Please help with a guy who is taking credit for our contributions.
I'm from the Hispanic community. There's a guy by the username [user name removed] who has lately been modifying literally every source attached by me and my friends , even contributions made by academics, on the profiles of our trees, and he leaves them as if he were the one who researched everything. I know myself that it's not that much of a big deal, as FS is a public FamilyTree. The worst thing is that he deletes profiles, creates new ones, attaches sources, and makes them seem as if he made the entirety of the investigation. It's not fair, and if someone in the future wants to talk to the person who made the contributions to a certain tree, they'll talk to this guy, who knows nothing, because he has appropriated those investigations.
Some friends and I wrote to the support email, but they only told us to read some useless explanation and to report the sources of the changes that he made, which is fake, as it can't be done. Maybe they use an AI for those emails lol.
So I'm here wondering if anybody here works at FS or knows someone who could help, as this is very frustrating.
Answers
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@Jesé.
Did you use the Report Abuse option on the specific profiles? Be prepared to be patient and specific. You'll probably receive several "A difference of opinion is not abuse" boilerplate replies. But, on a few occasions, Support eventually reversed the abuse I've reported and once even removed the user.
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@Jesé. Mod note: This post was edited to remove code violations. Please see the Community Code of Conduct
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@Jesé. I don't want to dismiss your major concern that someone is deleting valid sources, merging or detaching profiles and otherwise undoing good work…but…
Part of this might be an underlying problem with how FamilySearch is programmed. When you say "he leaves them as if he were the one who researched everything," it's not the user that is doing that. It's the FS programming. Anytime anyone changes anything, the system changes the name to show the user name of the last person that made a change and, in the process, completely obliterates the the names of the previous contributors. When I merge two profiles, anything that gets added has my name attached. If I want to add more info to a Note that someone else wrote, it changes the name to make it look like I wrote it.
It's possible that this user is not intentionally trying to take credit for anything. Many people don't realize this happens and even if they do, there's not really a way to stop it. It's one of those "not a bug, works as intended" things. It's frustrating to people on both sides of the equation. Changing this has been brought up as a requested new feature/behavior change before.
People modify sources for lots of reasons. Sometimes I come across profiles that have a lot of links to Ancestry, but the same sources are available here or on other free websites. I'll add all those sources as I'm working, especially if I already have citations for things that aren't on FS. That's helpful for a lot of people that don't have Ancestry, right? Then I'll tag the sources to facts, events and data. Now there are a bunch of duplicate sources. I might clean up the profile to get rid of the extras. Again, this is not about trying to steal credit. It's just an effort to help others and clean up stuff that might have gotten downloaded from someone's old GEDCOM, when FS still did that.
The guy you've encountered might be very well intentioned, but doesn't realize that he's confusing people or profiles or making mistakes or whatever.
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@ZuleikaD, I completely understand what you're saying, but this user even deletes profiles that have already been created, creates new ones, and transfers all the sources to the new profile, along with all the essential information. Even when everything is already added and there are no spelling mistakes or anything like that, he doesn't change or fix anything and simply reattaches the source. We've tried talking to him, but he ignores us. We know he must see our messages because he is very active. But now that you mention it, an update showing who originally attached a source and who made a change would be pretty good.
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@Jesé. @ZuleikaD
I've been through a similar situation. The other contributor went through 100s of profiles and added a comma or a period in the reason field, just to remove my name as the contributor. On dozens of other profiles, every event was removed from the profiles. That instance was definitely malicious destruction, accompanied by rude remarks left as Discussions and Reason Statements.After some weeks, Support restored the profiles to their original status. The Change Log for those profiles no longer shows that the other contributor ever touched them.
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Thank you for sharing your concerns. I can understand why this situation would be frustrating, especially when significant research and sourcing work has been contributed by you and others.
Please keep in mind that the Community is a peer-to-peer discussion forum and is not able to investigate specific user accounts, review contributor activity, or take action on reports. For privacy and security reasons, Community members and moderators cannot address these situations.
If you believe a user is engaging in abusive, inappropriate, or policy-violating behavior, the Report Abuse process is the only official path that allows FamilySearch to review and address the issue. Information about reporting abuse can be found here:
https://www.familysearch.org/en/help/helpcenter/article/how-do-i-report-abuse-spam-inappropriate-memories-and-other-content [familysearch.org]
While the Community can offer general guidance and support, concerns involving the actions of a specific user must be handled through the official reporting process. I encourage you to submit any relevant details and examples through that channel so the appropriate FamilySearch team can review them
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