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I entered geni.com in good faith posting my children's childhood pictures, graduations to date and so on. Since this time, I have been locked out of my free account, with a message 'You do not have permission to view this page.' when I try to reset my password. Although I have advised GENI on many occasions now, at their email address of *******@geni.com, I am still locked. They have allowed me to join again, but I cannot seem to link to any family unless a pay a subscription fee. Yes, it says its free, but it asks for credit card details. Has this happened to anyone else?
This website is fishy as mentioned by several other users, no contact details, no technical assistance, its simply not acceptable. I tried unsuccessfully to amend my privacy setting for more than five months and I lodged several claims on their pseudo 'request' section with zero response. You've been warned, keep away from this site.
Geni doesn't accept any critical comment about the site, the customer-service or the management. Geni has in that regard the mentality of North Korea! Every free user, paying user and even any curator who publishes negative comments will be suspended and indefinitely blocked from working on Geni!
Geni is a site for hints and pointers, but not usable as a base for the results of your own research!
If you want to use Geni you have to keep your research results on your own computer's hard-disk and copy between it and Geni, that's the only way to keep your results in good condition, because on Geni you're never sure that other users will not change, delete or ruin your data!
Every day thousands of users add incorrect information and relations, after being sent daily hints with profiles and trees from MyHeritage. Any madman can make his own tree on MyHeritage and many do, unfortunately are there many people who fantasize ancestors to look important and all this $#*! Is copied to Geni!
There are no instructions on how to work on the site, even the curators who work voluntarily to improve Geni don't know how everything works.
Geni for a long time suffered from very bad management and customer service for basic users. Now there is a new CEO, who is an excellent software engineer, but lacking competent support he isn't able to improve the Geni site in line with the quality of other genealogy sites. Customer service generally is now worse than it ever was.
As free basic user there are too many limitations and too many pop ups with requests to upgrade to become a paying user.
The search tool is very weak and is annoying with continuous request pop-ups to upgrade, it is easier to search via Google with adding "site: Geni.com" than to search as a Geni user!
For a collaboration site there are too many private limitations and too many duplicates making it very difficult and annoying working when at every step you have a pop up extorting you to upgrade to paying membership.
Biggest Pro's: More than 70,000,000 by blood-relation or marriage with another connected profiles, dynamic tree-view, some kind of a relation-path/lineage counting, multilingual, social and research forum for users, project-collaboration.
Biggest Con: Unreliable profiles, missing or wrong sources for the data and relations, easy vandalism that can ruin your inputs, poor software for projects editing, poor search-engine, bad profile displays, no gedcom uploads, limited and bad gedcom downloads.
After being on board with them and thinking everything was going great for six years they end up taking away the privacy of my accounts, lock up my photo editor, and start re-writing the bios of my 3rd and 4th great grandparents essentially locking me out as a pro Geni customer. Things get worse after I attempt to get help, and end with violations of my family privacy, not allowing me to post family photos or depictions, or licenced photos, ugly accusations and interrogation sessions about my family and locking up my family line from me. Interrogation is not collaboration and Geni allows curators to walk all over the customers while also being their customer service, also they all side together on issues and leave your family out in the cold once they take over your families line. Be wary, the customer and family do not come first there once they do their "take over," it is essentially best overall to keep your own family tree in case you come into contact with one of their Nazi collaborators who essentially can do whatever they want without good reason to your once private profiles, and they could care less if you are a paying customer or not, going against their own rules by locking up profiles and family photo editor functions. One of the managers is very controlling and he lies out the roof of his mouth, I believe his name is Michael, especially be wary of him, he doesn't know how to tell the whole truth and doesn't mind his own business as far as your family is concerned. In Geni's rules it states that as a paying customer you can use any family photo that you want and you have can post unlimited ones for your family lineage, they took down my family photos although they were licensed art and then after taking away my paid for functions and freedoms, proceeded to harass me. No self-respecting person would or could put up with that level of contempt or control that should be called "forced collaboration because if you do not answer all their interrogations, they then have the power to destroy your families profile" (this all coming from people who are amateurs and can't even source their own trees have zero business regulating mine) Why would I want to be part of such a mockery when my line is already fully sourced by certified geneologists? In my case, the definition of Nazi fits the bill to my experience. They did things to me without notifying me, and in the end, they enjoy antagonizing the customer by saying "geni is not for you, whoever treats their paying customers like that? The customer should be given the benefit of the doubt at all times and family should be respected but I did not see that happening at all. Michael is a piece of work and has no clue how to be a manager in the real world.
Tip for consumers:
Don't bother putting up your hard work for they will surely take it over and leave you and your hard work out in the cold with no say over once held private profiles.
Products used:
Pro Geni Membership
After a year I came back to Geni to start a new profile and uploaded my tree hopeing to make amends after being away for so long, I worked on putting most of my tree back and worked peacefully for six months on it. Things were going good until I found a discrepancy in the world tree and started to fix the line using a mirror lineage from wikitree sources. But, a curator named Ann Brennan wrote to me and warned me not to "vandalize" and that she wanted to warn me about adding to the family tree master profiles, and if i needed to change something I should ask for permission. She told me if it happened again it would be considered valdalism. I told her no problem, sounds good to me and apologized for making a human mistake. The problem is, she took away my editing privilages, when I asked her why she decided to warn me and punish me at the same time she told me to contact customer service. The only way to contact them was to get a pro membership so I paid the price of one and asked them to please give me my editing privilege's back. The next thing I know Mike Stangel, the GM writes to me and recanted the experience I had with them a year ago and complained I called him a Nazi. I told him that was a reaction from being threatened and taking away my family tree from me. He wanted to know if I was willing to follow the rules and told me not to post "photoshopped" photos. I told him and explained I bought a image from "TURNMEROYAL" Inc, and that it was a licensed image. Anyhow i apologized and told him I followed the rules back then and I intended to follow them going forward. I came back the next day.to find my tree deleted once again. My mothers side of the tree connected into the main family tree and I had yet to really dig in and work on my fathers side. He dismantled and deleted yet again all my hard work did and cancelled my pro subscription yet I AGAIN did nothing wrong. This feels like a DISCRIMINATION Case, and I am using this to document the experience. This happened as of 10/25/23. Yet, again BE WARY of this company and Mike Stangel if you get on his curators bad side he is pretty biased to what they say and you really have no say in how you are treated there. I had a bad experience and these people are very discriminating and controlling, like a NAZI with no way for remediation.. I am certainly no criminal and never deserved to be treated like this. Also Last year, I had posted my paid for and licensed image created by "TURNMEROYAL" Company to my own family lineage in which I have very strong ties and a rare family tree (I have genuine photos of 3rd and 4th Great Grandparents) this guy, Mike, is very insulting and tries to come on here to further insult me by calling ART a "photoshop" is ridiculous and a hideous way to intervene with your "customers". This was actually a painted and licensed image. I have yet to receive an apology from him for his foul treatment of me and it appears many others. There is a lot to be said about being professional and many of these people who volunteer for Geni,com are at brink of abuse. As I said, when one gets to collaborate it should not be a threatening environment. I was targeted and my tree was targeted out of jealousy because I am related to the landed gentry so they were extra hard on my line, but I have the proof. I use many trees across the world wide net.
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Melissa, you uploaded an image of your mother's face photoshopped onto a classical painting, and then set it as the profile photo of someone born in 1794. You lashed out at our curators, calling them Nazis for enforcing genealogical standards. Geni is not the place for you.