| Frequently Asked Questions | ||
 These
are our most frequently asked questions.
If you can't find what you're looking for here then try our Message Boards. |
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OK ... so how much is it going to cost me? | |
| Nothing. We don't do this for money. | ||
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Yeah, but you have a shop so clearly you do! | |
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OK, fair cop. We've been running without any funding and
it's getting expensive to maintain the servers. We use a
huge amount of disk space for all the images, which
doesn't come cheap. So, to try to cover some of the costs we have a shop which sells bits and pieces. If we have anything left over we'll invest it in certificates for the site. |
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So why do you do it? | |
| It seemed like a good idea at the time. | ||
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Do I need anything special to see the information? | |
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Not really ... although a nice bottle of red wine often
comes in handy. We don't do anything flash, so as long as you have a fairly recent Internet browser you should be OK. We've tested it using Internet Explorer, FireFox, Google Chrome and Safari, which covers the vast majority of users. There are certain annoying differences between different browsers but these tend to be cosmetic rather than catastrophic. We could spend months fiddling to remove spurious extra lines and the like, but life is too short. Basically, what you see is what you get. |
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If you suspect the page isn't displaying correctly then
try hitting the Refresh button on your browser. Browsers
store pages on your computer to make them faster to
load. However, this means that sometimes you get
out-of-date stuff hanging around. The Refresh will force
the page to be re-loaded from our servers. We also experience a really annoying bug with the Internet Explorer browser which sometimes leaves a page looking as though there are bits missing. The Refresh button will normally sort this out but to say it's irritating would be an understatement. Our recommendation is to use the FireFox browser instead. See below. |
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There are two things that could spoil your experience:
Inline Frames (or iFrames) and JavaScript. We use both
of these, mainly for the navigation bars and maps. Not having one or the other will have negative effects of varying degrees... like not being able to move from page to page ... If your browser doesn't support iFrames then this isn't the end of the world as we've deliberately built the site to allow some information to be displayed, even without JavaScript. However, none of the maps will display a view and many of the other cool stuff won't work. Check your browser options to ensure JavaScript is enabled. Early versions (less than version 6.0) of Internet Explorer are likely to have problems executing the JavaScript contained in this site. |
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| If there are a just a set of Whoops links displayed instead of anything sensible, then you really do have a problem. | ||
| To be honest, if that's all you see then we don't really know how you ended up here! Click the Whoops link for more information. | ||
| In general you should always try to keep your browser up-to-date with the latest releases. If you don't then not only will you have increasing problems viewing Internet sites (not just ours), but you will also leave yourself wide open to some of the nastier stuff lurking out there. | ||
| If you're using an old browser, you may want to have a look at one of more recent versions: | ||
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Internet Explorer | |
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FireFox This is our preferred browser. It's a LOT faster than Internet Explorer on page loads, and actually displays what was intended. |
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Safari (for Mac's) | |
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Google Chrome | |
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Can I upload my family tree to your site? | |
| Unfortunately, not at the moment. There are two reasons for this:. | ||
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We're always desperately short of disk space on our server and if we allowed downloads it would clog up in double-quick time. We pay enough as is for server space, so we try to keep this down to a minimum. | |
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Everything we publish is checked (as far as we can) for accuracy. It gives us more quality control over the content of the site, and allows us to splice things into the published trees. It's just common sense really. | |
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However, we're always happy to receive any information,
including family trees. These then go into our pipeline
... and eventually emerge onto the site. If you use
software to manage your trees you'll probably find
that you can export them into what is called the GEDCOM
format.
We can read these files and it saves a lot of time in the checking. If you would like to send us any stuff then please send it to stuff@closeancstry.com and we'll add it to the list of things to do. Anybody that contributes to the site will end up as a Contributor, with full credit for their work. |
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What do your Message Boards do? | |
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Our
Message Boards are a dynamic way to get help, ask questions and
see what else is going on.
Whilst we are always happy to answer individual emails, using our forums shares the question and answer amongst the whole community. To that end we would ask you to use these as far as possible. You can read postings at any time without registering or logging on. If you want to ask a question or post a comment then all you need is a username, password and email address to register. We have to insist on this because the spamsters invade the forums otherwise and they soon fill up with unwanted garbage. |
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| Please use this facility sensibly. We reserve the right to remove abusive, discriminatory or offensive material, and will bar access to anyone who posts it... Yes Mr Ruski Pornmeister - you WILL be blocked! | ||
| If that hasn't covered it please drop us a mail to: faq@closeancestry.com | ||