Forum bot that monitors for phrase "My Tree"
This is a suggestion for the community.
I suggests the introduction of a forum bot* that monitors/hunts for the phrase "My Tree", from user accounts less than x months old.
It would insert a friendly response into the thread, cheerfully clarifying how no one in FS has their own tree because FS is one tree. It would include link to a splainer.
* a project all on it's own
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Interesting idea. (While we're at it, can we have something that automatically shunts questions into the Temple category if they mention two or more of "temple", "ordinance", and "sealing"?)
The trick with either of those would be getting the bot to tell a question from an answer. And FS's record with automated anything is, um, bad.
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And the board nanny bot doesn't have a great track record. Any time I try to include a link to WorldCat in an answer, the nanny bot deletes the link telling me the picture was not permitted. Only there was no picture, just the URL of a book on WorldCat.
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My suggestion is a clone of the Reddit spelling bots.
"Hey, raggyboi7, just a quick heads-up:
alot is actually spelled a lot. You can remember it by it is one lot, 'a lot'.
Have a nice day!"
They reasonably annoy a lot of users but we're not Reddit.
Also, they're not serving a critical function. That is, they're suggestive and not authoritative about anything important.
For a moment, let's assume the bot is reliable enough. Would it be useful? Maybe, if the cheerful clarification was worded well enough. It could be tested by having a mod pose as a bot and be the first-ish response to an angry OP about My Tree!!!
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And when Innocent User asks politely "How do I import my tree from Ancestry into FamilySearch, please?" and gets that confusing answer, we still have to answer it and explain the bot got it wrong.
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A simpler alternative is community staff could prepare a post for us users to copy & paste into a standalone post.
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You aren't wrong but as far as I see bots do this task well, it's because the wording is succinctly self-explanatory. The phrasing is about 98% of this.
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Or you could scroll on by and let someone else answer it.
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Sure. That's what we're seeing now, many times a day. Conversation get halted while the most basic possible facet of FS gets explained for the bazillionth time. For the folks doing that, I can feel the fatigue from here.
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Your concern is touching. I have many semi-automatic answers prepared, ready to copy/paste.
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Niiiiice. Can I see the one for this? Who doesn't like a semi-automatic?
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We've had users who were in the habit of regurgitating boilerplate for common topics, and some mods have lists of Help Center links for frequent questions, but it is my experience that people stop reading such things the moment they find something that they perceive as inapplicable to Their Own Special Circumstance. (If they were receptive to generic advice on the topic, they'd be looking through whatever FAQ is available, not posting to a forum.)
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And to be clear, I'm not utterly convinced the repetitive exercise I'm targeting can be eased this way.
But since there is no banner at sign-up yelling THERE. IS. ONE. TREE. in a Picard voice, we works with whats we gots.
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Yes, to that Julia. I tweak my prepared answers to the situation, but I keep a few necessary phrases and URLs at the ready.
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What I'd be interested in is a survey of all of those people who've posted a "someone touched MY tree!" question: how did they arrive at their total misapprehension of the nature of FS's tree? Which door did they come through? (Where [else] does FS need to put more flashy posters/signs?)
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I get why they believe it's a personal tree. Every genealogy program everywhere does a personal tree. It isn't intuitive to imagine anything else.
It'd be like buying a computer, pre-internet days and suddenly discovering everyone on Earth who bought one of these shares your document folder. Who'd ever imagine that?
One of the first clues you aren't in your universe anymore is when you try to delete someone and you can't. Also that there are reasons you can't and as you track those reasons down it starts dawning on you that something unexpected is going on.
In my long-considered opinion, these users are reasonably confused.
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"No one in particular" wrote:
I get why they believe it's a personal tree. Every genealogy program everywhere does a personal tree. It isn't intuitive to imagine anything else.
If this is so, it leaves a fundamental question: what can FamilySearch do, to make people aware of the difference? What can they write, and where can they put it, so that newcomers will actually read it and comprehend it?
The same question applies to WikiTree and Geni, I suppose, but at a smaller scale, and especially in WikiTree's case, without the added confusion caused by the other parts of the website and the connections between the parts. (I answered a question in Other Languages - Hungarian this week with "perhaps you weren't finding it because you were looking in the phonebook for the stew recipe". The confusion was caused by the nearly-identical interfaces for Search - Records and Search - Family Tree.)
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