If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, a ghost hint is the term used for those pesky hints that were once available and no longer are. There are several reasons for their occurrence - an individual may have uploaded media and then removed it or made it private or Ancestry may have discontinued the database for the hint.
Every so often I go through the hints as sometimes I miss a new database that Ancestry has added and the hints can give me some information I may have missed. The ghost hints, though, remain and give a false number of the hints that are available. I've clipped below the grayed out hints that appear on my All Hints page:
Clicking on Records or Photos just gives me the message " You currently have no photo hints for .
Reset filter to see all hints "
Also, look at the count over the leaf of 99+ on the upper right corner. I don't have over 99 hints as I actually have zero. That count has stayed the same even after leaving the program and signing on a different computer the following day.
This lack of accuracy scares me; how many other data counts are off that we aren't aware of? How do we know that filtering we set when doing a search is correct?
Ghost hints aren't a new phenomena; I first noticed them in June a few years ago and when I called Customer Service was informed the problem must be on my end with cache in my computer. Yeah, sure. The following May, at an NGS Conference, I asked one of the Ancestry reps about the situation as my ghost inhabitants had grown. He explained the reasons which I mentioned in my first paragraph and said the company was working on cleaning up the problem by periodically doing a refresh. The problem is the refresh does not work for all the hints as I've had the 7 above for YEARS.
I'd really love for Ancestry to stop being a ghost host and send these phantoms to parts unknown.
Yes, I've had the same experience for more than a year, and it persists on certain hints still. It's NOT your computer, it's their system. Sigh.
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