Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Ancestry.com's Online Support Community Forums

I must have missed (or forgotten about) the announcement by Ancestry.com describing their Online Support Community forums.  Was there a press release?  I just discovered them today...I must be getting old.

On the Ancestry.com home page, the "Online Support Community" link is under the "Collaborate" tab:


Clicking on the "Online Support Communities" link takes the user to the Ancestry Support Communities page (http://ancestryforums.custhelp.com/pages/home):


There are a number of different Communities - two for Community Matters and seven for Support Communities.  The Ancestry Support Communities are:

*  Getting Started
*  Product How-To
*  Search
*  Historical Records
*  Research Assistance
*  AncestryDNA
*  Family Tree Maker

I clicked on the "Product How-To" community forum, which has 1047 posts and 4344 comments.  Here is the top of that page:


Each community forum has a list of the posts, with the post with the most recent comment at the top of the list.  I clicked on the top item on the list above:




The post with the question was asked at 2:18 PM today, and the last comment was posted at 3:30 PM.

This community forum may be one of those very useful "Help" functions that users can participate in to ask questions and receive answers or advice for other users (and Ancestry.com staff, I would guess).

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Copyright (c) @2013, Randall J. Seaver


1 comment:

bgwiehle said...

The Ancestry forums were launched back in Jan 2013
[http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2013/01/ancestrycom-introduces-new-support-communities.html]

This was after the Genealogy and Family History Stack Exchange site was launched in 2012 [http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2012/10/genealogy-family-history-question-answer-site-now-in-public-beta.html, http://www.geneamusings.com/2012/10/genealogy-stack-exchange-is-up-and.html] and before the Mocavo's Genealogy Karma in May 2013 [http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2013/05/mocavo-announces-genealogy-karma.html].

And, of course, Genforum [http://genforum.genealogy.com/] and all the message boards are still around.

It takes a bit of investigation to know the best place to post a message. And I doubt many monitor researchers every site.