Britishnewspaperarchive Avis 

Joanna quickly and effectively resolved an issue I had with my subscription.

They’ve wrecked a perfectly good site, ignored every warning from long‑term subscribers, and rolled out a system that is slower, clunkier, and far harder to use. Years of saved research have been reduced to useless lists, search results are now unreliable, and basic navigation takes twice as long.

The worst part?
They clearly don’t care. The replies to reviews are copy‑paste corporate apologies that never address the actual problems — exactly what you’d expect from a service that knows users have no alternative. When you’re the only large‑scale digitised British newspaper archive, you can degrade the product and still expect people to pay.

I’ve subscribed for 8 years, but I won’t be renewing.
Until BNA stops acting like a monopoly and actually listens to the people who fund it, this “upgrade” will remain one of the most damaging decisions they’ve ever made.

The new format is dreadful - it just doesn't work. Previously the site was not particularly good but it was passable. In its current form it is simply unusable. After 5 or 6 years of subscribing, I shall not be renewing.

I find the site almost unusable since the change to the GUI. I assume the thought they were modernising it but instead it made it so counter intuitive.
It is so bad that I no longer enjoy even trying to find what I am looking for with the new search procedure. I have been with them on annual subscription for a few years now but I WILL NOT BE RENEWING!

Another dissatisfied customer. The new interface is much fiddlier to use and the unreliability of the OCR means most of its flashy new features are largely pointless and no improvement on the previous clear and uncluttered approach.

The date filter makes it much harder to compare frequency of term usage over time: much harder to set up and harder / slower to do structured sampling .

The new clipping system has the advantage of giving the date of the paper but not the page number which is obscured (on the iPad at least) by other text. And clipping itself takes more time while the necessity of clicking twice to find the relevant heading rather than accepting the last-used ‘bookmark’ as the default slows things up.

Useful features from eg the Gale databases of allowing a seamless move from one hit to the next or seeing the text in context at a glance have been incorporated.

It’s hard to believe that they sought any input at any stage from users - especially historians.

When it came to updating payment details, I wasn't able to do this online, which I was surprised at. However, I contacted the archive by email and Joanna dealt very quickly and efficiently with my query. Thank you, Joanna!

56% of reviewers giving one star and an embarrassing overall score of 2.3. A total collapse since the new system was introduced and no one is listening.

I experienced a problem which was completely my own fault. Sophie sorted things out for me very quickly - she worked out what I had done wrong and corrected it.

It could be a bit easier....

oohhhhh just seen that i can no longer look at clippings without subscription! it all becoming cleaerer is it greed? a national asset turned into money making scheme... ill come back if you just go back to the old system listen to your users please!!!!!!

If I could give this “0” I would, they’ve absolutely ruined a brilliant resource that I loved using daily, I have held a subscription for 5 years, I won’t be renewing, no chance. Searching on the site has become almost impossible.. it’s Laborious, clunky and train wreck compared to what it used to be. Advice to BNA, change it back.

Used to think this was a great site (I worked in IT for many years and found this site excellent - well presented). It is now a total shambles. Not sure if I will be subscribing again. Who did you get to do the upgrade - if it was external contractors I suggest it is time to go elsewhere. Time to wake up and listen to your customers. Put it back as it was or you will be losing a lot of subscribers - and money. Take notice ansd admit the upgrade was a costly mistake!!

DO NOT WASTE MONEY ON SUBSCRIPTION.

Given the simplistic searching of the old system I cannot understand why they have now made it virtually impossible to use.

Simply pick region, dates, newspaper has been replaced with a system I cannot grasp or understand, & given the years of research I've carried out, i thought id quickly get to grips with it.
I do not understand why these companies continually want to remake the wheel..

Then to reply with, here’s a video to learn, is just a sarcastic insult.

There should be a Zero Star rating because a 1 star is actually too much for this wreck of a site.

I cant & will not renew my decade long subscription

I have no idea how a company could make such a mess of a perfectly functioning website. I agree with everyone else's scores here and would give it a zero if I could. Since the "upgrade" the site is unusable. Even if you can actually get into the home page, the UI is not user friendly and has obviously skipped any in depth beta testing before launching this upon an unsuspecting public. Poor form all around.

The changes that have been made to the BNA website are absymal! I have spent a lot of money subscribing to your services as they were the best. But these recent changes to the websites UI have made it impossible to navigate. I would warn the team responsible for this update that the people complaining aren't just people of an older generation who "dislike change" or "Struggle with newer tech". I am 32, I grew up with computers, websites and apps and I find this over simplification of a deisgn disastrous.

I've poured so much of my time and my money into researching my family history, I have so many articles saved. Articles that I could quickly look back at and remember basic information like the newspaper name and the date published. But somehow that's all gone now and all my bookmarked articles are reduced to a simple newspaper headline that might not even be relevant to why I saved that page. I need to have sources listed and organised otherwise EVERYONE'S research is useless. Given that BNA is based on archiving history, you should know how important those details are!!

Give us back the old website UI. This update is better suited for app users maybe. But for those of us who use it on desktop it's totally unfair. I specifically do not use Find My Past because they have exatly the same UI design and it's wholly unsuited for in depth research.

I used to love the BNA website, but the recent "improvements" are terrible. An enjoyable and rewarding research pass time has now, sadly, become a chore.
The new search options are far too complicated, and the results are not as accurate as the old website. I've tried using my keywords in each of the myriad of fields but none seem to work as before. I'm pretty savvy with computers but this interface is baffling.
And why so many time-consuming drop-down options?
The user interface is just not logical anymore.
The incredibly useful 'new and upcoming newspapers' link is gone too.
Unless the old (and very reliable) search parameters and simple menu options are replicated, I will, sadly, not be renewing my subscription.

Impossible to use the recently updated site now. Renewed my membership 4 weeks ago as BNA was a great resource over the last couple of years on my family ancestry search....... however I now can't use it. Unable to refine my searches......and end up getting thousand plus returns when I search for something! Extremely disappointed.......and regretting renewing my membership.

I used to love this site: by far the best for newspaper research. If only the company had bothered to do some research amongst its users before it launched this disaster.

I work with a lot of tech and I'm used to programs changing so I thought I'd give this a go. Often things do become intuitive once you've worked with them a little.

Alas that is not the case with this update. I created a new collection but cannot import any of my original bookmarks into it: they each have to be viewed and then saved into the new collection.

Well, you'd hope that would be the case, wouldn't you? I created a new collection, painstakingly clipped, annotated and saved three test clippings into it, only to find out that my collection had completely disappeared when I went back to try and find it via the menu.

The 'new' bookmarks are an unhelpful disaster as far as finding anything goes. The title of each clipping is gobbledegook. The date against it is the date you accessed it, not the date of the original article.

Fortunately I always make a document copy of my research, but I like to double check things and BNA have made this completely impossible.

I don't know who was responsible for coding this disaster, but for future reference, there is a thing called beta-testing you appear to have entirely ignored. If, as I sincerely hope, you restore the old functionality to the site, for God's sake beta-test it.

I have to agree with all of the negatives views regarding BNA. The site worked perfectly well without this upgrade which is appalling. I have been a member for many years but as my subscription renewal is due in October I may well look at the alternative site on Ancestry.com. I used to enjoy this site so much but can only say, "if this is progress, forget it”. Very disappointed.

The changes to the site have made it exceptionally difficult to use . As a result I haven’t renewed my subscription (after using for several years) and won’t until they go back to how it was or make big improvements.
The only positive is I did like the ability to look more easily through an entire edition and move easily to the next one . But that’s it - the rest of it is now a shambles. They have ruined what was a fantastic resource.