One of the key aspects of the Stories Behind the Stars project is the ability of people to read stories of the fallen using a smartphone at any cemetery or memorial.
Save your story to a Fold3 Memorial
Link your Fold3 Memorial to the matching FindaGrave page for the same fallen (instructions here)
People can use the FindAGrave smartphone app to read your story
Recently a glitch with FindAGrave has resulted in a temporary hold on getting this link to work.
Here is the relevant message from Fold3:
We have verified that it appears something has broken once more with links to Fold3 Memorials showing on Find-a-Grave. Since we are aware of this, please pass on to all of Stories behind the Stars that we are working on a fix. It will most likely be a bit of time (I would guess at least 2 weeks, but I cannot give a specific date for sure). Additionally, if there are links already previously broken (between about December 2022 and the end of January 2023) or that break beginning on about March 19, those will have to retroactively be fixed, which won’t happen until we do the first fix I mentioned above. So:
I would guess at least 2 weeks to fix the feature so it works again
Some time after the above (hopefully within the next few weeks), we will run a script to retroactively fix things not linked when the feature was failing.
I would also request that members of your organization not continue to e-mail about the same thing over and over (whether directly to me or to oursupport@fold3.com mailbox). This won’t improve the speed of the fixes and delays our responses to other customers and in other work on the website that needs to be done. Perhaps you can ask them to filter all requests through you first? That way, if you know that we are working on fixes, you can pass that along.
I will let you know when this has been resolved.
More info from my Fold3 contact:
The issue was broken from December through January (if I remember correctly), and then it was fixed. On March 19 the mechanism to coordinate this linking broke for Find-a-Grave (abbreviated as FGV by the way). What that means is that, while Fold3 tried to communicate with FGV, their site didn’t respond and so a link on their pages could not be created. I actually was informed just a few minutes ago that this has been fixed again, so linking should work properly once more. As stated previously, links that failed when the FGV mechanism was broken will remain broken for now. At some point (when we have the time and resources available), we will run a series of commands that will check for broken links and fix those retroactively. But I would not expect this set of commands to be run for some time, probably a few weeks.
Thanks for your help, Don. If possible, please pass this on to your members so they’re aware both of the fix that has happened and of the plans in the future to correct those links that had failed in the past.