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

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Siv Collett said: I agree that such a filter would be very helpful. As would a comment section in the change log where you could record something like "I have thoroughly evaluated this merge on 5/22/2020 and it was correctly done, no one needs to ever look at it again."

From the discussions on the change log, I'm getting concerned that there may be a lot of people wasting a lot of time checking and rechecking old merges that have been checked over and over again by others.

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Gordon Collett said: I agree that such a filter would be very helpful. As would a comment section in the change log where you could record something like "I have thoroughly evaluated this merge on 5/22/2020 and it was correctly done, no one needs to ever look at it again."

From the discussions on the change log, I'm getting concerned that there may be a lot of people wasting a lot of time checking and rechecking old merges that have been checked over and over again by others.

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Pioneer42 said: Is it me or does anyone not understand what im trying to say here? New changes are not necessary. The church is doing all of this because they know from what I know, that people are making unnecessary changes to this program way to often. Look at the watch list. Its incredible, it tells me that in one week that there has been over 3000 modifications to those people I watch! Why? Who knows? People just go crazy with there ancestry.com pedigree charts, and it has got to stop! So they make it crazy and harder for people to do things so this will get them to stop. Problem is though, that nobody reads anything, and next thing you know your'e all wearing masks and you dont even know, nor do you question why! WAKE UP! So as to the changes made, merges and sources are the biggest issue in the new change log with cruddy visuals and too BIG of writing, it just looks like a mess in there. Why not just add a merge tab and a sorting tab to the old program? This is what should have been done. Everything else is just not needed. To grandiose and complicated now and not enough common sense.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Yeah, these changes could have come at a better time when we're not dealing with a pandemic AND all of these changes to Family Tree.

I had developed me history page reading skills so that I could skim it in seconds and understand what had happened. Now I'm just confused.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Even if someone said they had checked it, I would question their authority and check it again. I've seen too many people who think their way or the highway, that I don't trust anything on Family Tree until I've checked sources and history of the record.

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Gordon Collett said: Whenever I've gotten a new computer, the new keyboard feels strange and throws off my typing for about a week. Then things are fine again.

It's the same with updates like this. One week of confusion then things will be fine and pretty soon you won't even remember how the older style worked or looked.

Changes like these are important because the minor cosmetic updates that might temporarily throw us off are just the icing on top of potentially massive improvements in performance and allow additional new features such as the easily accessible filters to be added to the user interface

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: I agree. I would like to see merges boxed with a colored box so they are easy to find. For a unified look, they could use the same dotted colored box that is used in the new merge process when you move stuff from one side of the screen to another. The box could expand when you click the "v" so that it didn't have to take up so much space on the page initially, but please box it to make it easy to find.

The typeface they are using is really skinny which also make all of the changes they are using harder to read. I'm just noticing the word CURRENT off to the side because it is gray on white instead of black on white. Is there a reason for that? All of the type is varying shades of gray on white except the bold stuff. It needs better contrast.

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m said: New change log is horrible. VERY difficult to figure out what changes were made.

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Tom Huber said: The filter feature, which still needs some help (there were two missing filters that I saw and reported) but using the filter definitely helps look through the changes for a specific type of change.

I don't know if the problem with using the See All Changes from within an edit screen has been fixed or not (its been a couple of hours since I last saw it reported, but instead of opening the change log with an active filter, the system went straight to the pedigree chart.

It didn't take me long to see the advantages to the new log layout, so aside from a couple of missing filters and some other concerns noted in other discussions, I quickly became a fan of the new layout, especially, not having to move between log pages (now if the log runs long, the new section is automatically loaded, rather than having to open a new page.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: The new features may be good, but graphically speaking, it is not easy to read. As a designer, I'm observing they were going more for style than usability.

A designer's number one motto is "form follows function." The page isn't friendly to someone who is trying to read a lot of information very quickly. The fonts are too skinny, the contrast is minimal, the color is gone. Gray backgrounds with gray type in them are terrible for reading.

The important words like "merge" and "relationship deleted" are some of the hardest to read. Please hire a graphic designer who's actually used this change log page before and knows what the important stuff is!

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Here's a challenge. See if you can quickly find all of the merges in this change log:

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/per...

What about the restores? How long is this going to take without a colored box to show you where it is? Hmmm.

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joe martel said: In summary there are a couple outstanding issues (sort, filter) but I don't see anything that has changed in terms of the information that is shown in a Merge. Yes the look (fonts, coloring, spacing) is different but the information provided to the user is no different. Let me know if I'm wrong.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: I just hope they improve the "icing" or the cosmetic changes so that this page is easier to read and navigate. If they're going to hide pertinent information in collapsible text boxes, they need to be better labeled so that they can be found quickly. The bold should be used for the words "Merge" and "Relationship Added", not "Name" or "Parents". If you are looking at a change log, you want to see the action words first. You are looking to see what has happened, so make those action words BOLD.

The information is there, I presume, but it's hard to find it with the design of the type.

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Robert Wren said: Stephanie,
Tried your challenge (having never seen this new system before - but have read a few posts herein)

FWIW, Using ctr-F I found 35 "restore" (many hidden) & 1 Merge:


Is that even close?

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Gordon Collett said: Assuming the page loaded correctly and the oldest entry in the change log is April 18, 2012, there are three merges and it took 29.67 seconds to find them, mainly because the page was a little slow in loading.

Preloading the entire page then scrolling from the top to the bottom at a speed that let me easily see the three merges took 14.56 seconds.

There are no restores on this page. The only time there is a restore on an existing person in Family Tree is when the last action was a merge. Then the "Restore (to the person's premerge state, formerly simply called unmerge) " is always at the top of the page.

Otherwise you cannot "restore" an existing person in Family Tree. You never could. You can only restore a deleted person and to do that you have to go to the deleted person's page. The new update makes it very clear that that is what you have always been doing. Just click on the deleted person's name to jump to exactly were the restore link is for that deleted person.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: I think using control F is cheating. Notice what control F did to the word Merge. It highlighted it! Yes, and it used to be already highlighted. Not a change for the better. Thanks for taking the challenge, Robert.

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Gordon Collett said: The key is don't look for the word Merge! Keep your eye in the center of the page and look for the person icon in the center column.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: There is a restore on the page. I guess you didn't find it.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Use your Control F to find Person Restored. I stand by my instincts as a designer, the person who designed the page look has never used it.

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Gordon Collett said: Person Restored is not what you asked about. You asked about Restore.

So what you were really asking about, is to find the previous brown boxes that used to be labeled unmerged. I'll try that.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: I am seeing that some user names are missing from the actions taken. On Elizabeth "Elcy" Price, my user name is missing from all of the stuff I did, but there is stuff I didn't do that is also missing a user name. From latest changes on the main page, is shows someone else changed her name on May 19th, but on the change log page, there is no user name, like I did it. And I didn't do that. Am I going to get the blame for it?

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Wait, the user names just came back.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: And they're gone again.

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: Yeah, they not only changed the boxes, they changed the terms your looking for.

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Gordon Collett said: Preloading the entire page, which is nice since it stays loaded, then going to the top and scrolling down slowly enough to fine the one "Person Restored" then to continue on to the bottom of the page took 42.1 seconds. Agreed this is not as fast as if the brown box were still there, but not a burden. The real solution is adding this to the filters, also.

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Gordon Collett said: Those user names do seem to be having some trouble sticking around. Either there is some server slowdown because everyone is looking at the change log right now so the page is sacrificing them to get the page loaded or we are seeing some active updating going on with the program, would be my guesses.

One thing I have noticed, is that if the names are not there, if you click on any of the Reference links then hit your back arrow button to return to the page, all the names will be there.

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m said: Has "Life Sketch added" been removed from changelog?

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Gordon Collett said: Just checked by adding one:



So at least newly added ones are, as are edits and deletes:

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Stephanie Spencer Booth said: After looking at several change logs, I now know why I rely so heavily on the green box that is no longer there. A lot of the changes listed outside of those boxes don't make any sense at all. I just want to cut to the part that does make sense and not have to read pages and pages of nonsense.

Here is a simple example.

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/per...

It makes sense until you get to the "Relationship Removed." Click the down arrow, and you get it was added, and added, and removed. This is the result of one of the parents getting merged. I don't know which one from this notation. It is unclear if the relationship survived this merge. I think this needs some serious editing.

Perhaps one line would do for this situation. Action would be Parent Merged, and then list which parent was merged and the deleted record from the merge. Make it clear if the relationship survived this merge. None of the added, added, removed. That is just confusing and I don't want to read that.

It happens again just below this. I assume the other parent was also merged, but I don't know which parent, and I only know this from experience. The people I help with this always say to me, "This page doesn't make any sense to me. I'm glad you know what it says."

Have someone edit the log, please. Make sure it makes sense to the average user and it will be more useful. It would prevent people from creating new family members who have been disconnected in a merge just because it's easier than trying to find them in the change log.

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m said: "Life Sketch Added" removed from changelog for older pages.