Thursday, September 29, 2016

Rootsweb mailing lists

For some time now I have not seen any new messages on Rootsweb Mailing Lists.

There are more than 30000 genealogy mailing lists hosted by the Rootsweb servers, which have been managed by Ancestry.com and I've been using them for more than 20 years to communicate with and keep in touch with genealogists around the world, and suddenly they seem to have stopped working.

Some of the mailing lists have been gated into other forums, such as Usenet newsgroups and Googlegroups, so they have been fairly widely available, but suddenly they seem to have stopped working.

There's been no announcement on the Rootsweb Home Page, and no response from the Helpdesk.

Does anyone know what's going on?

For what it's worth the general African list is still working, but it's not hosted by Rootsweb but by YahooGroups. If you would like to subscribe, just send e-mail to:

afgen-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

with the word "subscribe" (without the quotes) in the subject line and the body of the message.

It's a continent-wide list,  so it doesn't have the specialised focus on a particular province of a particular country, but you can use it for queries and comments about genealogy in any country in Africa.

4 comments:

aaronjhill said...

I manage several lists and some are not working at all. There is no way to post and the archives are missing. I've been told that techies are working on resolving problems, but this has been ongoing for months and there is not timeline for when it will be fixed. It's very disturbing. Decades of archived genealogical research, by some who have passed on, is missing. And, of course, no one knows why or how this happened.

Steve Hayes said...

Yes, three weeks since I posted this, and all the lists I am subscribed to are down. Three weeks is quite a long time.

aaronjhill said...

Here's the response after I asked about one of the lists I manage. -- Aaron

Dear Aaron,

We understand that you have encountered problems with a Mailing List on Rootsweb. We can appreciate that this is an inconvenience which must be interrupting your work. We are happy to provide you with an update regarding the problem.

We are currently in the process of upgrading our technical infrastructure. Some processes are on hold until this upgrade is complete. This currently includes some Mailing List processes and features including the ability to post messages and access some archives. Once the work is finished everything should be working as normal again. Unfortunately, we do not have a timeframe as to when this work may be completed.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your continued patience.

If there is anything else with which we might assist you, please let us know.

Kevin
RootsWeb Support Team
http://rootsweb.ancestry.com

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