Mayflower Update
What a week it’s been.
We are happy to report that we have now successfully completed more than 95% of the migration requests that we’ve received. A challenge that was doomed to take months only last week has been tamed into submission this week, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the results our efforts have brought.
With millions upon millions of records added to our database and tens-of-thousands new members this last week alone, we’re a bit overwhelmed by how busy things have become. We are receiving quite a bit of feedback both on our blog and in our support queue. Most of the messages we’re receiving are glowing, like the following:
“Spokt team – you are beyond awesome! Import completed and 100% sucessful – any minor gliches were addressed by your team promptly…Hooray!”
“I must admit that I was a fence sitter. A friend on another site that is offering import services has been keeping me abreast of their import said more than a couple of weeks ago that he had been notified that his data had been retrieved from MyFamily and that he would be notified when it was ready to view on their site. I have not heard anything further, so I’m thinking that they must be having some problems.
However, I have been allowed to log into one of the sites that have been imported to a Spokt hub. Kudos to you guys!”
“Dear Spokt family, we could not be more pleased. I like it just the way you did it. The search you gave us serves as the solution to most of my questions and in general it is refreshing to look at all this familiar stuff in a new and excitedly fresh way! It feels every bit a Family History gathering place. The fine search facility makes every surname important.”
“Announcement of import occurred on July 31st. Got my notice to beginning import 5 days later. Only had to re-identify 2 users. Import was flawless and only took minutes. Great job! My users are pleased.”
“I am thrilled to report that the Spokt team got right on it! They immediately looked into and resolved my import problem, and it looks like we have everything now! There are some duplicates in the photos, but I can deal with that. I am just so relieved and appreciative of the dedication shown by the Spokt staff. Well done!!”
“Over 10 years worth of posts with 740 users and as far as we can see not one post or user missed.
Yup there are some differences between MyFamily and Spokt. But nothing that can’t be resolved over time.
When you know that your data is a) safe, b) back in the land of the living and c) never at the mercy of a 3rd party again, all for less than one good meal and not the price of a small car, we for one (or 740!) are more grateful than words can express.
So we will say simply, in caps – THANK YOU each and every one of the hard and long working staff!!!!!!!!”
However, there are a handful of you who have had a less than perfect experience. We want you to know we are aware of you and the issues you’ve reported, and we are working hard to make sure you get everything you need to make your migration a success so you can have the peace of mind you’ve trusted us to provide.
We are working on a major blog post (coming right up) which will outline the most recent questions that have been asked by admins and members alike. This should help answer many of your questions and give you an idea of what to expect now that the migration has been completed.
We kindly ask that you continue to be patient and carefully read through the known issues in the next blog post before you contact Support. If your request or question is covered there, please sit tight and wait for an official response from us regarding the solution we’ve come up with. We know we can offer a favorable answer to most (if not all) of the questions you are asking, but in order to do this we NEED to be able to commit the majority of our resources to creating solutions, rather than answering repeat questions. Thank you for understanding, and thank you for all of your continued support, trust, and assistance in making Spokt the best MyFamily replacement on the planet.
– The Spokt Team
Great idea!
In addition, a separate blog post summarizing the requested new features or functionality would be useful. Things like the ability to resend invitation emails to potential members created by Spokt or editing the Invitation Letter after the import process is completed.
Or would the above be included in the “major blog post” that you described?
Hi Bob,
That’s precisely what we’re working on. Release coming soon!
RJ, Please tell the engineers I said thanks for adding password tool for the admins to use.
Ron
I just found this page this minute.
I was pleased with my first migrated site even with a few missing parts on Photos pages.
So I got my co-admin to order three more sites and the first site was migrated completely miraculously fast. Still finding more little problems, but most is there and if Ancestry.com gives me the time I can correct the omissions on my own.
However the other two sites have been uploaded and not downloaded, so I guess we have two of our three ordered sites in the 5% not completed and yet the first was done so fast and members are slowly showing up, after being discourage for over two years by Ancestry.com’s antics clsiming that things broke that they could not fix and then fixing them for a week and then they are gone for a year and then fixing them once the sites were officially closed.
As I know I must make corrections and additions, I am desperate to get these other two sites downloaded. Some of the really important pages might well be truncated and time to find those pages is rapidly being lost.
Whst is the cause of the 5& that are not completed? Have their migrations failed despite showing otherwise?
Hi Chief,
Not all sites are created equal. The usual reason sites take longer because they are larger (More posts, larger photos, more photos). We appreciate your patience as our engineers work through the extremely tricky task of moving all these little bits from one end of the internet to the other.
I am co-Admin to Chief Scribe and it was my credit card used to pay the bill.
We are concerned now that it is more days that it took to get our first site in that order of three ready for checking (and that is a good story with many little problems almost all still outstanding) as we ordered on August 5, what we thought were three sites (an error of a fourth one, unchecked as best we knew and then showing up on the next page as ordered)was to be corrected but despite a confirmation of that being promised by Ben it is not done to date and it is overdue.
If 95& are done, then the problems blocking the other 5% including two of our three should be such as to begin to be resolved.
We understand that the myriad of problems are such s to delay an answer, but surely with these problems, the sites that have been ordered should be downloaded so that we can begin to correct the standard errors we have been observing, some of which could have been avoided, such as doing only three of the seven headings titles and missing parts of description. The failure to give the Categories/Albums lists, even when the links do not work is much regretted as well as it was an integral part of our pages.
The site downloaded had over 3,000 Categories at History, hundreds at Photos and News and not a one of them will be able to be used as they have been inexplicably omitted.
Even without live links, this categories and albums are critical.
So if any of these can be addressed while there is some chance to correct those that are not going to be addressed it would be appreciated.
That starts with what is happening with our two missing sites?
There is only so much time each day we will have to fix the missing items, collect the missing pages, copy the missing scands (one Photo page had half ot he posts but was missing 9 posts and 9 scans, but we found it, but we need the other two sites to look at our prime posts to make sure that at least we do not lose any part of those. However our prime posts are not marked, just found if we are lucky in reviewing the near two thousand pages of Photos and similar numbers of News and History ones.
In total we estimate 70,000 posts will need to be checked and we hope if the other two sites are downloaded to get members there to assist.
If we do not have them downloaded soon, the time will be major enemy rather than just one of many problems to face.
I am 83 years old, active on my own work, but will not be volunteering even though I retired as an IT manager a decade and more ago. My life has more crucial research I plan to do as long as I can read the computer screen.
Time is crucial for the two sites to be organized and worked upon, if volunteers can be found, after the awaited but delayed downloads, at the very least of all these the other problems.
Hi Henny,
70,000 posts, 3,000 categories! What great sites you must have! I’m glad you recognize the great value Mayflower provides, nobody has time to go through and save all that data manually!
I recall hearing the engineering team mention some issues with three or four sites that contained invalid html. I don’t know if your site was among these but if you haven’t contacted support, please do so.
Are you going to provide categories for all of our data, including photos, news, history, file-cabinet?
I need to know. If you aren’t we must look elsewhere because we have too much data to search for an item by scrolling through all of the posts one at a time. Please let me know if we can expect the cateogies to be exported and used to partition our data?
Andy Grisham
Hi Andrew,
Yes! We are storing the categories and albums and will develop organizational features for Spokt later this year.
Hello Andy,
Yes! We will be providing these categories, and all of the content that was migrated from MyFamily will be automatically arranged in those categories once the feature is released. We’re a bit stretched at the moment working to help everyone with their migrations before the deadline passes, but these account and Hub tools are our top priority behind the Mayflower migrations. Our entire team really appreciates your patience as we work through the steps to:
A) help others save their data as we’ve done for you, and
B) implement the features that make Spokt an even better place for you.
Thanks again!
RJ
This is a question that may have an easy answer. I have noticed that some hubs have Avatars for the posts that were imported as well as those since import. Is this something that can be changed so the avatar appears on all posts.
Hi Bill,
This is usually an issue with photo posts since the MyFamily.com member id was not included in the data MyFamily.com provides. We plan to add a feature which will allow administrators to manually match posts that are impossible to auto-match by a computer.
Thanks Dan, as I recall name and date was auto generated as each new post for photos and any other type of post displayed the date and member name on the screen on MyFamily without any input by the member. So it must have been on the MyFamily file.
The name and date do appear on the imported posts of all types but he Avatar picture is the generic gray profile. Since the Avatar is something Spokt added new why would it be there for new posts but not for imported posts?
Hi Bill, on the other posts there was a unique myfamily.com member id – all replies had it too. We can systematically match to the unique member id. Photos did not have this unique id. If the name matched exactly at the time of import then the avatar was populated for photos. I wish MyFamily.com had provided the member id with the photos but they did not. Despite them not providing it we have a plan to allow admins to match these users but out top priority now is to export and save as much data for our users as possible before the deadline.
I discovered a PHOTO hole in the migrated data. The Spokt page says: IMAGE MISSING … and provided a link to MyFamily’s page – but the image is still there. How can I rectify this?
Hi V A Emuang,
Contact support and send a link to your missing image. Sometimes MyFamily.com’s servers respond erroneously when we attempt to download a photo but usually it works on a second download attempt. We are very busy but we will get to every request.
Our site says “all caught up”, but there is still nothing on it.
What’s up?
Hi Joe,
The “You’re all caught up” message is displayed when you have no new news to read.
Did you place a Mayflower Order? If you did you can check the status by using the “Mayflower Status” link in your left menu.