Can no longer filter watch (following) list by birthdate

LegacyUser

D. Llewelyn said: With the new (and frustrating) change from my "watch" list, which is now people I'm "following" (which doesn't make sense - but that's for another topic as you normally "follow" people who are living and it's a popular thing to do on twitter). Anyway, with the new layout I can no longer filter by birthdate! This is hugely important as I watch several ancestors, waiting for the 110 year mark to pass, so I can get their temple work done. Also, instead of seeing a clear list with multiple names at once, only 4 names fit on my screen with a lot of wasted white space. Please include genealogists who spend hours a day on family search in your decision making process. I liked being able to filter by birthdate, first name, last name (to come back to a family I was working on), and ID number. The ID numbers help direct me back to place where I had stopped. It seems like these changes are being made with no thought to people's workflow. FS keeps "fixing" things that aren't broken to begin with.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: There are some basic features that were part of the watch list that should also be part of the following list. Hopefully, this as well as other features missing in the following list can be added.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Hopefully, users clicking on "good point" both here and at the https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea... thread will send a message that these features should have been retained.

In a post at the Communities forum, an employee stated features were dropped as only a small number of users appeared to be using them. However, he said there was the possibility to make changes to "Following" if enough users indicated this was needed.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I think when I trialled the new facility in Beta and compared it to the original Watch List in what was then production, it was something like for every 4 entries in the new Following, there were 7 in the old Watch.

Why?

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: If you looked at the recent changes for a person record in the old watch list, and then compared that list to the change history log for that person record, you would FREQUENTLY see a difference. Items in the change history would frequently be missing from the watch list. This was this way for a LONG time.

Now it may just be my imagination (I would need to look into it closer), but with the new format it does seem that even less change information is there. There is not always a discrepancy, but it does occur frequently.

LegacyUser

Rebecca Lorena Stewart said: I greatly need this Birth Date Filter Feature. I use it every day for the 110 year rule for my ancestors. For those of us who use Family Search Every Day it is a feature we use. If programming cannot be changed, it would be nice if there was a feature where we could download our "following" list as some kind of ASCII spreadsheet that we could export into our own database to filter by birth date.

LegacyUser

Robert Wren said: I was glad to see a note at the top of the page to "Learn More" leading to the "FamilySearch Updates" blog page (which I didn't even know existed) - it explains that the "Watch Feature" was: "renamed “Follow.” This term is similar to what other social media sites use and is more intuitive" - (I was not even aware that FamilySearch was a "Social Media" site.)


However, I would suggest that the greatest improvement to "Following" would be to allow fellow "Followers" to be able to communicate & collaborate with each other.

In, and of, itself that could be a great assistance to help to solve many of the 'open edit' problems!!!!

https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...