should I sign up with you, when a very quick stroll through your help pages reveals a great many angry and frustrated users? It looks like you're even worse than Ancestry, and I yearn for something better than the dreary Purgatory they provide at huge expense. Seriously, people, how hard can it be to run a site like this without eternal frustration and incompetent design?
Date
Votes
5 comments
-
Matthew Riggle Ted, I advise you to look elsewhere for now, perhaps FamilySearch, WikiTree, or WeRelate. Geni.com have changed their terms too many times, always to the detriment of their members, upon whom they rely. Most recently they canceled lifetime memberships in exchange for 5-year memberships. Does that seem like a good deal?
-
Jeff, Geni Curator Keith, They also made a bunch of paid services free and gave a $600 data subscription to those lifetime members (more than the cost of the membership, plus five years, plus whatever they used). Not saying that is equal compensation - depends on each person and the value to them. Obviously, Keith didn't care for that deal and he can contact subscriptions to work something out as they have stated several times.
Geni is unique and personally, I really like their design and tools - it is a collaborative tree with the goal of creating a single world tree, which your tree plugs into. This allows us to work together on making the common ancestors as accurate and documented as they can be. If one person gets new information, it is updated for all. If you're looking for your own private tree, then I suggest one of the other sites.
-
Matthew Riggle Jeff, the lifetime membership was worth much more to me than a data subscription with MyHeritage, which I already had two years of anyway. I have contacted Subscriptions but have yet to hear back from them. I will be satisfied with nothing less than getting my lifetime membership back. By the way, why was there nothing in the email from Geni about contacting Subscriptions? Why did I have to search in the forums to find that out? And why are you defending Geni so staunchly, when they have repeatedly made decisions that are detrimental to their members?
Geni is not unique. FamilySearch, WikiTree, and WeRelate are also striving for a single world tree. There are probably others, as well. There's even a Facebook group that suggests alternative services. The three services I named are free with no limitations on the number of profiles, merging profiles, etc. FamilySearch is constantly striving to provide better tools and resources to their users, including a huge and ever growing database of documents. I'm glad you're happy with Geni, but for me and many others, the elimination of lifetime memberships is one misstep too far in a long line of missteps.
-
Jeff, Geni Curator My point was that you didn't include what was offered, only the time-frame change, which gave a inaccurate picture. I could argue about the comparable services, but anyway... enough said.
-
Matthew Riggle My original comment may have been incomplete, but it was not inaccurate. Whether Geni.com provided lifetime members data memberships to a service they didn't ask for is irrelevant to a prospective member. The relevant point is that Geni keeps changing its terms of service without warning, only this time they took away something people had actually paid for. If I were looking into joining Geni right now, I would steer clear if I knew this.
Post is closed for comments.