"Your question will be forwarded to a specialty team for review and resolution" moderator responses
I would be grateful if Community members could provide some feedback on the results of such an action.
Can anyone relate details of positive responses from one of these speciality teams?
I only raise the question because it has previously been my understanding that FamilySearch does not have the resources / dedicated teams to answer many of the questions to which moderators are giving this response. For example, just now I saw this copy/paste response against a post that was reporting an indexing error. It has always been my understanding that if an indexing error (let's preclude metadata issues for now) cannot be edited by the user, FamiySearch does not have a dedicated team to make the correction on their behalf.
Apart from positive responses from users (I would like to report a number of issues myself, if I believed they would receive special attention), perhaps a moderator could explain the nature of these speciality teams. Then, FamilySearch users (like me) could feel more inclined to report issues that (from experience) they knew they could previously only get a response from another forum participant.
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Thank you for your question. When you see a response like what you indicated above or something like:
Your question will be forwarded to a specialty team for review and resolution. You may be contacted by that team if they need more information.
This means that that particular question is being moved to another FamilySearch Community where the question more adequately applies. Those moderators assigned and trained in that category are better equipped to answer that particular question and can get further assistance from other like team members to provide an answer.
Regarding your example question about "indexing error (let's preclude metadata issues for now) cannot be edited by the user, FamiySearch does not have a dedicated team to make the correction on their behalf." That would be forwarded to the Search category. That team is trained in historical records and would be dealing with records that have been published. I personally do not know if there is a "back door" way to correct indexing errors that have been published but they would be the team that would know if there ways to make the correction. They have their own training and protocols regarding this. I do know that this question has come up before and maybe the engineers are developing a way or work around to make those corrections. But the Search moderators would know better on what is happening with that issue.
Hopefully this explanation will help answer your question.
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Thank you. You have certainly explained the meaning of the sentence you, and some of your moderator colleagues, frequently use.
However, I find myself disappointed by the use of such phrasing, as it implies (at least to me) that these questions have been actually escalated to a team within the FamilySearch organisation that can deal with such issues. Instead, it appears the question / post is merely being moved to another section within "Community".
I wonder, is it just me, or have other Community members been under the impression that their issues have been passed to a group (outside of "Community"), which has expert knowledge of the particular subject?
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I agree that the phrase seems misleading, at best.
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Would this be a better response?
Your question will be forwarded to another team within the FamilySearch community for review and resolution. You may be contacted by that team if they need more information. Each FamilySearch category team has special training for their area and that is why we are moving your question to that team.
Does that make more sense? If you can give me feedback on that I can notify the various team leads so other moderators can use similar language.
Thank you for your feedback.
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Many thanks for addressing this matter further. I think the word "team" is still likely to be a little confusing. Why not simply say, as is stated in other posts, that the question has been moved to another (named) more appropriate section of Community?
To be honest, experienced "ordinary" members of Community are likely to have as much knowledge as some of the moderators when it comes to answering most of the questions posted on the forum. If members, of say around ten years experience of answering queries on this and predecessor platforms, are not able to address an issue, then it really does need to be escalated to a specialist, FamilySearch department.
Some moderators were previously stating they had escalated issues, that required expert opinion or action, though I haven't seen much of that lately.
My main wish is to give absolute clarity as to where members' questions are being passed (if they are not to be left in the section to which they were originally posted). As the issue is one applicable to a number of moderators, could it not be passed to a "senior moderator" or "Community manager" to see how they believe this could be best handled, in an effort to avoid any ambiguity?
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"We are moving your question to the X group where someone may have more information" would be a honest way to do it.
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See this thread for another of the same. https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/comment/383745
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However, every time I have gotten that response, my question was already in the correct category and I received a private message from someone who either asked me for a little more clarifying information, or fixed the problem that was brought up in my question. I've also received messages from actual other moderators who were on that "specialty team" who were able to fix my problem that was unable to be addressed by the regular community moderators. Some of I can think of right now are temple ordinances that needed to be fixed by the temple/membership department and then I needed a PID deleted that was done by an engineering team. None of these were handled by community moderators. They were sent to people outside of the community to be fixed.
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There is more to FS Community than we contributors aka "guests" can see.
Some questions get moved from one public category to another; others get moved "behind the curtain".
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Amy, I'm glad you have had a good experience. Mine has not been so. I have yet to receive a request for more information from someone who could resolve the issue I posted.
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@Paul W I think folks are talking about 2 different things in the comments. You seem to be asking specifically about the message that moderators are taught to use when, in fact, they do move the issue to a team outside of Community. Some end up going to engineers; others to other specialists. But they are in fact being sent to folks outside of Community.
The blanket statement that we can never fix "indexing" issues is not quite true. There are situations in which things that look like an error made by an indexer are in fact an error made by an auto-standardization process. Those are things that the moderators who work in the Q and A Search area are supposed to understand how to recognize and they are supposed to move those on to the specialists who can get them to the engineers. That said, it is true that we are not currently reporting straight-up indexing errors. We encourage the use of the Edit option where it exists and using the Feedback button on the right side of a records details page or search results page to report issues directly. (Incidently, that feedback button does not show in Firefox, so use Chrome or Edge).
The message about moving a discussion is within Community and is simply trying to get a discussion to the part of community where the moderators most familiar with the topic work.
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I keep seeing "(Incidently, that feedback button does not show in Firefox, so use Chrome or Edge)."
I use Firefox almost exclusively, and the Feedback button is definitely visible.
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@Paul W, When there have been issues that I know by experience support can fix, I have found here that after getting such message that a moderator moved the question to a specialty team, I get a pretty prompt response via direct message and the issue is fixed. Sometimes it takes a little back and forth to give more detail and to explain to support why they can fix it. These are things like minor data issues in Family Tree that only an administrator can fix.
I have one issue that I have not checked on for awhile and it has been a couple of months since some discussion with the moderator that looked at it and its being sent to the specialty team.
Those auto-standardized indexing issues are being worked on according to a response I got: "We have reported the errors to engineering. Unfortunately, they have a large list of similar errors they are working to correct in our massive historical records collection, so it will likely be quite some time before all are corrected." So it may be years.
Regarding indexing errors, the only thing I have ever heard here on all the past iterations of these boards, elsewhere on FamilySearch, and in other various presentations from FamilySearch personnel is that there is no way for FamilySearch to correct them, which is why the editing system for them was programmed.
Programming issues, based on prior and ongoing experience, I never expect any kind of response to. Those things are either fixed over the next couple of years or they are not or they are made completely irrelevant by a major update.
It would probably be more informative if the moderators had a couple of different types of responses that could include a true assessment of what the specialty team might be able to do. This will take experience on the part of moderators and the ability for them, before posting a response, to ask someone on the specialty team what, if anything, the team can do about an issue. It may solve some frustration on the part of users to have a clear "Thank you for your post. We regret to inform you that nothing can be done at this point." Rather than "Your question has been forwarded..." and never getting a reply, if that is what some people are experiencing.
It would also be great if, when appropriate and would not involve sensitive or private information, the specialty team could continue the conversation via the Community board and not just via private messaging so that the rest of us can learn from the discussion.
To take your original question, if that post about the indexing issue ends with "Your question has been forwarded....," none of the rest of us, including the moderator who forwarded it, learns anything.
If instead we can see what further information the team might ask for, whether or not they were able to fix the issue, why or why not it was fixable, this would be very worthwhile in learning what types of requests are worth posting and how to properly make a clear request.
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@Áine Ni Donnghaile I woud be interested in knowing what version of Firefox you are using. I am on version 93.0 and cannot see Feedback on record details pages or search results pages.
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@N Tychonievich sending you a private message.
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@N Tychonievich FYI - uBlock settings were hiding the "Feedback" button for me on Chrome. Resetting that fixed the button on Chrome for me - the issue may be similar on Firefox for you.
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