"Unknown Contributor"

Penny JoAnn B Johnson

The date column is showing "unknown contributor" rather than the name of the contributor. It appears this is happening if a lot of changes occur on the same day. I suppose we can assume the person identified once on that date also did all of the other changes. But it would be nice if the contributor name showed up on every row.

Screenshot 2025-04-10 at 10.38.34 AM (2).png

Uploaded Apr 10, 2025878.85 KB

Áine Ní Donnghaile

@Penny JoAnn B Johnson

Yes, see this thread:

Recent merges and changes by "Unknown Contributor"

Charlie Black

Apr 7, 2025

I've noticed an increasing number of merges and changes made by "Unknown Contributor." Please investigate whether these are arising because the Improved Merged Experiment isn't capturing information about the user who made the merge. This information is critical to communicating with other users about conflicting or inappropriate information.

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@Ashlee C. Has this issue been reported? The problem seems intermittent in my case.

BobRoss

I see the same issue. It appears that my name is on the first change in the list that I made and then all other changes after that, going back in time, have "Unknown Contributor" instead of my name. This occurs not only for today but for changes I made in the past.

Herdsman Janet 1

I have had a good look at turning off and on the New Change Log Experiment and turning it off brings back the names of the contributors, that show as unknown when it it is turned on. I seem to need to log out and in again each time I experiment with this, Also I have not seen any difference in the way the change log displays as shown in the following Article.

Article Id: 29246March 06, 2025

Rhonda Budvarson

Thank you everyone. We have created a ticket to fix this issue :)

Áine Ní Donnghaile

Thanks @Rhonda Budvarson

Herdsman Janet 1

With reference to my previous comment, it does still seem to happen intermittently.

Rhonda Budvarson

I noticed that the newer changes were showing the correct contributor this morning. But some of the older ones still weren't showing. Thank you for being patient while the bug/glitch gets worked out.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

I just checked one of my examples, @Rhonda Budvarson. Most of the contributor names are showing correctly. The ones that remain "unknown" are apparently FS official actions. There were several copyright issues on that profile, which I reported, and FS removed. Those are now showing as "unknown."

Rhonda Budvarson

Awesome Aine. Thank you so much! :)

rosemarygrounds

I just made 2 changes on my ancestor one records me (RoseG) and the other is Unknown contributor.

then it changes to both Unknown Contributors. I am using a Dell Inspirion Laptop and Microsoft Edge.

GWagoner

Any updates regarding this issue? I had to turn the experiment off on my end. Every single change user (other than FamilySearch) whether the change is from 2012 or today is just Unknown Contributor.

CDBurk

I have had to turn the experiment off as well to eliminate the "Unknown Contributor" entries. It will not be useful to have a series of changes that don't identify the person who made the changes, in my opinion. I noticed when I made changes, everything that followed the first change that was made by me showed as "Unknown Contributor" but how are guests to know this if they don't review documents that explain changes? Many are simply confused, and not identifying who is changing records really undermines a feature that allows all changes to be attributed to the right persons. Just my opinion, but how is this an improvement?

Rhonda Budvarson

Thank you everyone for your input and patience while this issue is being fixed.