I've been away from family research for several years and recently returned to the Rootsweb site. What a shock. I began using Rootsweb when I first started doing family research online back in the mid 1990's. Rootsweb was very different then. It was actually a wonderful site and really was free. From my observations, it seems that Rootsweb now is little more than an advertising gimmick for Ancestry.com with the constant pop-ups, constant pressure to subscribe, etc. I enjoy the mail lists because you can actually communicate with other researchers, but I refuse to be a part of anything else on their site. I don't want to feed into any organization that obsessed with hooking people and using their information for free.