smart Matches from people who have copied my data right of. How do I know this? Because I use Coat of arms as personal pictures and some I have drawn myself which are also copied. My source is ÄSF which consist of 4 books with corrections in each book of previous books. So by entering data from first book may include some fault which is later corrected. By copying it before I have entered the corrections will unfortunatly spred the faults if they dont check it first.
I believe some people want a large number of people with faults in their trees before less number of people but correct. Is'nt that strange???
I find it also anoying with some people who put up tree after tree like "My Tree 2011-09-30", "My Tree 2011-10-31" and so on leaving me with Matches from almost 5 identical trees in different stages of development. When I'm just finished going thru last batch with Smart Matches (200 ) they put up a new tree and multiply that with 5 since there are many who does this.
If I understood the Whats new in 6.0 this would not be a problem any more since it would be possible to only maintain one tree from one FTB project.
FTB 6.0 prevents you from publishing the same tree to 2 family sites, which will also reduce smart matches noise.
FTB 7.0 will feature full sync between the tree in the program and the tree in the site, which is also bound to reduce noise, as users will maintain one tree only in their site.
For now, you can choose to "ignore tree" if you see that a certain user has published several back-ups of the same project to his site.
I looked at your account details and I can see your tree has been processed successfully.
Since your tree has 10K individuals in it, depending on the number of Smart Matching requests pending at the time your tree enters the queue it can take a bit longer than it does for smaller trees.
I also made sure that all support requests you sent will be answered if they haven't already. I see that Arbel and Aviv took care of the requests you had open this week.
This may seem picky, but I find it irritating (when trying to sift through hundreds of Smart Matches with 2 or less matches) and I have to hit "reject", "ignore tree" and "confirm ignoring tree" before I can move on to searching for the next needle in the haystack. I'm already limiting my review of Smart Matches to crown icons (indicator of more current trees and more serious researchers), but my clicking finger is pooped!
Technically you don't have to officially reject the actual match. Likely you will get other matches for more recent trees which you can confirm to give the system more info. I do admit that I sometimes have rejected or even confirmed a match on a tree I was about to ignore, but that's generally been a mistake and an exception. Sometimes if a tree has several matches, only one of which is actually wrong, I will reject that particular one before I ignore the tree.
Recently i've had notifications of 650 matches in 1 tree (13 pages @ 50 page) takes some time to check accuracy of thes matches, would be usefull to be able to process the matches in more managable batches.
I usually have FTB open as well, I toggle between web and FTB, to correct or add details in FTB as necessary rather having to trawl through smart matches in FTB at later time.
I've read in another post FTB 7 will have "Sync" bring it on sooner than later, this will influence my decission on renewing subscription to My Heritage or not.
When you reject a smart match you have to re-confirm each time, it would make things a lot easier if each entry had reject/confirm box and one click "process button" at end.
First make sure you are on your website, and not in the Family Tree Builder software (boxes with smart match circles). From the website set of Smart Matches (usually they are more current by 2 or 3 days than the Smart Matches in the software), you will have the option of sorting by "Family" versus "Individual". Choose " By Family"tab on the upper right hand side of the page. You will then have the option of "Confirming" all of the entries at once. Good luck.
See my comment re rejects, somtimes on page of 50 matches lol (thats another story) can be ratio 50/50 confirm/reject each individual reject must be re-confirmed!
I have just experinced (not for the first time) a Smart match (is that an oxymoron) wher - the names did not match the parents did not match but even the SEX did not match
As far as I can tell, it "matched" Eliazer and and last names only... This is not the first time it has happened, just that I managed to capture the screenshot before I rejected the unmatch.
Hi Shelly,We have a known issue of corrupt Smart Matches pools, which cause this strange behaviour.Our development team will make improvements in our algorithm as soon as possible.In the meanwhile I apologize for the inconvenience, and hope you will be able to get good matches as well.Regards,Noam \ MyHeritage Team
I get these all the time, about 10-15 so far in my latest batch of Smart matches. Here's one of them with nothing other than 17 to link them together. Can you let us know when this might end, please? Thanks, Dianne
35%
Archange Langlois
1792 - 1848
Husband:
Joseph
Children:
Archange, Elisabeth and Felix
William WELCH
1778 - ?
Father:
Walter
Wife:
Martha
Children:
James, Jane, Mary, Telitha, Matilda, Martha Or Malinda, Bartema, Isham, Amos, Iseral, Martin Luther and Sarah Ann
When we send a reminder to a person to confirm start matches, does the reminder go to their email, or just make some sort of comment on their site? If they have ignored trees for any smart matches they get, do they still get the reminder? It would be nice to know exactly what is going on with them one way or another as to why they are not confirming.