How to report someone for excessive duplicates?
Is there a way to report someone specific for creating new people without checking if they already exist? I understand this may be a young person who doesn't know better, or someone new to family history work with FamilySearch, and other websites DO require you build your own tree with completely new people, but I have spent the last few hours cleaning up multiple duplicate generations, all people with only one or two sources, and completely identical to an already existing family, all of which have 3-25 sources for each person already. All duplicates were created within the last week, while the originals have been around since 2012 in most cases.
I of course verified everything before beginning the merge journey, but I'm not even halfway done and my 'My Contributions' graph has indicated 50+ contributions over the last few hours, and all were with this family. This is excessive, and I imagine this isn't the only part of the tree that this person has worked with.
I know there is an option to message the person directly but 1) I don't always see it right away when someone messages me, 2) I don't want to discourage them from doing the work, and 3) It is a very different feeling to be told something by an individual rather than a big company (me vs. FamilySearch)
I know there is a 'Report Abuse' flag on each individual person, but I don't actually know what that does, and I'm not sure if I would need to flag all people, or just one or two?
If further context is needed, I'd be happy to explain! Thank you
Answers
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Good morning @KyLeiScott1
When you click the "Report Abuse" button, a report is registered with FamilySearch Support. You will receive a form email:
After a day or so, depending on workload, you'll receive another email. Generally, you'll receive notice that the action reported is not considered abuse. You can try replying and asking Support to review the situation, but for "excessive duplicates," it's unlikely Support will take action. The bar for FamilySearch Support to consider something as abuse is quite high.
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By any chance do the duplicates have "GEDCOM" data" in reason statements? Apparently some people can still use a GEDCOM to easily upload large numbers of duplicates. It's an allowed function. And a headache for people working with well established families in Family Tree to fix and to educate the newcomer. Often it is someone new to Family Tree who just doesn't realize yet we are all working in the same tree database and who think they are just creating their own tree just like they would on other sites.
A friendly, polite, respectful explanatory message regarding how Family Tree works is your best option for getting this to stop and to get to know this new FamilyTree user who is most likely your cousin of some sort.
The other possibility, is that there is a problem with the new CET feature. Someone may have created a CET tree and in transferring information to the main tree from there (can people do that yet? I've got too many things going on and have not done anything much with CET functions) accidentally creating the duplicates because of a bug in that new (or upcoming) feature.
If you post the ID number of one of these new duplicates, people here might see some clues in the profile as to what is really going on.
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The pop-up on a new CET still shows "soon" for copying/adding information. I added a small CET just a few days ago to test.
I no longer see an option to turn the CET Labs experiment off, but it is supposedly not yet fully enabled for everyone.
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@KyLeiScott1 and @Gordon Collett It's also possible that this "person creator"/Contributor creates duplicates because they don't know how to "add people" so a step-by-step example might be the best answer to this problem
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Actually, it sounds like the person is too good at adding people! He or she needs a lesson on how not to add them. But we don't have any idea who this person is and we don't know what this person is actually doing. So a random guess at a lesson to be posted here won't do the least good.
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