Dear Listers: Rumors have been flying this week. Dick Eastman's article gives the details of what has occurred. The most interesting information is at the bottom of the article which tells of new genealogical resources now available to all of us. Happy Trails, Lauren List Admin ................... The following article is from Eastmans Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 2003 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author. Information about the newsletter is available at http://www.eogn.com. ......... - AOL Genealogy Forum Turmoil WARNING: This article contains personal opinions, mine and others. Something strange is going on at AOL. It seems that AOL is booting out the genealogists. But hang on: a phoenix is rising from the ruins to benefit genealogists beyond the boundaries of AOL. For many years, AOL hosted one of the largest and most active online genealogy groups anywhere online. AOL contracted the management of the Genealogy Forum to Golden Gate Services of Franklin, Massachusetts, a small company operated by George Ferguson. Under George's management, the AOL Genealogy Forum attracted thousands of genealogists and contributed significantly to AOL's growth. George recruited a large staff of volunteers who ran chat rooms, answered questions, guided newcomers, taught online classes, and much, much more. AOL later merged with Time-Warner. The new company's financial problems are well-known and are documented extensively on almost all the financial Web sites and in many printed magazines. AOL's meteoric membership growth has now stopped. Membership now has been declining for some months. In addition, AOL's relationship with its many contractors has soured, and many of them have left. In some cases, AOL cancelled the contracts. In other cases, the contract holders "read the handwriting on the wall" and cancelled the contracts themselves. Golden Gate Services parted company with AOL a few weeks ago. Since then, the AOL Genealogy Forum has floundered. Now AOL has all but eliminated this once-popular service. The Genealogy Forum on AOL still exists, although it is now difficult to find. AOL depends heavily on "key words" to navigate around its many services. For more than a decade, ntering a keyword of "roots" immediately took the user to the AOL Genealogy Forum. Now AOL reportedly has removed the keyword of "roots." The only method of finding the remnants of the once-thriving Genealogy Forum is to use the menus, starting inexplicably in the "Parenting" section, and then follow a labyrinth of menus. AOL also fired all the Genealogy Forum volunteers and then invited them to "re-apply" for their old positions. I received e-mails this week from several of the former volunteers, all relating how they had been shoddily treated and quoting some new AOL policies that seem strange, to say the least. In short, AOL has all but killed genealogy on its service. This seems incredible. Various surveys report that genealogy is the second or third or fourth most popular activity on the Web. The exact numbers vary, depending upon whose survey results you read. However, one thing is clear: genealogy is one of the top online interests! Here is AOL/Time-Warner, a company that is hemorrhaging red ink on its balance sheets and losing customers rapidly. The company desperately needs to attract and keep online users. Yet the company deliberately decimated the one topic that is so popular universally: genealogy. Are they nuts? I have to insert a personal comment here: This is déjà vu for me. I ran a competitive genealogy forum for fifteen years on CompuServe, a company that was AOL's biggest competitor for many years. AOL purchased CompuServe in 1997. At a meeting with contract holders held at CompuServe headquarters shortly after the 1997 announcement, AOL's then number two executive, Bob Pittman, promised me and the other contract holders in the room that AOL would pump money into their new division and grow the business. He painted a glowing vision of an AOL and CompuServe partnership that would be good for everyone. He described AOL's "commitment" in detail. All of Bob Pittman's promises were broken soon after he got on the plane to fly home. Pittman's executive team laid off more than half of the CompuServe employees and cancelled many services within weeks of his rallying speech to contract holders. Customer Service was outsourced to a group that knew nothing about CompuServe. A new "CompuServe 2000" service was launched that really is AOL's limited software in a different wrapper. In short, the original CompuServe service was reduced to rubble. CompuServe has since limped along as a separate service under AOL's thumb. Most of CompuServe's contract holders of 1997 are gone. I held out longer than most of them; I cancelled my contract with AOL/CompuServe earlier this year. I was replaced by a new AOL contract holder who literally did not know how to spell "genealogy." (I am not making this up!) The present events on AOL's primary service are repetitive of what I saw earlier on AOL's CompuServe division. Luckily for users, most of AOL's former genealogy volunteers have banded together and moved to the Web. It may take a few weeks to get everything created, but most of the services that were formerly available on AOL's Genealogy Forum are now or soon will soon be available on the Web. GenealogyForum.com (owned by George Ferguson) contains the regular Genealogy Forum material. GenealogyForum.org contains the genealogy chats that users have known and loved on AOL. The following chat rooms are available now -- and on the web, where ALL can attend! BranchesNRoots Skeleton Closet GenRoots Brick Walls Cousin Connections TwigsNTrees Maple Leaf In addition, the following Special Event Rooms are also open for business: Classroom - requires a password for the class you decide to take Auditorium - for BIG special events with guest speakers quirrels' Den - private staff lounge GenealogyForum.org expects to have 100+ chat areas soon. The best part is that anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can now participate in these chat rooms. You no longer need an AOL account. This will be especially attractive to former AOL members who used to participate in the chats but moved off when they found better Internet providers. These new services are now much easier to find than trying to navigate AOL's convoluted menus to locate whats left of their genealogy service. GenealogyForums public chat rooms are free to everyone on the Web. The new site does accept banner ads to help pay for the bandwidth. AOL's loss is your gain and mine. Due to corporate stupidity, more people than ever can now participate in these popular genealogy chat rooms and can do so for free. The new service is now owned by genealogists, operated by genealogists, for the purpose of serving genealogists. For more information, look at http://www.GenealogyForum.com and http://www.GenealogyForum.org.