Adding Relationship "Codes" to the name suffix field for individuals
I have recently discovered a family tree user that is adding "relationship codes" to his ancestors in the family tree. For example, GGF, GGM, 2GGF, 2GGM, 3GGF, 3GGM .... 13GGF, 13GGM. This person obviously doesn't understand that family tree is not his "personal tree". How can we prevent such "overachieving"? Needless to say, this contributor has not responded to my several attempts to communication via Chat. Is this considered a form of abuse? Arrgghhh!@&#
Answers
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I would consider it abuse, but the bar is VERY high when we report abuse.
I had one not long ago who was using the middle name field of men for such descriptors as "wife Esther Bardsley" and even attached a note on the profiles that such descriptors were a great way to differentiate among same-named people. Maybe in her personal tree, but not in the collaborative tree, please.
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I highly doubt that such cluelessness would qualify under FS's extremely strict definitions for "abuse", unfortunately.
The best I can think of is to move those codes to collaboration notes, along with the user's name and some sort of boilerplate text about this being a shared tree. "This profile was marked '2ggf' by user USERNAME. This is not an appropriate use of the shared, collaborative tree; the person represented by this profile does not have that relationship to the vast majority of the people who contribute here. Such personalization belongs in offline or otherwise private trees." And then put a reference to the note in the edited name's Reason box: "Please see the note on the Collaborate tab regarding the relationship code that has been removed from this name." Or something like that.
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I have a line where someone added things like "8th ggrandfather" etc. to the title fields of many ancestors. I sent a nice message that got no response, so I spent a lot of time deleting those, as did other "cousins." Then there was the one who added the maiden name of the mother as a middle name to all of her children with no sources that backed up that middle name. This was over many generations and was probably for at least 100 PIDs. At least it was in all lowercase so it was easy to find where she did it, but then someone "corrected" the capitalization of many of them. And of course there were a few instances where that middle name was indeed backed up by sources and was correct, but most of her changes were to people born before middle names were common, say around 1800 (in the English-speaking tradition in America, anyway). And finally, there was the person who attached images of "2nd great grandfather" as a memory, then used that as the image of the person.
All this is to say, and it's been suggested before, could Family Search please make it more clear that it's a collaborative tree? Perhaps a big, bold statement on the login page, or a splash page. It needs to be more "in your face."
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