Two questions (deleting and marking deceased)

kathryngz

Hi everyone,

Today I was asked two questions I didn't know how to answer. I'm hoping someone can help.

1. Can I delete someone from a family group tree if I didn't create them? (I'm also wondering if group admins have different delete rights than group members.)
2. If someone marks a living person deceased in a family group tree so that they show up in the public tree, can I just mark them living again, or do I have to contact Support?

Thanks in advance!

Kathryn

Gordon Collett

Here's my unofficial observation: The rules appear to be pretty much the same as the rest of the database. I tested out deleting from both my point of view as an administrator and from my wife's point of view as a regular member.

• If a profile has more than one contributor, that profile cannot be deleted by anyone.
• If a profile has only one contributor, that profile can be deleted, and here is a bit of a twist, by anyone in the group whether the user is an administrator or not.

I would assume, but really don't want to test this and cause problems, that marking and unmarking deceased works just like the rest of the database: if a profile with just one contributor is marked deceased by that contributor, then that contributor can mark the profile living again but under all other situations only FamilySearch can change to profile back to living. After all, it is just one tree, despite the vocabulary terms people are struggling with, in one database so the rules should be the same everywhere.

(Thanks for the presentation. I enjoyed it. Too bad you will have to redo it in six months when all the changes settle down.)

kathryngz

@Gordon Collett Thanks a million! I appreciate your reliable observations about deleting.

I suspect you're right about marking a profile living again after it was erroneously marked deceased. Maybe @AnneLoForteWillson can weigh in on that. I also wasn't crazy about testing it.

Thanks for your kind words about the presentation. This was one of the hardest ones I've done, because it took so much time to test and figure out how things worked, and to organize the information in a way that hopefully made sense.

And I was thinking the same thing—the presentation will have a very short shelf life and need to be redone before too long. I'll probably wait until the experiment ends and the features go live :)

Alan E. Brown

@Gordon Collett said "If a profile has only one contributor, that profile can be deleted, and here is a bit of a twist, by anyone in the group whether the user is an administrator or not."

It would be an even bigger twist — an unwelcome one — if only administrators could delete profiles. One important use case is the OOPS case. If I create a profile (whether a public profile for a deceased person, a living profile in my personal space, or a living person in a Family Group Tree), if I am the only contributor, then I can delete that profile. That's true for every user of Family Tree, independent of their admin status. It would be sad if regular users had to beg an admin for help to delete a profile that was created by mistake, when that profile affects no other user.

Gordon Collett

Just to be clear, I was referring to the one to three family group administrators, not a FamilySearch administrator. Without having seen any discussion of this or anything in the help articles about deleting profiles specifically from a family group, the theoretical possibilities were:

1. Only the group member who created a profile could delete that profile as long as no one else had edited it.
2. The group member who created a profile and a group administrator could delete that profile as long as no one else had edited it.
3. Only the group member who created a profile could delete that profile even if edited by others.
4. The group member who created a profile and a group administrator could delete that profile even if edited by others..
5. Any group member could delete a profile as long as no one besides its original creator had edited it.
6. Any group member could delete any profile even if edited by others.
7. Only a group administrator could delete a profile as long as no one besides its original creator had edited it.
8. Only a group administrator could delete any profile even if edited by others.

Testing these out showed that option 5 is how things work.

Alan E. Brown

@Gordon Collett Perhaps I didn't make it clear, but I was using the term "administrator" the same way you were — a group administrator, not a FamilySearch data administrator.

Now that it's clear that an administrator role has nothing to do with the ability to delete a living profile within a Family Group Tree (FGT), we can eliminate half your possibilities immediately.

But your #5 option is not the correct explanation; indeed, none of your options really explain the complete situation, because there is one very important criterion that you didn't mention: if the profile is connected to a group member (as their "starting person" in the FGT).

If the profile is not connected to a group member, then any group member can delete that profile, regardless of how many group members have edited it. So for this case your "as long as no one besides its original creator had edited it" restriction is not needed. I suppose one way to think of this is that all members of the group jointly own that profile, and so any of those members can delete the joint property of the group. Personally, I think that's too permissive, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it changed before the FGT features are finalized. But then again, any profile that is deleted can be restored, so maybe this isn't a huge problem.

However, if the profile is connected to a group member (the "starting person" in the FGT for that group member), then no one can delete that profile. That includes the group member who is connected to the profile, the administrator who sent the original invitation, or any other group member. This makes sense, since Family Tree prevents us from deleting the root profile in our private FamilySearch Tree that is connected to our user, and by logical extension, no one should be able to delete the profile that is connected to a FGT user.

So my understanding of the rule is this: Any group member can delete any living profile in a FGT, as long as that profile is not the starting person profile for any group member.

Gordon Collett

Yes, clarity and precision are alway difficult when one word has multiple meanings.

Now the question is, should family group administrators have expanded editing rights in a family group including deleting any profile that should be deleted? If a couple of group members go off the deep end and create a bunch of incorrect profiles together, should the administrator have, in addition to the ability to kick them out of the group, the ability to delete those profiles rather than needing to mess up the change logs of other profiles by merging the incorrect ones into them to get rid of the incorrect ones?

To restate your last line to complete the rule: Any group member can delete any living profile in a FGT, as long as that profile is not the starting person profile for any group member and as long as that profile has only one contributor.

Alan E. Brown

@Gordon Collett As near as I can tell (and I have tested it thoroughly), the restrictive clause you added to my statement of the rule is not needed. There is no requirement that a "profile has only one contributor" when we are talking about deleting a living profile in a FGT (that is not a starting person profile) — any group member can delete such a profile. And because of that, there is currently no need for the feature you were wondering about: giving family group administrators expanded rights to delete profiles. Every group member already has those rights, so the administrators need no additional rights.

As a corollary to this, the administrators do have the power to kick a user out of the group, which would remove the connection between the starting person for that former group member and their corresponding profile in the FGT. At that point, that profile would become just a regular living FGT profile that any group member could delete. So putting those two steps together, family group administrators already do have expanded power to delete even starting person profiles, as long as they are willing to kick the associated member out of the group.

Gordon Collett

@Alan E. Brown , you stated " There is no requirement that a "profile has only one contributor" when we are talking about deleting a living profile in a FGT (that is not a starting person profile) — any group member can delete such a profile."

Strange. When I was testing on the 14th, every profile that had two contributors had the notice that it could not be deleted. Today nobody does. A new feature? A bug that has crept in?

Alan E. Brown

I can't say that I've examined all these conditions in detail until yesterday, so I'm unable to confirm or deny how it may have worked on the 14th. I assume that the profiles you were testing with on the 14th were NOT connected to any group member as their starting person profile. If that's the case, then it sounds like the rules for profile deletion have recently changed; I would tend to agree that this is either a bug or a new feature (I have no idea which).

AnneLoForteWillson

@kathryngz It sounds like the guys have pretty well experimented and found the limitations of deleting profiles in the Family Group Tree.

However, your question about marking someone deceased is a good one. The principle is that once a Family Group Tree profile is marked deceased it becomes part of the FamilySearch Tree (all the interconnected, deceased, publicly-viewable people). So, the rules that exist there apply. See: Change a deceased person to living in Family Tree. I'm pretty sure that covers it, but I will check to see if there are any specialized rules because of the shared nature of the Family Group Trees.

AnneLoForteWillson

Hey all, I did get word back from the engineers. They indicated that it is intentional that any member of the group can delete any Family Group Tree profile. So that might be something you consider when setting the rules for your Family Group.

Also, if a Family Group Tree profile is erroneously marked deceased, it has the same process to mark it as a living profile as when you mark one of your own Private People from FamilySearch Tree as deceased.