Family Search Hackers
Not sure if this is what one might call a FS member who goes to Family Search pages and intentionally writes over every entree they come across but it's the only word I can use to describe them. A few years ago when I joined this site I was really enjoying adding my family members to the WW tree but after a few weeks I noticed every entry I entered had been written over, merged or deleted with another name (usually the same one) next to these entries taking the credit.
How is a relative who sees these entries supposed to contact me if my name is completely erased. I have written to FS support many times to complain about this issue as has many other members from my area. To date this problem still exists. When writing to FS with a problem of abuse is their someone in charge of FS support who can hear the complaints of so many of its members?
Answers
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Please provide more details about what specifically you are referring to. There are two different scenarios I can picture, one of which is perfectly normal functioning of Family Tree and the other of which is a problem.
Scenario 1) You have entered a person into Family Tree. Someone else finds an existing duplicates and correctly merges the two or more copies of the person or correctly improves information on a person. After doing so, the contributor name on the edited pieces of information shows the other users name. This is fine and proper in that it shows the user responsible for the most recent change. There is no type of ownership, priority, or relationship implied by that name, just who is responsible for the current state of the data and the data still being there.
Nothing is ever completely erased in Family Tree. Everything is fully maintained in the Change Log. Sometimes you do have to check a few different Change Logs if there have been merges but the information is still there. If I want to see the names of all the dozens of people that have ever contributed to one of my relatives in Family Tree, I can find them in the Change Log.
I can also see what relatives are interested enough in a person to be worth contacting by checking who is following a person in Family Tree. I do this by going to my Following list and clicking on the More icon (the three vertical dots) next to his or her name:
That the user name on the details page is the last editor, not the first editor, is just a byproduct of working in a shared, communal, wiki-style tree. If you entered data and four other people have added to, corrected, or otherwise improved it or made a mistake based on a misunderstood source and changed it, do you still want your name there as the personal responsible for that data in its current form?
You state that one person has "written over" every entry. Most likely then the person is a fairly close relative and you and that person share a large number of joint relatives and that person is working diligently cleaning up duplicates and fixing data. As long as the end result is all still correct, you really don't have anything to complain about and actually should be thanking him for the help.
There is, of course, the possibility that this other person also misunderstands the meaning of that user name and is foolishly wasting a bunch of time trying to get his name to show. No one is going to give us any type of reward or extra credit based on the number of times our names appear on the detail page.
Scenario 2) You have entered a person in Family Tree, say "John Smith," and another user has come along and merged "John Smith" and all his family with "Henry Jones" and all his family. That is misuse or severe misunderstanding of Family Tree and is a problem that needs to be specifically dealt with. Sometimes all you need to do is contact the person and discuss that Family Tree is a shared tree and he should not be "cleaning up" "his tree" by merging away people he is not related to. Sometimes it has to be reported as abuse.
If you were to provide a specific example of an ID where you have a concern so people can see in the Change Log exactly what is going on, that would be helpful in reviewing and explaining this issue.
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