Rootsweb is back up after 18 months in the toilet. I’m not cheering. The whole thing was mismanaged start to finish. It took them 18 months. Let that sink in.
Rootsweb is one of the old guard of genealogy websites that host user-contributed data. When Ancestry bought Rootsweb in 2000 they promised to take good care of the data, and not turn it into a pay site. (Yeah? I was skeptical too.)
Ancestry took the site down in December 2017 after discovering it had been hacked.
And they were oh so sad. They got everyone’s data back up and running but they couldn’t allow anyone to log in or remove their data. Safety concerns, you know. And if that meant they were locking thousands of users out of their own data, well surely you don’t think it’s intentional do you? All for your own good.
Now they’re back. I’m not celebrating. In fact, now that I have access to my data again the first thing I’m going to do is get it off this unreliable site.
More Information
- “RootsWeb is Currently Unavailable and Probably Will Remain That Way for Some Time“, by Dick Eastman at Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter (Jan. 10, 2018), retrieved Aug. 2, 2019.
- “Ancestry Brings Back RootsWeb WorldConnect, Sort Of“, by Matt Miller (June 5, 2019), at Matt’s Genealogy Blog, retrieved Aug. 2, 2019.
Edited to fix broken link.