Please make list changes up to 15000 people, also the program is not giving 30 days of watch history

LegacyUser

Pioneer42 said: Why can we still only get 4000 changes only, why not unlimited or up to 15000? Please make it so. Only getting 15 days of watch history, the FS doctrine shows you have up to 30 days. This is a error and always has been, not just me too, its everyone with this problem. Depending on how many you watch. Still thought I would encourage this, why can we not do it? Parameters say it can but it does not happen.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: This needs a response. A year or more ago, this request to increase the capacity was made for the watch list. The reason given then for not going beyond the 4,000 name limit was simply a lack of computing power that if used, would adversely impact everyone else that uses the site.

There are solutions and one of them is to use a program like Ancestral Quest (the other two fully-certified programs may have a similar feature) wherein it can run a routine to note any changes that have been made to linked records in either FamilySearch or the local database.

It can take a very long time (several days) to run that against 15,000 people. Even under 10,000 can take many, many hours.

My changes list goes back to April 2nd, well over 30 days. So a lot depends upon the number of changes that have been found. The more that are watched, the more likely the user will see a reduced day count.

There is no "doctrinal" statement involving FamilySearch operation. There is no guarantee that you will see 30 days. It varies with the number of changes for the people being watched.

LegacyUser

Pioneer42 said: Tom Huber, why do you always not know what you're talking about on this programs past? Why do I even bother writing back to you on this. This is the last time, I don't play Trix's. I wouldn't have made the thread in the first place if I was in doubt with what I said. You ever heard of help center rules? That is FamilySearch DOCTRINE. Bearer of bad news to ya. Yes they modified there statement in the watch list requirements because of me, that I can guarantee you. I'm the one that created the case, and brought it to there attention (whether the engineers already knew or not is besides the point), because in the Help center to the public at the time, it DID NOT STATE you only had maybe up to 30 days, or only up to 4000 changes on the watchlist. It always said in there parameters that you had up to 30 days of watch history, and that you only had 4000 people you could watch. After the complaint was made by me, then the engineers came back and told me it was running normal operation, 30 days and or with only up to 4000 changes. Then they modified the statement by stating: The watch list maintains a log of all of the changes made in the last 30 days—or up to 4,000 changes. Well that defeats the purpose of watching anything from a power user POV, because in one week there has already been that many changes on this program by individuals. I was asking for a enhancement and still waiting for it. It wasn't suppose to go site wide.

LegacyUser

Pioneer42 said: So there is doctrine, and its called the help center. The watch log was changed by the engineer team later on because family search hadn't posted it correctly on there website after a case was submitted to them by myself, and then was the help center updating the wording afterwards. It was always 30 days and you had only 4000 to be watched. now it states up to 30 days - or the last 4000 changes can be watched. It needs to do more, as most of this is established in one week per power user usage needs. Last time I'll be responding to you.

LegacyUser

Paul said: In my experience, unless you are considering a full-time job in correcting other users' errors, 4000 is probably about the right limit for most Family Tree users, regardless of the "technical constraints". Over a fairly short period of time, my watch list has doubled in size, from about 600 to 1200 individuals. However, this has meant a considerable increase in my workload. Regarding those IDs NOT on my list, I AM concerned that much of my hard work in creating / correcting now well-sourced IDs might have been undone. However, there are limits to which I can "police" the relatives (and others) on whom I have worked, so am prepared to accept a huge increase in number of persons who can be watched would be totally impracticable for me.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: The term doctrine does not mean what you think it does. It has to do with official teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

What you are talking about is more about a goal that was set (and provided in an undated article or information provided by some means about a feature. A number of factors have proven that the goal, while admirable and reachable by most people, can be unreachable under certain circumstances. Thus, I can see well over 30 days of change history in my Changes list while you see only fifteen. There is no throttling of days, it just happens to be a limit involving the number of changes that were reported.

Originally, there was a "White Paper" for the new FamilySearch site back when it was first developed. I'm not talking about new FamilySearch, but the FamilySearch site, itself.

The goals were laid out in that paper and used for the initial development of the site. As the site grew more complex, not all the goals could be met, and so the paper was effectively abandoned. That happens with any project that is developed over time. The more complex, the less likely that all goals will be met. There are no "doctrines" involved, since there are no official teachings, only goals that may be or may not be met. In this case, the goal obviously could not be met, just as the original design for newFamilySearch could not be met because the code could not scale to meet the needs of the data and the suddenly recognized "IOUS" individuals.

No fault of anyone is involved, only the realities of the limits of what existed at the time in the code that was produced for the nFS site. Some of that code crept into FamilySearch, and as such, a lot of the changes being made to the site are to replace the older code with code that can scale and handle the ever increasing number of users and data that is being added on a regular basis to the site.

Those realities still continue to bite us all from time to time. We have to be patient and report what we feel are issues and concerns. Actual problems need to be identified and clearly expressed. Concerns and Issues can be helped by providing suggested improvements. Sometimes those improvements are practical and sometimes they aren't.