Rootsweb link failures

[Genealogy]

I've been researching some profiles on WikiTree.  What I'm finding is the source links are mostly defunct, either they direct to ancestry.com, they trigger a 404 error, or there's an issue with the http address.  Is this an issue for me only?  Or is it an issue for everyone?

Is this the way it's going to be now and in the future?  Unfortunate that a great deal of information is being lost.   At least I've been able to retain my homepages and freepages web sites.

-Bonnie

• http://newsarch.rootsweb.com/th/read/VANORTHU/2007-02/1172256994

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DAVIS/1999-04/0923161447

http://newsfeed.rootsweb.com/th/read/KINZER/1998-11/0911961239

http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DAVIS/1998-11/0911451274

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gillespiehistory/amherst-marriage-records.html

[Barry Carlson]

Thanks Bonnie; was just about to post the following:-

Following Vanessa's query on PDF files being allowed on Freepages sites,
my attention has been drawn to the validity of URL formats used to
access Rootsweb pages. Following Ancestry's aquisition of Rootsweb, the
URL format changed to show Rootsweb as a subdomain of Ancestry, e.g.

https://freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bristowe/

That link no longer works due to SSL certificate protocols not being
met, and modern browsers will report:-

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to
freepages.family.rootsweb.ancestry.com. Cannot communicate securely with
peer: no common encryption algorithm(s).

Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the
authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

- as reported by Firefox 108.0.2 (64-bit), and Microsoft Edge Version
109.0.1518.52 (Official build) (64-bit) gave a similar response.

Therefore Google Chrome and many other browsers using up-to-date
variants of the open source Chromium codebase, including Vivaldi, Brave,
Opera, SlimBrowser, Comodo Dragon etc.. will undoubtedly report similarly.

The correct TLS/SSL supported URL is:-

https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~bristowe/family/

and a server permanent redirect is in place to cover -

https://freepages.family.rootsweb.com/~bristowe/

- which was the longtime Rootsweb format prior to Ancestry getting involved.

There are undoubtedly many hosted sites where the owners have previously
updated their links to conform to the

.....rootsweb.ancestry.com/~accountname/

format, which will now need to revert to the recommended or the original
(rootsweb.com) version of those links. Which is another good reason for
using "relative links" throughout your site, as "absolute links" will
become victims of changes like those described.

Barry

------------------------------------------------

On 16/01/2023 8:08 am, Genealogy wrote:
>
> I've been researching some profiles on WikiTree.  What I'm finding is
> the source links are mostly defunct, either they direct to
> ancestry.com, they trigger a 404 error, or there's an issue with the
> http address.  Is this an issue for me only?  Or is it an issue for
> everyone?
>
> Is this the way it's going to be now and in the future? Unfortunate
> that a great deal of information is being lost.   At least I've been
> able to retain my homepages and freepages web sites.
>
> -Bonnie
>

> * http://newsarch.rootsweb.com/th/read/VANORTHU/2007-02/1172256994
> <http://newsarch.rootsweb.com/th/read/VANORTHU/2007-02/1172256994>
>
> http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DAVIS/1999-04/0923161447
> <http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DAVIS/1999-04/0923161447>
>
> http://newsfeed.rootsweb.com/th/read/KINZER/1998-11/0911961239
> <http://newsfeed.rootsweb.com/th/read/KINZER/1998-11/0911961239>
>
> http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DAVIS/1998-11/0911451274
> <http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/DAVIS/1998-11/0911451274>
>
> http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gillespiehistory/amherst-marriage-records.html
> <http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gillespiehistory/amherst-marriage-records.html>
>
>
> --
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> https://sites.rootsweb.com/~gearyfamily/rootsweb-hosted-web-sites.html
> FTP FAQs:
> https://sites.rootsweb.com/~gearyfamily/publishing-your-sites.html
> To contact the owners of this group, write to
> rw-website-...@googlegroups.com
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[Pat Asher]

Bonnie, Barry is correct, the updated URL for
http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~gillespiehistory/amherst-marriage-records.html
is
https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~gillespiehistory/history/amherst-marriage-records.html

The archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com URLS went to archives for the RootsWeb mailing lists. Those lists were discontinued by Ancestry and the archives for the lists were deleted.

I'm not sure what the newsarch.rootsweb.com and newsfeed.rootswebcom URLs were for, but I am sure that service and related content has been discontinued as well.

Pat Asher

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[Pat Asher]

In addition to Barry's response below, for those having sites on what used to be the www.rootsweb.com/~accountname/ and
homepages.rootsweb.com/~accountname/ servers,
the updated URL for both of those is
https://sites.rootsweb.com/~accountname/

Redirects for them are supposedly in place also, but they seem to work intermittently, or not at all.

Pat Asher

[Gina Heffernan]

There is another issue I haven't seen addressed. If you have absolute links that don't use https, you'll get warnings from your browser. I see those most often with

a Freefind search engine that isn't set for https (change your URL at Freefind)

absolute links to images, forms, PDFs, and other items that appear on the page (use https or use relative links)

the advertising that Ancestry puts on the pages doesn't always use https and causes alerts (we can't do anything about it except complain)

Gina Heffernan
Rusk County, Texas

Since you can be anything ... be kind.

[Vanessa Stern]

I have this problem with Freefind.  My URL with them does start with https, but it still pops up with a warning after more than one search.  Do you know how I can fix this?

 

Vanessa

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[Timothy Stowell]

I've seen reference to various types of links and while this thread seems mainly to speak to http versus https, 

would someone kindly explain or give an example of relative verus absolute links?

Tim Stowell

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[Pat Geary]

Good Question.

https://www.coffeecup.com/help/articles/absolute-vs-relative-pathslinks/

Pat

[Gina Heffernan]

An absolute link is basically the full URL to something like a page or an image - "https:txrusk.com/yyy/image.jpg" for example.

On a website, you can shorten that to a relative link - I'm in "xxx" folder and the image I want to show is in the "yyy" folder - so I have to go out of this folder (../), find yyy folder and then find the image - "../yyy/image.jpg". If the image is in the same folder as the page, you would ust use "image.jpg" as the relative link.

Gina Heffernan
Rusk County, Texas

Since you can be anything ... be kind.

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[Gina Heffernan]

I was more worried about eating my pizza than using correct links - the absolute URL would be more like https://www.txrusk.com/yyy/image.jpg.

Gina Heffernan
Rusk County, Texas

Since you can be anything ... be kind.

On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 7:41 AM Timothy Stowell <tim...@gmail.com> wrote:

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rw-website-help/CAF49Dn3iQFK4ANHs2%2BFeF19KJuG-1xrTmUpwyz2ay8JEh1X2%2BQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Timothy Stowell]

Thanks Pat and Gina.  I use mostly relevant links - ie the data on my site.  Then absolute (until the URL changes) for off-site links.  I mainly wanted to know, maybe for the benefit of others here, that it seems the whole http / https thing mainly is to do with absolute links.

I do so understand juggling food and computers.  I have 4 on my desktop at work, with 5 screens, 3 keyboards.

Tim

too long a list to mention

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