Auto follow
I would love to have a feature where the follow button on the FamilySearch Family Tree was automatically activated every time I edited a person or created a new person record. I'm finding that I keep forgetting to click on follow and I have to go back and follow everyone manually. Wikipedia has a similar function where you can automatically follow pages that you edit.
Comments
-
The problem here is with the limit of 4,000 profiles you can follow. If there was the "auto follow" feature you are requesting, some users would soon find themselves having to delete some of those automatically added to their Following list to enable this to function. (In other words, once you'd hit the 4,000 mark, no more IDs could be added to your Following list - either automatically or manually.
5 -
Don't assume everyone is working on JUST their ancestors. I have quite a few in-laws and adopted relatives who are not related to me and I work on their lineage. I'm not really interested in following most of their ancestors. I am also a volunteer lineage researcher and for people I work with, I will add sources I find to their ancestors. I am quite content to follow only who I manually mark to follow.
3 -
You can find those profiles again by visiting your Contributions.
1 -
I didn't realise there was an upper limit on the number of people you can follow. I just thought it would be nice to have the option. Otherwise how do I check if people have made changes to profiles to which I've contributed?
0 -
You could just have autofollow as an option. On Wikipedia you can choose to automatically follow any page where you make an edit.
0 -
Alas, on Family Tree I have over 300,000 contributions, either sources attached or profiles made, so probably I have edited over 100,000 profiles.
If there were an auto follow option, I would be constantly having to weed my Following list or turn the option off. I hit the 4000 threshold many years ago, so even now I weed the list almost daily.
I do wish Family Tree had more edit tracking and analysis, similar to Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a partner site where anyone can see summary statistics on any page: how many contributors, who contributed the most content, etc.
1 -
You've made an amazing contribution to the FamilySearch Family Tree. It would be great if there could be a way to acknowledge and highlight people like you who are contributing so much to the content in the same way that Wikipedia does. and to track more of the statistics.
I would envisage autofollow as an optional feature. I'm only up to about 300 people at the moment. I think I would only really want to follow people in my own family tree or perhaps a few other people I have a particular interest in. I see that I am now getting suggestions of people to follow which I'm finding quite useful.
0 -
@DebbieKennett –– My point is not to brag but to help more clearly define the scope of effects of such a feature request. There are direct effects and side effects.
Edits to profiles aren't even counted, although they are recorded in each contributor's change log. FamilySearch provides no user tools to analyze our own change logs, and we can only see our own, not anyone else's.
0 -
@dontiknowyou I see what you mean. I was wondering if there was a way to see the contributions of other users as you can on Wikipedia. That might be a useful facility to include. I wonder if the site admins are able to see all the user edits. Perhaps someone could develop a browser extension that would allow people to analyse their own stats.
1 -
FamilySearch is able to forensically investigate or see a more extensive history of actions or edits taken by all user accounts. That is how they can determine if someone is being 'destructive', abusive or 'malicious' in Family Tree.
0 -
Thanks for the info. I thought that had to be the case.
0 -
I would love this option, too. Disabling it by default is fine, so the most significant contributors don't get spammed with zillions of updates.
It could be worth the effort to have a slightly smarter feature, that only automatically follows pages of people directly related to you within X connections. So it would automatically follow updates to anyone in my somewhat-extended family tree, but not automatically follow changes to totally-unrelated people.
And for what it's worth, the FamilySearch wiki already has this feature. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/index.php?title=Help:Watchlist&title=Help%3AWatchlist§ion=8#Automatically_add_a_page_to_your_Watchlist
Also found a kinda-sorta workaround, if you don't mind installing the external software Legacy Family Tree. I don't think I will do so. https://www.reddit.com/r/familysearch/comments/12c980p/how_can_i_automatically_follow_anyone_i/
1
