Subscription-Required Site Ahead
I am finding links on your site to GenealogyBank.com. The links on your site say “View Original Document” and when the link is clicked there is an advisory that the user is leaving the Family Search website. All good, except, the original document cannot be viewed unless that user has a paid membership to GenealogyBank.
Might I suggest you revise your wording to reflect the fact that the original document cannot be viewed unless you have a paid subscription?
I am suggesting this because I followed the link on your website and ended up ½ way to subscribing to their paid service before I realized what was going on.
Thank you for considering this suggestion.
Brad Johnson
Comments
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Interesting... I suppose that they could create a list of popular genealogy websites that have subscriptions, and apply a new message if they detect that the link heads to one of those websites, but since the FamilySearch website itself can't actually know anything about the website on the other side of the link, some websites may fall through the cracks and lack the warning.
Or maybe I'm just overthinking this and they could apply a general "Additional fees may apply" to every link. Yeah, that's probably better.
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@BraydenGraves suggested:
" ... Or maybe I'm just overthinking this and they could apply a general "Additional fees may apply" to every link. Yeah, that's probably better. ... "
I'd buy that (figuratively speaking, that is).
The problem is that I suspect that it's too much to expect FS to know about the payment aspect simply because sites might have both paid and free collections. There are also one or two cases where the linked URL is appropriate but the description is plain wrong. If I recall correctly, this applies to some censuses for England & Wales where the description of the link says that the originals are in The National Archives (TNA) of the UK. I didn't understand what that meant since the TNA website does give access to original documents but, AFAIK, censuses are not among them. In fact, clicking the link takes me to FindMyPast, who publish originals belonging to TNA.
And mention of TNA website reminds me that originally I had to pay for military downloads and they went free during COVID. (Not sure of their current status).
So yes - "Additional fees may apply" is a much easier idea.
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In the past, there was a warning "Additional fees may apply" when leaving FS for one of the partner websites such as Fold3, GenealogyBank, MyHeritage. But, the same warning appeared when leaving FS for Findagrave, which is, of course, free. It was probably easier to remove the warning than deal with the people who regularly grumped that Findagrave was supposed to be free and why was FamilySearch saying it was not.
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