Why can't I delete Legacy Disputes?

melville,dl

Is there a rational reason why I can't delete "Legacy Disputes" under the Collaborate menu in Family Tree? It appears that only the original creator of the Dispute has the authority to delete their Dispute. These items were created in the era of NFS when the capability to edit event fields and family relationships didn't exist. From my experience, most of the Legacy Disputes are OBE (overcome by events) or have been resolved in the current Family Tree open-edit environment. Just wondering why this outdated information (in most cases) needs to persist. I have not had any success with contacting the original creators, many are perhaps deceased or are no longer active Family Tree users. .... just wondering and thought I would "reach out" to the community for thoughts or ideas. thanks, DL Melville

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I believe the reason you can't delete them is that they were put in the "discussions" slot, and those can only be deleted by the person who started them.

Why they were put in as discussions rather than as notes, and why discussions cannot be deleted by other users, are questions I do not know the answer to.

melville,dl

yes, Legacy Disputes are put in the Discussions section rather than Notes. WE can delete Notes but not Legacy Disputes.

Paula Thornton

Julia's statement is not accurate. We were able to delete them in the past. Indeed there is still documentation giving instructions to do so. This needs to be fixed. I need to go back and correct LH1Y-YXM

See https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/discussions-users-can-now-delete-legacy-disputes

This feature needs to be restored. Legacy disputes were a system error as a carry over from notes when we could not correct records at all (prior to 2011). Most of the data in these entries are garbage and need to be cleaned up.

melville,dl

Paula,

I hope you can take "a course of action" to give us the capability to delete Legacy Disputes. As I stated, most (if not all) Legacy Disputes are not relavant anymore.

RTorchia

This has been raised before: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/142264/legacy-disputes

The reason for removing the ability to delete these just doesn't make any sense, especially given that they were attached to every person connected at the time even though they only applied to one and were often spread by improper merging and subsequent restoration. So instead letting us sweep away this trash, somebody decided they should be permanently displayed a museum of archaic ineptitude, I guess so people can gaze in awe at these long-resolved and often indecipherable complaints and solemnly contemplate their utter uselessness and irrelevance.

Paul W

I don't have particularly strong feelings on this subject, for or against. However, I do remember at least a couple of users being furious when (it seems in 2014) the ability to delete Legacy Disputes was announced. Occasionally (but rarely) I have found some useful comments in them - especially relating to mistaken identities.

Another issue I used to feel strongly about was that FamilySearch should merge / retire certain "duplicate" records. I certainly changed my mind on that one when I, and many others, found they had started such an exercise, but retiring records with a greater amount of detail than the ones retained!

So, as long as there undoubtedly are certain Legacy Dispute items that do have some useful information included, I would be reluctant to make it easier to hide them, perhaps deep in change logs, and/or so they couldn't be restored. As with "superfluous" sources, we can always ignore these items if they don't appear to be of any added value.

Pat Lowe

I agree strongly with those asking for the ability to delete or edit Legacy discussions. I want to "clean up" each pioneer ancestor with relevant information.

Most of these legacy disputes arose when there was no editing at all in 2011. They have been resolved and are not relevant now. Reinstate editing or deleting of Legacy disputes.

LarryRHunt

I was searching for how to delete legacy disputes and came here. I have to agree with the majority of the users. We need the ability to delete the legacy discussions. If there is useful data there, we need to trust the descendants to use/keep it, although like someone else mentioned, I've never once found useful data there and I do thousands of changes each year.