Possible Bug-Error message on deleted persons

LegacyUser

David Roderick McLean said: After a person is deleted by a merge, an error message is displayed about sources being unavailable:

" ! Sorry, the sources feature is currently unavailable. Please try again later."

A deleted person should have no sources. They have been "deleted by merge".

Reference: KF58-3H2

I don't see the point of an error message here in the user interface.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Odd!

I must admit that once a person has been deleted (by merge) I stop reading the various texts - I'm looking at the words but not seeing them, as it were. So I might have seen this oddity but never noticed. Or if I did notice, I suspect I'd just explain it as a temporary blip while bits of the data eventually caught up. Bits of the UI do seem to get out of step for a short while - like that message that comes up during merge about some feature being unavailable - notes? memories? (Mind you, this must have stuck around for a while to get a screen shot!)

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: David,

Your assumption is not entirely correct. A deleted person SHOULD STILL HAVE all of the sources that were attached to that record when it was deleted.

The problem is that all of the sources that were attached to that individual at the time they were merged away should STILL be attached so that if/when a restore is performed on that PID, all of the appropriate sources would still be there.

We have been told by FS several times here that when a restore is performed on a deleted PID, it will return it to exactly as it was before. This has NOT been the case in that after a merge, sources were removed from the original PID before its deletion. This is a real nuisance in that you have to go to the post-merge PID and move all the appropriate sources BACK TO the PID that you have restored when correcting an inappropriate merge.

The fact that the deleted person record is attempting to show sources is a good sign as far as I'm concerned. It seems that this feature might be getting worked on to fix it.

The error message is NOT telling you that there are no sources. It is only telling you that the sources feature is not currently available. I have seen that same message in other places, sometimes due to system loading, and sometimes when you just can't access source handling for a while.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: I'm not sure I would call this a bug. Just a vague generic error message that more correctly could state "Sorry, the sources tab is not available for deleted individual. To view the sources, either go the the Change Log or Restore the individual."

In one of Ron Tanner's Facebook Q&A last year sometime, someone had a question about the incompleteness of the pages for deleted individual and he stated they did not completely code the page to show everything, such as parents and children, and, I imagine, sources. They didn't want to waste effort on something that wouldn't be used much.

If you do want to see the two sources that were on the record and what happened to them, you can go to the Change Log.

LegacyUser

David Roderick McLean said: My intent was to report to the developers a message that I considered odd. Perhaps bug is too strong of a word; but it is a word that gets their attention.

Perhaps a better way to have said it was "unexpected error message".

Regardless, Familysearch is not like a typical software company. It appears they desire that their user base to interact with their product in all ways possible. By getting users to report bugs (rather than Familysearch finding them before production release) that users develop a sense of "ownership" with the product and develop more brand affiliation as they interact with the brand. It is a strategy it appears.

This error message has been appearing many times for the last several months and has been reported numerous times. I just wanted to bring this new case to the developers attention.

Most of the time once an individual is merged, that is the end of it. In this particular case, I had written down the PID number for future work and went back to it. Because I found this PID (and the error) in a non-traditional way I wanted to report what I saw. Perhaps they really don't care. That is a possibility.

Regardless, I feel gaslighted by some of the responses on this thread that I had the problem; not the software. Such is not the case.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I do sympathize David. If several extensive users of FamilySearch can't immediately agree on what a deleted by merge profile should look like, then yes, it's the software that has the problem, not us. I personally would say that "Sources currently unavailable..." is (accurately or not) reporting an error condition and should not appear on a deleted by merge profile - what should appear is another matter.

LegacyUser

Gordon Collett said: FamilySearch has several weird error messages that don't really mean what they say. (Such as the one that implies you cannot do a first name only search in the Records section.) And this is another one. That's all I really meant to say. Sorry if I phrased myself badly. I've fallen into the tendency to ignore what the error messages say and figure out what is really going on. I guess I don't consider these bugs since the program is still working as intended. Error messages are just a feature that doesn't always work very well.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: For what it is worth, yesterday when I went in to look at the source list for a PID that I have been working on, I got the same exact message (and this was NOT a deleted person). There seems to have been an intermittent system problem with sources there.

However, the issue that David brought up with the sources problem on DELETED person profiles is still present today and should probably be addressed.