When I see a bunch of those I ALWAYS mark the "Ignore this site". If a person can't mark those as dead then I won't bother trying to compare any thing for them. :-(
I dont think that not marking people as dead is the whole story. A while ago many matches started to have <private> on the relatives which, if you go in and look at the match in Compare Tree, becomes visible. I just checked one of the matches I have got. They have both birth and death info. Either the people have changed the mark for their trees as <private> or a system glitch has done that for them. I saw a post here where someone had <private> in their tree without having done anything by their knowledge.
I am getting messages from others trying to 'Smartmatch' to my records that are getting most showing as <Private>. This just started happening in the last few weeks.
I have always made special effort to check all my records older than 70 years as 'deceased' even if I have no date of death, so that is not the cause of the <Private> they are seeing.
I too, usually set new sites with most marked as "Private" to IGNORE, but will have to stop doing this since it looks like this is a recent system glitch and not always the user' fault.
This is not the only reason as to why a person would be viewed as <Private>. Another reason is for a user who is publishing with the Family Tree Builder specifying for specific people (or facts) to not show on their family site.
When encountering such people you will not be able to view either all information or some of it.
If any of you know any private cases where it looks like the user on the other end did not do just that, we would be glad if you could write an email to support@myheritage.com.
Currently, we do not know of any bugss that cause the smart matches show <private> people on your tree.
I have been going through my many 100's of smart matching notifications (must admit it is infrequent - putting that aside) and I am rather frustrated as 'supposed smart matches' with people in other trees.
They are not even the same name, same parent/s, same spouse, same siblings, same gender and in some case not even the same dates. I am even get siblings coming up as a 'smart match'.
I spent over 5 hrs hrs yesterday going through these supposed 'smart matches' for people that should never have been matched in the first place because of the above reasons.
These are not new trees I have uploaded - I am talking about information that is very old and been on the server for a long time.
How can I make the definitions more accurate so 'smart matching' does not waiste my time - telling me to look at the % rate of match is not the answer. I don't think turning off smart matching is a solution either.
I feel the same way, these are none to smart. It seems to be a waste of time and energy.
I also notice that a lot of people are just ignoring them, probably for the same reason we are finding.
In this regard this program sucks!!!!
I have been going through my many 100's of smart matching notifications (must admit it is infrequent - putting that aside) and I am rather frustrated as 'supposed smart matches' with people in other trees.
They are not even the same name, same parent/s, same spouse, same siblings, same gender and in some case not even the same dates. I am even get siblings coming up as a 'smart match'.
I spent over 5 hrs hrs yesterday going through these supposed 'smart matches' for people that should never have been matched in the first place because of the above reasons.
These are not new trees I have uploaded - I am talking about information that is very old and been on the server for a long time.
How can I make the definitions more accurate so 'smart matching' does not waiste my time - telling me to look at the % rate of match is not the answer. I don't think turning off smart matching is a solution either.
A new mechanism for calculating Smart Matches is already in our developer's hands and is on the road map as part of Smart Matches improvements. This new mechanism will reduce the number of false positive matches you get. It's much more robust than our current system. We are not making any promises about time frames for release of this new system - there is still a lot to understand about the scope of the project before we can define and promise a time - but I thought you would be interested to know it's in the works. We are also looking at the possibility of allowing you to configure your matches to show only a certain percentage of quality. It means you will be able to say "I only want to see matches that are above 80%" and then you won't have to be bothered with all the other, lower quality matches. If we can add this feature relatively quickly we will.
Here's one possible solution: Turn OFF StupidMatching. Life is so much easier now. At least now I don't get matches simply because both people have 2 left legs or an "E" somewhere in their name or whatever the silly matching algorithm threw together.
Of course, you'll get MH support people telling you that once you reject a match, it learns and you won't get it again. Don't listen to them. It's not the truth. Only way to stop getting matches over and over again is to have everyone STOP loading new trees. Everytime another person loads a tree, it starts all over again. After rejecting the same, totally and improbably incorrect people over and over and over and over again, I turned off the blasted thing.
I'm seriously considering finding my old copy of Family Tree Maker 2005 and going back to that.
Don't bother asking for "help". All you'll get is a canned response: "Thank you for your suggestion. I will forward it to the appropriate department for further consideration". I was at a genealogy lecture last year and the speaker was the head of development for MyHeritage. All he said was how great the site was, how people were excited to use it, how responsive the company was to suggestions blah blah blah. I told him how disappointed I was and that I was NOT renewing and he just said that was my perogative.
With "help" like that, no wonder people are leaving left and right. As it is, once I reload my FTM 2005 and export all my info from MH, I won't bother with this site anymore except for these forums.
I see the frustration in your message. Have you considered sending DIRECT to MH instead of the Forum. It seems to me that the MH team have been given a blurb response and - seemingly like any american service (although they are NOT american) its the sing-a -long line that must be provided for an answer- try and pacify the natives without actualy answering the concern. Dont give up.
Very true - it is not the most user friendly site I have been on - I will consider my options when my subscription comes up - bit sad really considering the potential it has.
I have been with them since 2007 under my current registration but was with the site prior to that for quite a number of years.
Thanks for attaching a screenshot. It really helps to illustrate the question you have.
What you are doing when you type the name in this box is creating a connection between a person's site member profile and their entry in the family tree.
I looked at your family trees and I wasn't able to find your cousin's name in any of the trees on your family site. In order to show the relationship of your cousin's site member profile to the family tree that person must exist in one of the trees on your family site.
Try adding your cousin to the tree first. Then you'll have no problem.
This is frustrating. I cannot see this button either. I have been trying to get an answer to my question and no response. Can someone please assist me. I have a site manager on my two trees that in the last week cannot edit, add, delete anything. I have tried to demote and promote them to see if this reinstates their access rights and no success. Can someone please correct this asap.
Thank you,
Michelle
Hi Juhani,
Thank you for writing.
I must thank you - we have a bug in the help page that causes the button to disappear. Your post made us aware of it.
I agree. I saw the same message but "ask a rep" was missing from my page. I don't think it is a browser problem because I have used it in the past (and I used Chrome all the time.) Ben
Thanks for the support. I am really thinking about pulling out the whole bloody MyHeritage and sign up with Ancestor. No service for to ask questions how to use their site, that sucks!
I've just gone through 87 new matches, and only five of those were correct matches, so the rest was just a waste of time. I would like to have some settings where I can decide how close they should be.
If the years of birth or death are 200 years apart, I don't want to know about it (a useless match). For crying out loud, why is that even considered a match! Up to 50 years is acceptable if I could decide.
If none of the names match, I don't want to know either.
If not at least 50 % of the information match, I don't want to know.
Another thing that annoys me is the sorting of matches. Why do sites with 0 matches stay in the list higher up than sites with 5, 7, 10 or any number of correct matches no matter how I sort them? It doesn't make any sense.
Thank you for the messages. Smart matches are dynamic and dependent on two parties, this means that there can be delays when processing trees if for example the tree you matched with is very large. It can happen that when the new smart matches are populated into your tree in family tree builder you will see no matches for a short time until our servers can finish the processing.
A new mechanism for calculating Smart Matches is already in our developer's hands and is on the road map as part of Smart Matches improvements. This new mechanism will reduce the number of false positive matches you get. It's much more robust than our current system. We are not making any promises about time frames for release of this new system - there is still a lot to understand about the scope of the project before we can define and promise a time - but I thought you would be interested to know it's in the works.
We are also looking at the possibility of allowing you to configure your matches to show only a certain percentage of quality. It means you will be able to say "I only want to see matches that are above 80%" and then you won't have to be bothered with all the other, lower quality matches. If we can add this feature relatively quickly we will.
