Display Relationship on individual page
When I display an ancestor on the screen, I would like to have the relationship appear immediately. Currently, I have to click on relationship for it to appear.
Answers
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This has been requested repeatedly ever since relationship calculation was available. Occasionally the posts have been commented on by someone from FamilySearch who reported that relationship calculating is so computer resource intensive that, at this point, doing this calculation every time one of the millions of users on the site at any one time goes to a new profile page is prohibitive and would unacceptably slow down the site response time for everyone.
But maybe one of their very creative programmers will come up the a way to get around this routine calculation time problem and find away to allow this.
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It seems to me that this could only improve data quality, in that people would be less likely to start editing a profile that didn't relate to an ancestor but that had looked initially as if it did.
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I agree it would be a great idea. But what is acceptable? An extra 2 seconds for the page to load? An extra 30 seconds? Twice as long for anything to happen on any page because the system is so busy calculating relationships every time one of the hundreds of thousands of users currently signed on goes to a different profile? But maybe they are making progress on this since it appears that some real-time background relationship calculating is going on with some of the recent updates.
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FS could always focus on this rather than all the automatic surname meaning lookups and other bells and whistles that contribute little or nothing to the completeness or accuracy of the Tree.
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Most of those bells and whistles are run one time and never repeated. In terms of computer resources they are cheap.
Relationship checking is more like the Possible Duplicates routine. I don't know if you remember or if you were working in Family Tree at the time, but when the possible duplicate checking was first released, you had to click a link to check for them. This was also because the routine as first released was very resource expensive. After a couple of years the programmers found ways to reduce the cost to the point that every time we go to a new profile page that profile is automatically checked against every other profile in Family Tree for possible duplicates. Make one change on the page and it checks again. Then it posts the result of the check in the Research helps section. Without any noticeable lag in the page loading. It's rather amazing when you think of it.
So I'll again say I think it is a great idea and it has been requested so many times that it must be on a list of programming goals somewhere and if a programmer has a flash of insight as to how to dramatically increase the efficiency of checking for relationships, we may see this feature appear on day.
But it is a quite a gap between a tiny fraction of users checking relationships on a tiny number of the profile pages they look at to having every user see the relationship on every page all the time. Remember, this has to be recalculated every time a profile is loaded just in case another user edited a relationship somewhere which changes the linage path.
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However, I remember another issue now that might make it so that we never see the relationship on the profile. That is because the profile pages look the same and have the same information in all languages. However, only the English version of the relationship view has a text description of the relationship.
A few years ago Ron Tanner, who was in charge of Family Tree, would hold live question and answer sessions. In one of those he discussed that putting that text for the relationship was done as an experiment for English to see if it could be done. What they found, however, when trying to incorporate this into other languages was that it was just not going to be possible. They left the English because they had the routine but plans were dropped to make this a general feature.
So if they want to keep the information uniform on the profile page for every language, then we won't be seeing the relation on the English version of the profile page since it is not available for any other language version of the page.
The trouble is that family relationships do not translate between languages. For example, there is no way to translate into Norwegian that someone is my third cousin twice removed using those terms. All I can say is that the person is my grandfather's third cousin. It's even worse for other languages. Below is a link to a fun video talking about Chinese relationship names where what someone is called depends on not only where they are in the family tree but also whether it is a maternal or paternal line, whether the person is older or younger than you, and other factors.
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@Gordon Collett Thanks for sharing that bit of history:
However, I remember another issue now that might make it so that we never see the relationship on the profile. That is because the profile pages look the same and have the same information in all languages. However, only the English version of the relationship view has a text description of the relationship.
A few years ago Ron Tanner, who was in charge of Family Tree, would hold live question and answer sessions. In one of those he discussed that putting that text for the relationship was done as an experiment for English to see if it could be done. What they found, however, when trying to incorporate this into other languages was that it was just not going to be possible. They left the English because they had the routine but plans were dropped to make this a general feature.
Your information is a bit out of date and your conclusion (or Ron Tanner's conclusion) too broad, but the basic principle still has merit. Since that discussion with Ron Tanner several years ago, FamilySearch has developed the capability to show relationship descriptions in several more languages. Here you can see relationships in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Korean, and Japanese. But when I tried Chinese or Norwegian, no relationship description is shown. I didn't try all the languages, but enough to believe that those first 9 I listed are probably the only languages that can show relationship descriptions at this point.
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Nice! Yes, ancient history does tend to be out of date. And three to six years ago is ancient history in terms of computer history. I wonder if they are slowly working through each language to find a way to add the relationship? Norwegian should be pretty easy to add since it has the same structure as the other European languages above, that is, "My husband's grandmother's second cousin" which would be "Mannen mins bestemors tremenning."
So since might be working on the text and they have stared calculating the relationship every time you make a change in a profile's relationship (which still is not going to be very often), maybe we will see this feature in a few more days.
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The more I think about this, the more I wonder exactly how often the relationship is calculated now with the recently update. At a maximum it would be every time a profile is loaded. At a minimum it has to be only if deciding whether to display a green or a dotted outline icon. Also would wonder how much processing power difference there is between determining whether a relationship exists and determining what that relationship is.
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