Latest Changes Update is unintelligible, old way MUCH easier to understand

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Carol Hutchinson said: I got a message after I added the title:
Latest Changes Update is unintelligible, old way MUCH easier to understand
"""EASE UP ON THE ALL CAPS IN YOUR TITLE. It looks like you're shouting."""
I would shout it from the top of my lungs if I could, I am THAT disappointed and confused by the new look, it is AWFUL.

the new "UPDATE" to the Latest changes, in unintelligible, and the other way was SO MUCH EASIER to understand, this new one we cannot see who changed the information, we cannot undo wrong merges in the correct order, and thus we will lose correct temple data, oh, please, quit breaking a perfectly good system, this is awful.
When you had the green lines around the merges, it was easy to see when, what, and how wrong merges were done. Using the old system, I was able to unmerge, in the correct order, from most recent, to the earliest, 68 DIFFERENT David Jones' families who were merged into one ID. with this new system, I will just start my tree over, and re-do temple work, as this is just ----- I am lost for words.

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Carol Hutchinson said: okay, I looked at it some more, it is really hard to understand, but it you use your "FIND" button, and look for merge you can find the merges. but it is still not as user friendly as the old version. I just don't like change, and I cannot see any advantage to this new system.

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Tom Huber said: Hi Carol,

Are you talking about the email that shows you the changes to the people you have on your watch list or something else?

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Pioneer42 said: Does anyone at familysearch (that works for the church) actually talk to people that do the genealogy work and not just some engineer? The show all changes field is awful at best now. That is only the main ingredient to familysearch in fixing the many errors caused by people. With it in the new way, unmerging is not highlighted in green, cannot see the links, no more hyperlinks or drop down data to be found on sources to see what is actually in that source to know if its part of the same person. Everything is Xtra large size now and all in white and grey! CMON CHURCH ENGINEERS!

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Pioneer42 said: This is defiantly the worse change so far that the church has ever done. Might as well not even bother with this program now. Sure glad I got what I needed to accomplish 3 years ago. Because if i had to start over now...Id might as well go fall off the earth to the void. Too even begin looking at the show all changes now hurts your eyes, and its so complicated now, where to even begin. Such a nightmare. TURN BACK THE CLOCK BEFORE DECEMBER 2017! It was a good program til after this date!

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Pioneer42 said: no she is talking about the show all changes screen, where its like trying to understand the understandable!

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Pioneer42 said: Agree with Carol, such craziness this is now!

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Tom Huber said: The change was badly needed and the new display was easy to get used to.

Many people are resistant to change and change for change's sake is something that should be avoided. But in this case, the move to a new change log was a good thing.

There are some problems (as is always the case) that was not caught by those testing the new system, which was dependent upon the beta site. Some changes could be set up to see how they would appear in the new change log design, but in this case, the real testing has to take place in production.

Complaints about the new change log should be very specific as to what is failing or missing (in the case of what I have seen)..

For instance, there is no way to filter merges, so they have to be found using the browser search page feature. It would be much better if all the merges could be seen together, rather than spread out.

Life is full of changes, but there isn't much anyone can do about it. Many of the changes that have been made in FamilySearch (especially in Family Tree) have been necessary to take care of existing issues inherited in some cases from a previous system.

For instance, I complained long and hard bout the help center that became the HelpLess center. Over the intervening years, the help center has been modified, providing a relatively better system than the way it was set up when newly introduced.

There were a lot of complaints about the new profile layout, spread over tabs, but it was also needed. If a profile had a lot of information, the old layout was hard to use. The new tabbed layout was much better. There are still problems, to be sure, but a number of recent suggestions have provided some great ideas that once implemented, will improve the profiles tremendously.

I like the new change log and at 75 years old, I would have reason for resisting the change. Instead, after less then a half-hour with one of the change logs for an ancestor, I found it much better.

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Paul said: I haven't had time to fully explore the new version yet, but I found the old change log was a complete mess and desparately needed to be improved.

Now, just about the only major enhancement required is to the Couple Realtionship section. Maybe some day this will be given the well-overdue attention it, too, so desparately needs.

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Pioneer42 said: WRONG! Not a good change. Nothing to do with updating the visual. The change log has to do with corrections. Anyone going in there for any other purpose has no reason of going in there. What point is a filter matter, if the biggest issue in there is the mergers? Whoever did this, has not spent the time and energy as i have. I have over 6000+ hours on this program since inception in 2012 to this new look. Please revert back church! The only thing they really needed to add was a merge tab, and a sort tab by earliest or latest. The rest doesn't matter!

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Pioneer42 said: WRONG! Not a good change. Nothing to do with updating the visual. The change log has to do with corrections. Anyone going in there for any other purpose has no reason of going in there. What point is a filter matter, if the biggest issue in there is the mergers? Whoever did this, has not spent the time and energy as i have. I have over 6000+ hours on this program since inception in 2012 to this new look. Please revert back church! The only thing they really needed to add was a merge tab, and a sort tab by earliest or latest. The rest doesn't matter!

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Pioneer42 said: Kind of like when the church did a update in December of 2017, and many individual dropped out of the program, because they labeled them as hidden. Many years later still have a case opened that nobody will resolve. I did get them to fix a few of them, they say they have not the support to handle the issue at hand. They still havent even fixed the bug with the hyperlinks in the texts going outside the page command window! BUT THEY HAVE NO PROBLEM MAKING CONSTANT UPDATES THAT ARE MOSTLY GARBAGE CHANGES THAT DON'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE OTHER THEN ANNOYING THE OLD PATRONS THAT HAVE DONE THE MAJORITY OF THE WORK ON THIS PROGRAM!

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Tom Huber said: Sorry, but a number of us see the new change log as a major improvement. There is currently a reported problem when opening the change log from an edit screen (it opens a pedigree instead of a filtered change log).

I find the new log very easy to use. Two filters are missing, and have been reported in their own thread (merge and notes), but aside from that, I've now spent quite a bit of time testing the new log and find it very easy to use.

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Tom Huber said: Opened cases that are requested not to be closed until resolved basically end up in a limbo state and are ignored.

When you have a problem that hasn't been addressed, open a thread for each problem (do not combine problems into one thread), and provide information that we users can use to determine the issue. Screen captures posted in the thread provide a lot of information, along with the operating system and browser combinations.

Most of the changes will take getting used to, but they are often big improvements over the previous user interface. I fully understand the issues surrounding the lack of consistent use of terms, links, and mouse action, but that is because if there is a style guide, it is being ignored, or a strong possibility is that no one at FS has taken the time to produce a style guide in how terms are used (their meaning) and how links appear and are used.

I have been using FamilySearch as an early user going back into 2009 and earlier and with the exception of the fiasco surrounding the Help Center (that has eventually become mostly useful again) the reasons behind the changes made sense and were needed.

The site is still not fully developed, so changes will continue to happen. It is important to understand that a site as complex and interconnected as FamilySearch is going to have issues arise from time to time. This Get Satisfaction forum, reached via feedback, is one of the best places to post issues, again, keeping thread to just one issue or concern.

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Carol Hutchinson said: thanks for your comments, I do see some improvements to the "latest changes" page, but the information that I used and NEED for correct restoring of wrong merges from the old version are gone. I am unwilling to attempt to fix wrong merges, without this important data, as I am afraid I will make too many mistakes. I will just add new ID's for my families that have problems, and unlink/detach from troublesome ID's that appear to have bad merges.. I always enjoy your comments and you have great knowledge and common sense, which I find lacking is so many patrons who use this site. Stay safe and healthy,

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gasmodels said: Carol, the same information on merges that was in the old change log appears to be in the new change log. I will admit it is somewhat hidden. Go to the new change log and find a merge - to the left you will see a "V" . If you click on the icon it will rotate 180 and open all the details that were modified by the merge. You can click on the merge record open in a new window and complete a restore just like you did before. You can see all sources moved from the deleted record to the surviving record. You can see all relationships moved. I do not see any real difference between the old and new just a different way of getting to the information.

I do wish they would do a filter on all merges. Some of the messy files have multiple merges and I am looking for one to remove something, it would be easier that scanning the complete change log to just look at a block for each merge. But that aside, I really do not see any major loss of information with the new Change log.

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Gordon Collett said: Carol, I'm just curious, by why do your relatives have so many bad merges? Could you post an example of one, giving the person's ID? Could you take a screen shot of a merge in a change log and point out exactly what information is missing?

For example, in this merge:



I can see everything that happened, that a child was added, relationship types were added, a wife was added, and a marriage event was added. The date is there and the person who did the merge is there.

I will admit I think the grey background to show the events in the merge is a bit too subtle. It's hard to tell when one is at the end of the merge.

By the way, referring back to your original post, the order in which restoring individuals deleted in merges occurs has absolutely no effect on the outcome and never has. Restoring takes the ID of the person being restored, finds the archived and hidden version of that person, recreates the person as he or she was at the time of the merge, including all the temple work permanently attached to that individual, and does nothing to the ID that was the survivor in the merge.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Carol,

I was just about to post the same thing when I found your thread. I find bad merges in my family all of the time and I can't say how upsetting it is to find that the All Changes page no longer has a green box around the merge listing all of the changes made in the merge process.

I have another thread going complimenting the new merge process that moves relationships over automatically. On old merges, I used the green box on the All Changes page to find all of the relationships that amateur mergers like to clip off so that I can restore them. This new page tells me nothing about what happened in the merge. I am perplexed at what to do.

My main focus since temples closed has been to correct bad merges in Family Tree and eliminate all of the duplicates created because people can't find the children, spouses, or parents that got left off in a merge and they make new ones. This new design is just making that goal harder for me to accomplish. I think I might have to take the day off from this and hope it gets easier tomorrow.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: I think her problem would be that we are dealing with a lot of amateurs on Family Tree who think that every David Jones that the system suggests is a duplicate, is a duplicate. I deal with it all of the time myself. I want the green box back, and the brown box back for the restore. And the boxes should contain the changes made in the merge so that I can determine if the two individuals merged were the same person or not.

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Gordon Collett said: As I asked above, could you post an example where "This new page tells me nothing about what happened in the merge." And point out exactly what information is missing? That is what the engineers are going to need to know to further improve things.

I can see all the information I ever saw before. The only real change is that the merge box is closed as the default view, rather than open, which saves a lot of space on the screen.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: gasmodels, If I don't see a "v" next to merge, does that mean that no changes were made in the merge?

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gasmodels said: This is an aside for you Gordon as to why I would like a filter to see all the merges. The change log is so large I cannot post it but look at John Butterworth
LZ2M-ZZ9 and the large change log. There are a number of merges but scrolling to find them can be a tedious effort. It would be much easier if I could only see the merges. This particular record almost mirrors the old IOUS records there are so many different John Butterworth's mushed together.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Here's the change page I'm looking at. https://www.familysearch.org/tree/per...

I'm wondering what happened in the merge. There is no "v" by the merge, so does that mean there were no changes made in the merge? Was nothing added? Were any relationships added or lost? I'm used to looking at more complicated change pages, extremely more complicated, so it really looks like something is missing.

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gasmodels said: Stephanie, every merge I have looked at has the "v" if you look just below at the image Gordon is showing it is pointing upward just to the left of the word merge. This means it is showing the details. Normally when you open the changes it is pointing downward which is just the summary.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: See my post at the bottom. There is no V in that merge. The first merge I have looked at with the new changes.

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gasmodels said: I think you have a situation where the two records were identical -- no relationships were added. no sources were attached, the names were the same and the two pieces of vital information were the same so yes there was nothing to add except the two records were merged. I would find this quite unique in all the merges I have encountered.

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Tom Huber said: I have one of those and since I created it, I know that I made no changes from the merge-deleted profile to the surviving profile. Any changes that happened will be recorded in the change log of the merge deleted profile and that can be examined by clicking on the name of the "Deleted" Person's name (it is a link to that profile) and looking through the change log for the deleted person.

This is not new, but was the same in the previous user interface. One had to go to the deleted person's profile and look through that change log.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: I've been looking at the changes to the deleted record, and it looks like the user deleted all relationships to this individual before making the merge, even though the relationships were to the same people with the same IDs. I'm not sure why anyone would do that.

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gasmodels said: Tom makes a good point. The information on the change log is changes to the surviving record not changes to the deleted record.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: I'm looking at the history of the parents' records and there are relationships getting deleted, but it doesn't say it's being done in a merge. The reason statement says "same person" so it did happen in a merge. It would be nice to have some indication of changes that were made in a merge. Maybe color coding changes would be a good idea. If the designers don't like green and brown, then choose different colors, but please don't leave it off.

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Gordon Collett said: This, also, is no different from the previous version of the Change Log. And it was also confusing then. If you have not seen this before, then this is another improvement in the Change Log in that this is more easily seen.

If you see a relationship deleted and it is not a sub-section of a merge, that means that either the relationship itself was just removed or, much more commonly, somebody else was merged.

Most commonly this occurs when a duplicate parent is merged.

For example, if John AAAA-AAA has parents Ben BBBB-BBB & Ann CCCC-CCC and parents Ben YYYY-YYY & Ann CCCC-CCC, when the two Bens are merged and Ben BBBB-BBB is the survivor, John's change log will show that his relationship to Ben CCCC-CCC was deleted.

You will also see this when duplicate children are merged. The relationship of the deleted child will show as deleted in the change log for both of the parents after the child is merged.