Home Page

Beverleyn

For the past few weeks, when I open FamilySearch website in my browser, I get this screen. Once I sign in, I get it again. I never see the old home page any more.

I am in New Zealand. As you can see, this appears even when I am signed in.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The 404 error almost always indicates a problem with the specific URL that your browser is asking for, but you didn't include that part in your screenshot.

What happens if you click the green logo at the top left?

Beverleyn

Hi Julia

Thanks for your response. I just click on the Search button and that gets me to where I need to be.

It's just that I wonder why I get the equivalent of an "error message" and not the home page.

The green logo gets me to another weird-looking page (partial screenshot) with silly little questions!

Is this meant to be the Home Page now?? Surely not?

And if so.... why on Earth.......??

Bev

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Yeah, that's the homepage. Mine looks a little bit different, but it's useless either way; I only ever use it as a temporary landing spot, 'cause it's where the logo takes me from this Community.

For the error page, what does your browser have in the URL box (the thing at the top of your screenshot, after the padlock symbol)? It sounds like whatever it is, there's an error in it, and you need to tell your browser to stop trying to use it.

Beverleyn

Hi again

The URL that gave the error message was https://www.familysearch.org/nz/ (my usual bookmarked link) but now (since clicking on the green logo in the corner) if I just type FamilySearch.org it changes to https://www.familysearch.org/en/ and it goes to the home page as shown in the screen shot. So I hope that will work when I sign in again after logging out. I'll try that and let you know!

Bev

Beverleyn

Sad to say that nothing has changed. It is just the same as before, including after signing in AND now also on clicking the green logo in the corner.

Same screen, even after manually changing the URL to the /en/ option rather than /new zealand/.

😡

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I think we need a mod to send this on to the engineers to figure out what's going on with /nz/. Did someone forget to set or post something?

In the meantime, check your browser, though: is it being Smarter Than Thou and changing your localization settings, even when you try to tell it not to? Or is it "helpfully" serving up a saved file or three, instead of going and getting the content again?

I just tried going to familysearch.org/nz/ in a different browser (Edge), and I couldn't: it resolutely changed it back to /en/ Every Single Time. In Firefox (my current browser), in contrast, I went to the home page, changed the URL, and it stayed changed -- but the page was exactly the same.

Nggghh. Modern browsers and web programming are Too Complicated For Words.

Beverleyn

Thank you very much for your helpful comments, Julia! I am very pleased to have discovered this community Q and A page.

Like you, I use Firefox as default browser. Having read your comments I think I will try deleting my bookmark and any cached 'error message' sign-in pages and see how that goes.

FamilySearch seems to have made changes that have affected various parts of their website. In addition to this thread, I also have an issue/ question about unavailability of images that were previously accessible. So in my opinion there are some serious glitches in this web site!