Mayflower 2.0 Status Update
As I’m certain you are aware by now, Migrating data from MyFamily.com into Spokt is a very challenging and complex process. Our unique access to MyFamily allows us to do what many have not been able to do. Specific limitations also exist, as we’ve previously noted.
We have encountered an issue in our attempts to transfer the member records from MyFamily.com 2.0/2.5. We believe we can circumvent some or all of the hurdles we’ve encountered, but this will take some time. We expect to have this issue resolved before the end of next week (13 Sept 2014).
We expected to be finalizing imports of MyFamily.com 2.0/2.5 sites early this week but this issue has set back our timetable. It is important that you understand that there is no cause to be concerned: If your site is in “Processing Import” Status that means that we have exported all of your discussions, photos, videos, and files. This data is exported, and is now safely in our care. Once we are able to successfully transfer the member records we will be able to finalize the import.
As always you can check the status of your Mayflower orders here: http://spokt.com/mayflower/migrations. If you see “Export Complete”, “Import Queued”, or “Processing Import” then you can breathe a sigh of relief. We have your data. If you see “Exporting” or any other status we’ll have it soon!
MyFamily 1.0 Sites are unaffected by this issue and will continue to transfer as usual.
Thank you again for all of your support and patience as we work around the clock to save your data.
You have done a great job. Looking forward to your future endeavors. Will we be able to print off list of members and their addresses as we did on myfamily? I am sure you have already thought of this. I am the secretary of the reunion and use that list every year. Again, thanks for a job well done!!!!!!!!!!!! Donna Kobbe
Thanks Donna,
We’ll keep printing in-mind as we develop our membership features.
I am thinking this is the answer I have been looking for. I have this My Family site which has been used for several years and would like to preserve as much as possible intact. I have been saving but not enough to assure all is as should be and it will be difficult to organize later also. I am not sure which name is now used, and I am unable to get into the site though I was told it would be there until Sept. 30 an extended date.
Do I use the 01 or 02? Is the cost then $69.00 plus $29.00 or $98.00. Can I still get it done by the cut off date hopefully.
Hi Sandra,
I’m glad you found us! The subscription for a Spokt hub is $29/year for 15GB of storage and unlimited members. We charge a one-time fee of $69 per site migrated with Mayflower. We can migrate sites from both MyFamily.com 1.0 and 2.0.
Most sites are migrated in about a week so yes there is still time!
Thanks for your answer. I am also considering merging with another site and a member of my own. We have shared and worked as admin of separate sites for quite some time and both value saving what we have. Am I understand that the other site has its hub at $29.00 plus the migration fee of $69.00 and once both sites are migrated and running then the migration can be done by one of us? Can the site then have both of us as administrators? We have some of the same members and info also, since we have shared. Will that cause us problems with the migration and otherwise?
Hi Sandra,
You can run as many hubs as you’d like, have as many members as you’d like. You can have multiple admins in each hub. Each hub costs $29/year and each migration costs $69. Any hub administrator can bring the results of a Mayflower migration into their hub.
Go spokt! We all thank you for your honesty and transparency… I believe we all thought this transfer from myfamily and ancestry would be impossible a few weeks ago?? You and your team are doing the impossible.
So glad to have found you. I was devastated to lose MyFamily.com and all the history accrued over the past 14 years but you have saved it all. The transfer of myfamily1 went better than I had hoped and I am anticipating the same success in the transfer of myfamily2 which is now at import status.
Thanks for your excellent work and commitment to refine.
Thanks for sharing your success story here Ron! We’ll get your 2.0 site imported soon!
Hello,
I have two family groups to bring over, and I believe they are both 2.0. I just saw your announcement about issues with migrating the 2.0 sites and wonder if I should wait until you say it is ok (Sept 13 or so) or get in the queue now- both sites have lots and lots of photos- gulp:(
Hi Karen,
I recommend you get in the queue now. There is only a delay in the members section. We have a solution which will work, it’s now simply a matter of implementing it.
Thank you so much for doing this. I was devastated at the thought of losing myfamily. I started to save things myself but there was just too much. I found this a little late so I am hopeful everything is going smoothly as I am still waiting on my 1.0 migration. I have two questions however, first what information exactly will not be migrated (I read calendar, but I want to know if there is more), and second is there an app for spokt on the horizon at all? That is one thing my family and I all wished we had for myfamily but it never came to pass.
Thanks!
Hi Charlotte,
We’re glad you found us! We transfer the File Cabinet, News, History, Photos, Recipes, Reviews. Anything not in those sections won’t be transferred (e.g. Calendar, Polls, Family Trees, & Email). Early this year we launched a mobile version of our site which is great for catching up on Spokt and we will continue to update it. We have not made any announcements regarding a native phone app.
Thank you for getting back to me!
I was alarmed today when I discovered that SPOKT began to download my site from myfamily to a member of my site, without checking with me, the administrator of the site. This means that as long as someone pays they can download any site they want if they have the Username and password for the myfamily site. There is something not right here that should be corrected SPOKT.
Hi Eamon, You are correct anyone that you have granted access to can access the contents of your site and therefore can initiate a Mayflower migration. I’m sure we can work out a solution. We’ll contact you via email with more details.
Hi, iis the snag you have on the extracting membership data only on the MyFamily 2.0. Because i have noticed for a very long time that most of my member’s email addresses vanished while I was at MyFamily. At first they had a different way of inviting people than they changed it to the front of the page. So that would be no alarm for me. I can gather the list to invite them elsewhere once I have my hub set up! There were only a handful family members coming into my site. I would just like to save my files and records I have now. I’m anxiously awaiting.
Thanks!
Hi Velma,
It looks like you were able to finalize your migration successfully since you made this comment. Please contact support if you have any issues with your migrated content.
I agree with Eamon. A member should not be able to take a site, simply because they are a member. That is stealing in my opinion. The owners/administrators should be the only ones able to migrate a myfamily.com site. The owners/administrators have put years of time, effort and money into building these sites. The members are welcome, but they do not own the sites. They should not be able to steal the entire site by migrating to Spokt just because they were invited to a myfamily.com site and gained membership. If this is true, and it appears to be, I am very disappointed in Spokt.
Hi Debbie & Eamon. I’m sorry we’ve disappointed you. Perhaps a little insight can help here.
Mayflower is not able to differentiate between admins and non-admins. As with MyFamily’s export tool, Mayflower allows all of the members which you’ve invited to your private site to export the site data. I’ve personally overseen migration of data for tens of thousands of members, and I’ve only seen a handful (a single handful even) of sites that were downloaded redundantly. In every case I’ve seen so far, sites have been downloaded by participating members simply with the intent of saving the data you all collectively treasure, data they’ve participated in curating with you over the years. They’re doing their “good deed” by helping save the data for the group.
We’ve added some intelligent checks and messages so that inadvertent, unintended downloads no longer happen without the migrator being clearly informed, and believe this will correct the problem most (all?) admins are seeing.
And of course, if there is a problem where an unintended, redundant migration has occurred, our support team is happy to help you on an individual basis. If an inadvertent migration has occurred, please contact us at http://spokt.com/contact and we’ll be more than happy to help you sort it out.
I do want to add to what I just posted, Spokt has done us an amazing service in migrating our sites, especially getting 2.0 going in time!!! I very much appreciate all they do. I am sure members being able to migrate complete myfamily.com sites is just a glitch that occurred and that they intended no harm. If no one migrated these sites, they would just be gone completely, which would be a shame.
Hi Dan,
No, I’m not finalized yet!
I was referring to my 2nd hub—which is my personal family migration from MyFamily 20. It is still in processing mode for quite awhile. At first had Finalize this–then it changed to processing mode. Can you look into my status as to why it has not finalized?
Thanks,
Velma
Velma,
2.0 Sites are still on track to start finalizing this weekend.
I feel pretty strongly at this point that, with only 2 weeks remaining, Spokt should be giving us much clearer and more consistent updates with regards to what, exactly, the problems are with the 2.0 migration.
I also feel you should be going ahead and showing us our sites with what you DO have, so we can really rest assured that our material has migrated and know for certain what our worst case scenario is. If, for example, all our members’ discussions or comments are in there, but we just don’t have a members list and have to reinvite everyone, that is one thing. If the discussions and comments have lost connection to actual member names, that is quite a bit more serious for us.
I have been very appreciative of all of Spokt’s efforts. However, at this point, the closeness of the deadline, the lack of updates for over a week, and the lack of any proof at all that you have what you say you have and that we have nothing to worry about, is a problem.
We have no second chance here.
BTW if you have a relationship with myfamily, it would be great if you could ask them to extend the deadline by a month. That would be the appropriate thing for them to do if they are working with you on these problems.
For us, we’d just like to have what we can of our site…with or without members…so we can see where we actually are and what we actually do or do not have to worry about.
Thanks.
Hi Kayle,
Thanks for the candid feedback. I realize it may seem unsettling to you to “trust us”, but we don’t take that trust or responsibility lightly. Please see our latest blog post today for an update on our progress with the member matching for 2.0 sites. Rest assured we have your data, and we are working hard to make sure it’s all wired up in the best way possible.
Thanks again for your patience, and keep an eye on your inbox (and the blog) this week for coming details!
As I said before, MyFamily 2.0 was a Beta site and mid-way they changed their way of people joining. I know on my site, seems like later either people weren’t filling out and leaving email addresses, yet they were able to come into the site. However–I couldn’t communicate with them, for they didn’t leave an email address behind. I hope that is not the case. According to the note Dan @ SPOKT left above, they are scheduled to start finalizing our migration this weekend! Well the weekend is here! I have confidence they will come through!
Hi Velma. We have initiated the final imports over the weekend, and will be ramping it up over the coming days. Thanks for hanging in there with us!
I’m thinking about switching my family to Spokt now that MyFamily is going away. I’m just confused… I know you can’t migrate our calendar over, but will there BE a calendar? That’s one of the most important things to us. I just don’t see a firm answer to that.
Thanks
Hi Lucy,
It’s a bit confusing since we’re not transferring the past calendar data, but to answer your question, YES! We WILL have a calendar feature. We’re neck deep in migrations at the moment, but are excited to be able to shift gears to the upcoming features we’ve announced, one of which is calendar.
I hope that helps!
RJ
Migration is complete for three of our myfamily.com sites. Beginning to feel a bit better about not losing YEARS of family history data.
While looking around our new hub, am I correct that Photos are in the PHOTO area, but all other myfamily sections such as NEWS, FILE CABINET, HISTORY, RECIPES, etc. can be found in the NEWS area on our hub?
I’ve done a couple searches so I know the old posts are there, but still trying to determine if they are located in the NEWS area.
Thank you!
Hello Denise,
Yes, you are absolutely correct. We will be offering additional tools to drill into the old sections, categories, and albums from MyFamily, but in the meantime you can find them quite easily through search.
Glad you’ve found us! Welcome to Spokt!!
Eamon Aylward post on
September 11, 2014 at 1:25 am
I share Eamon Aylward’s frustration that Spokt does not allow administrator control of membership access but rather my MyFamily.com members will be provided proactive access via the migration methodology. I want to start fresh with my membership on Spokt.com and provide my own invitations when I feel the site is ready for participation (clean up on my part)–and I want to be able to block access to those not invited by ME.
I also have a cost question that I would like clarified: with MyFamily.com, I paid for the site as the administrator and all of my invited members participated for free. With Spokt.com, does my hub membership cover all of my Hub members or does each one also have to pay a Hub fee to participate? I assume by the FAQ info (see excerpt below), that my $29 for the 15gb of data allows members to participate without charge, correct?
Q: How much does it cost?
Our current plan allows you to upload up to 15gb of data for $29/year. Each additional gigabyte of data is just $1.99/year.
Following up on my first point: I see that Spokt has been busy working on Administrator rights options. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
Hi Dr Deb,
If you would like to forego the auto-invite process, we can manually exclude your site for a one-time $15 charge. You will be responsible for manually inviting the members (for existing members that were at MyFamily, you’ll want to do this via the specific re-invite tool provided on each member’s profile page rather than the general invite screen. If you would like to stop the email invites from being sent out automatically, please contact support at the link below PRIOR to finalizing your migration. We’ll confirm your request, disable the auto-invites, and walk you through the process of manually inviting the existing MyFamily members you would like to re-include.
Here’s the link for support:
http://spokt.com/contact
Thanks!
RJ
Thanks, RJ! I will do as you suggest and appreciate the option.
As they have stated, our data is already saved and in their capable hands. They just want to get it right. So relax, don’t worry, be patient. I am thankful to have found such wonderful, caring people, who desire to achieve quality results.
Thanks Debbie! You are correct — we have the data, and are working hard to make a safe handoff to you.
Have a great week!
RJ
Is there anyway to have other members of a hub see the status of a Mayflower 2.0 import? Another member of our family initiated our Mayflower migration yet when I check to see the status it tells me that nothing has been initiated. Plus it offers me the chance to start a migration for the same my.family site (for another 69.95) that is already in progress which is confusing and could lead to multiple migrations.
Hi Bob,
If you proceed with a second migration of the same site, we now notify you that the site has already been migrated. This informs members of the migration already in process, and helps prevent unwanted duplicate migrations.
Hope this helps!
RJ
Hi RJ,
Thanks. I’ll just keep bugging my brother then for an update on our migration. 🙂
Bob
Our migrated data showed up today. Looks good. Great job Spokt!
Thanks Bob, we’re glad you found us!