Bug report: randomly disappearing merge reason statement
Is anyone else experiencing this problem, or is my computer just acting weird? I type in a (detailed) reason statement for a merge, but then it randomly suddenly disappears, leaving the box blank and forcing me to re-type everything. I say "randomly" because I cannot figure out any pattern to what I did or didn't do to cause it. It doesn't seem to matter where my mouse cursor was or where I was on the page; sometimes I was scrolling, sometimes I wasn't, sometimes I hadn't clicked anything, another time I had just clicked the "do it!" button (resulting in an error message, which made me want to yell at the thing....).
Answers
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No, I have not seen that. As a test I unmerged a recent merge, and merged again, and it worked normally.
Is this at the point where you are shown a choice of 4 boilerplate reason statements? Because I always pick one, then if appropriate add a second paragraph.
Are you using the new person pages? I am not.
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@Julia Szent-Györgyi I haven't had that one, yet. I did have other strange issues yesterday while cleaning up the mess made by one of my cousins. Detaching duplicated parent-child connections was not working at all.
Win 10, updated, Firefox 100.0.1 (64-bit), new pages.
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I'm using the new person page, but that shouldn't affect things, since this is step 3 of the unchanged merge process. Yes, this is where the boilerplate choices are offered. I generally choose the shortest (first) one and then edit it -- that way, I don't need to retype the PIDs. It doesn't make any difference whether I choose one and edit, or just type something. I've had it happen where I was one character short of the end, and suddenly the box only contained the last character I typed, and another instance where I had just selected the "and" between the IDs and the box suddenly went blank.
(Because of this weird behavior, I've been copying the IDs portion of one of the boilerplates into a text editor and writing the reason there. Then I copy and paste and very quickly click "finish".)
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I've had that happen a few times, but I don't know the cause either. Most of the time it works as normal, thankfully. I think I've also had it happen when giving reason statements for changes other than merges.
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Yes, it happens to me also, and those who I have helped. It happens on Merge pages and on Edit fields on a Person page. It happens when I’m quick on a page that’s been open more than a couple of minutes. It happens more often when I’m slower. It frequently happens when I flip to another page to check a fact. It nearly always happens when I spend more than 3-5 minutes typing, then I think of something I definitely need to check before continuing, open another page or two, find the facts, and then come back to continue typing. Also, it does not like having more than two related pages open. It does not like when I have to go back and shorten my text to not exceed the maximum number of characters allowed. Even when I do everything right and quickly, FamilySearch still has bugs and glitches - it has the attention span and “terrible twos” unpredictability of my two-year-old grandson. Both are a work in progress.
My solution (for FamilySearch) is to type my comments on a text-editor like MS Word that I can check File > Properties > Statistics and see the total number of characters in advance, and keep it (including the Title or Subject) well under the maximum. Frequently save that text-editor page to a temporary folder, in case it also goes blank. Then Refresh the FamilySearch page, let the page settle down, Copy & Paste the text, proofread what was copied, fix the surprises, and then within 30 seconds click Send/Save/Finish/Merge.
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