Technical Issues on Scotland's People

We've already discussed some of the teething problems of the new Scotland's People website, which was launched this week. Clearly the staff at Scotland's People are listening, because they've acknowledged at least some of the problems. They've also accepted that some of the features of the old site which have been removed will likely be reinstated.

• Some people have been having problems logging in to the new site - new help pages have been added to help resolve this issue
• Some deaths in church registers are showing an age of 131. This should be taken to mean that there is no age stated in the index (although it may be given in the actual record).
• The spouse's name search option in the church marriage registers search is not working. "Please do not use this field in searching or filtering for the time being."
• The new site uses a single surname variant algorithm (which is actually a great improvement on the old soundex system), but it's not currently working for some surnames
  
• The image viewer isn't working for some devices and internet browsers - if this is happening to you, let them know your combination of device and browser version.
  
• For saved images, they are looking to make the filter system work on the image header as well as the "Description" field. This is really important to us - we have thousands of images saved, and the ability to filter them by the image header (which crucially includes the name of the person in the record) is essential. Manually adding descriptions to these images would be very time consuming.
  

They're also asking people to report other search problems. It's great that they are listening, although one of the major search issues - searching for the death of say a married woman using both surnames is still not working and has not been acknowledged (we've described it here).

Meanwhile, we're in the Scotland's People Centre regularly - if you can't find what you're looking for on the Scotland's People website, we may be able to help.

(You can read the full announcement from Scotland's People here)