I am talking about https://old.findagrave.com/ and not https://www.findagrave.com/. For those not aware, the old site is still available for not quite a week. There are advantages and disadvantages to both sites. In some ways, the old site is still much better than the new site. While the search engine on the old site had a bad habit of missing names when I used it to search, it is still better at searching than the new site. When I can’t find a memorial that I added using the new site, I can often find it using the old site’s search engine.
When I clicked on the old site today, I received the following message:
The time has come for us to close down the old Find A Grave site.
The old site will be retired on August 20th.
We appreciate the great feedback we’ve received and have made many changes to the new site that we hope will make it easier for you to use. If there are specific things you still have trouble doing with the new site, please let us know by using the “Send Feedback” link at the bottom of any page of the new Find A Grave site. We will continue to work to improve the site and look forward to working with you to make it the best it can be.
—The Find A Grave Team
They made it clear a while back they were going to close the old site down at some point in the not too distant future. There are some things that still work better on the old site and some things that are still broken on the old and the new sites.
I don’t like how they changed the FAQs. In the past, you could easily see all the FAQs without having to view each section by clicking on it. For a while, you could still view the FAQs on the old site, but that was changed late last year. Now if you go to the old FAQs, you get: https://old.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=listFaqs:
Where did the FAQ go?
The FAQ has been replaced by Help
If they didn’t change the FAQs as often as they do, it wouldn’t be an issue. Here’s the Wayback Machine from November 6, 2017 (last year) for the FAQs: https://web.archive.org/web/20170828200529/https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=listFaqs – a much better format and easier to search in my opinion. The next save for it on the Wayback Machine was a few days later, November 9, 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20171109133420/https://www.findagrave.com/list-faqs and it had changed to the new format or I get an error message. I use a change detection site to monitor changes to the FAQs that worked great with the old FAQs, but is almost useless with the new FAQs.
This isn’t a case of me being against the new site because I dislike change. I love change when it’s for the better. More often than not when a company makes website changes they break things that worked before the change. If that wasn’t bad enough, they broke the Sents website. The Sents site isn’t run by Ancestry, but it was a great site that overcame a lot of the broken parts of Find-A-Grave. I could use it to create lists that I couldn’t easily create on Find-A-Grave.
I see a few people commenting on Facebook and other social media who are glad Ancestry is doing away with the old Find-A-Grave site since they think it will give Ancestry more time to devote to fixing some of the broken things on the site. Near as I can tell, they weren’t using any of their employees to do any major work on the old site so there’s no gain of additional staff time to work on the new site.
Ups Downs Family History 