Wow! What an incredible experience! So incredible that I'd like to share it with everyone. By this evening I received 51 responses to the message I sent last night. I will give a brief rundown of the nature of the responses. 1 person provided me with Jake's e-mail address. I am copying him on this message and including my and his original messages below so that he can put the results in perspective. 36 people agreed with me outright. Many thanked me for saying what they hadn't. 2 of these people asked me about my lineage. I will be responding to them this weekend. 2 people didn't understand my message. 1 County Coordinator asked for my permission to forward my message to the County Coordinator's List. 2 County Coordinators said my message would never be read by anyone at RootsWeb or Ancestry.com. 4 people offered help in getting around the new system. 3 people were offended by my language. For that I apologize. I certainly could have used a better choice of words and still had the same impact. I have reworded my original message below to avoid offending them again. 1 person responded with no message. 2 responses were received with a virus infected attachment. These appeared to come from the same person. Fortunately, my Norton AntiVirus issued warnings immediately that the attachments were infected. Thank you all for the kind words of support. I hope sending my original message and copying the results to Mr. Gehring will affect changes at RootsWeb in a positive way. I will also be very happy to provide copies of these messages to Jake, without the senders' names, of course, unless I receive permission from those who sent them. At times keeping it simple can be a very difficult task. I have been programming for users since 1983 and have always tried to adhere to one very simple credo -- Get the user to his destination in three steps or less. There are times when it takes some deep thinking but it can usually be done. Ray Justus Chandler, AZ ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ray W. Justus" <[email protected]> To: RootsWeb Mailing Lists Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 9:41 PM Subject: Re: Message from Rootsweb Jake, I don't know if this message has a snowball's chance in in that proverbial hot place of reaching you but I pray that it does. I appreciate your comments about the ease of use of the new search capabilities but there is one thing that has left me dumbfounded the past several weeks. Why in the world do you want to make it so difficult for us to get to the point where we can do a search? Whenever I click on a button at a RootsWeb County site that says Queries, Bios, Obits, Pensions, Wills, Bible Records or Deeds, I am directed to a cryptic page that is titled in bold letters "Message Boards" and provides me with absolutely no information. I can then start an endless drill down to the other side of the earth or say, "Balderdash!" and go elsewhere. Do you have anyone on staff that actually does genealogy research? I think it is time for your whole crew to fall back and regroup. The status quo is headed straight down the tubes. Ray Justus Chandler, AZ ------------------------- Jake's Original Message ------------------------- MESSAGE FROM THE ROOTSWEB HOME OFFICE by Jake Gehring, RootsWeb Executive Producer Our message boards improvements continue this week. My comments regard the search features in the new system. Sometimes certain boards and the messages they contain have been moved since they were initially indexed -- when you search and try to view posts, you get an error message asking you to check back in a few hours. In some cases this message lasts a lot longer than expected. We're changing the error message and working hard to fix the underlying problem. I'll report the status of this issue next week. Generally, however, we hope that you are impressed with the new search features. The new system shows search results ranked by relevance -- meaning that the system will display the best hits first. For example, messages that contain all of your terms are ranked higher than those that contain only some. Here are a couple of additional search tips: Wildcard Searching. The new message boards allow wildcard searching as long as the user specifies at least the first three characters in the word (i.e., users can search for "gehr*" to find "gehring, gehrig, gehrke," etc.). Search Operators. New functionality allows users to add powerful operators to their search terms to affect results. These operators, the plus and minus signs, are placed just before your search terms and function like popular Internet search engines Yahoo! and AltaVista. If you put a plus (+) sign in front of any word, that word *must* appear in a message for it to be a match. If there are terms that you want to exclude (you don't want to see messages in which these terms appear), you can place a minus sign (-) in front of them. For example, a search for "+gehring heinrich -baden" will return only those hits that contain the word "gehring" but not the word "baden", and in this group any messages containing "heinrich" will be displayed before those that don't.