Genealogy Chat

Well thank goodness someone else also is not receiving their hot matches, thought it was just me..I feel quite miffed as one of the main reasons I took out a subscription again, was the fact I had been so successful in the past, including finding a long lost brother..

from a disappointed user....

There are a couple of things that members need to be aware of re Hot Matches.

First of all, each time there is a run only a maximum of 100 of your names are selected for matching. There is some debate as to how these are selected but the current consensus based on member experience is that it is alphabetical. It matters not that you have added 500 names ofr 5,00o recently only a relatively small number will be selected for matching.

Secondly, the process was changed over a year ago as a result of lobbying from a small band of members so that in order to make a match, as well as the name and year of birth, the place of birth must also match. Implementing this actually caused huge problems. Not only did it require more processing resource it meant that the number of positive matches dried up to a trickle.

It is running - I had three recently......!

Hi All
I contacted GR about 6 weeks ago re my Hot Matches as I haven't had any for about 15 months.
I basically told that I thought the site ran more smoothly before the Brightsolid takeover.
They said that I should receive my Hot Matches in the next week-surprise surprise still waiting-and that they were concentrating on Hot Matches for the new members which is a load of tosh as the previous owners seemed to manage both.
I know as some of you said we did receive a lot of irrelavent ones but at least it gave you a choice.
I have had an awful lot of good contacts through these Hot Matches a lot who I am still in contact with and had a lot of additional of information to add to my research.
Best wishes
Norma

The trouble with the hot matches, even in the old days when it appeared to work well, was that lots of names were never 'matched', just lots of 'Sarah Wilson 1800's which meant nothing.
Having said that, I have had lots of useful matches and got back in contact with long lost 'cousins'.

It's all very well doing tree matches if you have the time or are looking for a particular person. Hot Matches gives you matches without any effort on your part and tells you when you have more than one match with the same person.

Of course in the old system there was the effort of discarding the non-real matches, and in the new system the effort is in ensuring you have the correct place names.

I regularly click on the 'matches' button on people in my tree to see tree matches for that person. This can also be useful if there aren't too many matches, you can sometimes spot the same member matching with more than 1 person.

Sharon,

I suggest you use the Surname Summary under the search tree tab.

It's more effective than hot matches.

Gai

I agree they should be more informative.

There is some suggestion on one of the threads that they do sometimes run it for you if you make a fuss.

Thanks for your reply Ken, they should just put up a message saying that it's kapput rather than the waffle that appears when you click the link!! (as in try again in a few days)

The joke is I've just renewed my membership & thought by adding my big tree I'd be inundated with possible matches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :-D :-D

I might contact them & ask for a discount as they're obviously not providing part of the service they're charging for! - Trades description act springs to mind! :-P :-P

Basically it isn't being run much now, and it is supposed to check for places as well, when it does run so you won't get many. Probably will not be run again until the other main problems have been fixed.

There are some discussions on the Suggestions board.
eg:
http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards.page/board/suggestions/thread/1289140

I had about 9 pages of hot matches ( not that many were even tepid!) when my original tree had about 80 people in it.
Bought FTM & imported my Ancestry tree which has over 500 people & I haven't got 1 single hot match!!
This was about 6 weeks ago so thought something would appear by now - does anyone know what is going on? - :-S

Cheers!!