Wednesday, July 10, 2019

MedBetterDNA version 5.0 supports AncestryDNA new site with over 200 filters

MedBetterDNA has been updated to work with the July 1st, 2019 major site revision on the AncestryDNA site and is available at the Chrome Web Store. This is an almost complete rewrite from earlier versions of the extension.

The biggest change is that MedBetterDNA now supports 100 filters each to only show or hide AncestryDNA DNA Matches page entries based on the notes in an entry. If you place a hashtag (a word prefaced by a '#') in the notes, MedBetterDNA will detect and can filter out those entries with those notes from view, or only show those entries with the notes containing that hashtag or others. Filters can be up to 100 characters long.

Note that MedBetterDNA will match any hashtag that contains the word it's looking for, even if there are extra letters or symbols at the end of the match, e.g. the filter "cow" matches #cow, #cows, and #cowabunga. Spaces are not allowed in filters and will be removed if added.

You can turn off and on filters through the context menu settings "show only with Notes hashtags" and "hide all with Notes hashtags" and clicking on the desired filter. To input the hashtags themselves, navigate to the Configure MedBetterDNA page via the context menu "Configure options" or the Browser toolbar MedBetterDNA icon dropdown menu or the main browser Extensions page settings.

Keeping one filter from the previous versions, MedBetterDNA allows users to filter out any entries on the DNA matches page of AncestryDNA without a profile picture by unchecking show No Profile Photo Entries in the context menu entry for MedBetterDNA.

A few quick questions:
  • Can I really put in 100 filters each? Yes, but for performance and memory reasons, you may not want to go full ham on them. I only tested operations with a handful, but each filter will incrementally add to runtime performance overhead. 100 may not be reasonably achievable. I was too lazy to put in 100 unique filters and test them all myself to see how bad things got.
  • Are there any known bugs? Nope, but given the complexity of the extension and the first release of an effectively ground-up rewrite, there are probably a couple lurking. Let me know if you see one and I'll try to fix it.
  • I briefly see some entries before they are filtered out. You will see this at times, it's a race between the browser pulling more entries and displaying them, and the extension catching the entries and filtering them out.  Sometimes the browser wins by a fraction of a second.
  • If I filter out most entries, I can't scroll. Actually you can keep scrolling on a blank page and you should see an entry with the note or notes which the filters allow, assuming there are any. Because entries are dynamically loaded by the AncestryDNA website, you may have to keep scrolling for a while, even if you don't see anything (that is, all the entries are still there, but simply hidden from view.)
  • I had to refresh the DNA matches page after I Saved settings on the configuration page for the extension to come back. Yup. That's how it works. Chrome has a bad habit of retaining older context menu settings on anything less than a full reload, so the configuration page Save button will reload the entire extension to flush them out.
  • Can I set the filters so that no entries will ever be displayed, e.g. simultaneously have a Show only and a Hide All filter active? Absolutely, there's no AI at work. The extension will filter what you tell it, even if it seems a completely useless task.

Sunday, June 30, 2019

New MedBetterDNA extension is planned and coming for the major AncestryDNA site update

I am indeed working on a new release of MedBetterDNA Chrome browser extension for the AncestryDNA site that will have at least two unique filters not found in the major AncestryDNA site update of July 1st, 2019.

Barring major issues, I anticipate a first release within the first half of July 2019. It will probably be fairly underpowered compared to the final version of the previous site's MedBetterDNA features, but it will continue to be enhanced and improved based on user feedback and requests. Significant filtering enhancements appear to remain a possibility with the new site. However, the extension will undergo what is almost a complete rewrite from scratch, so this will take time.

Honestly, for all the filter ideas AncestryDNA used in their update that were in my original extension, I think they ought to give me a free AncestryDNA subscription for life, but I am not so silly as to expect such a thing. They are certainly under no legal or moral obligation to do so.

Monday, April 15, 2019

MedBetterDNA now supports filtering out AncestryDNA results by Unlinked Tree

MedBetterDNA version 4.3, updated to add the feature of filtering by Unlinked Tree results. Unlinked Tree entries are normally shown on the AncestryDNA results page, but can be hidden from view via the standard context menu checkmark, or the extension options page.

That is all.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

MedBetterDNA 4.1 reintroduces No Trees filtering of AncestryDNA results

MedBetterDNA version 4.1, updated to reintroduce the previous feature of filtering by No Trees results, while we wait for the AncestryDNA beta to become a public release. No Trees entries are normally shown on the AncestryDNA results page, but can be hidden from view via the standard context menu checkmark, or the extension options page.

Also, minor wording changes to the context menu and elsewhere, based on user feedback.

Monday, February 11, 2019

MedBetterWTHAY updated, new popup information window in family tree

MedBetterWTHAY, a Chrome extension for use with the Ancestry site to display extra family information in a popup window, has been updated with a new feature. It now shows a popup window of a person's relationship to you when the cursor is placed, or hovered, over that person's information box on the family tree page.

This option is only available for the top-down or vertical family tree display, and not the sideways or horizontal family tree display. It will activate after one second of hovering the mouse over any family tree entry.

A red line at the top of the box will show when the feature is activated by the mouse hover, and then there is a delay of varying time (less than one to several seconds) while the extension requests and loads the relationship information from the Ancestry site.

The original popup window showing Relationship and LifeStory for Find Person listings continues to operate as before.

I personally use this feature of the MedBetterWTHAY extension when I'm deep in the family tree and start to lose track of exactly who the heck I'm looking at.

Please note, the new family tree relationship is internally a lot more fiddly and fragile than other parts of the extension, or other Ancestry-related extensions. If the Ancestry site changes even a little bit, I would be wholly unsurprised if the change caused this feature to stop working properly. Just let me know and I'll see if I can make it all work again.