Notification of Changes in Following is missing some changes

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: Apologies if this has already been reported. I did look but couldn't find anything. Honest.

The issue is the change notifications for Margaret Amelia Pole, GSCS-D8G. My notifications through the messaging service shows changes for her to Vitals and Sources. OK.

I go to Following / All Changes, and set it to show All Changes, Sort by Date. That only shows a Source Attached and a Death Changed. I could easily look at this display, decide that the displayed events are OK (which they are) and move onto the next profile. See below:


However, if I go to her profile and look at the Latest Changes list on the front screen, there's more than just those two. If I go to All Changes, there are actually five changes listed for that profile on that day.

Now, there are two changes to Birth, so arguably there are 4 nett changes - birth, christening, death and a source attachment. But birth and christening have been lost from the Following / All Changes. Their loss is wrong...

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Yes, this has been going on for a long time. There has always been discrepancies between the recent changes to a patron's watch list and the Show all changes on a given person's record. Here's an example I reported over a year ago:
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

But since everyone on my watch list is also linked to my Ancestral Quest database, when I see a change in my watch list, I use my AQ compare facility to see exactly what changed since I last sync'ed my record with that in FS. That is FAR easier than trying to decrypt the change history and recent changes lists. Since the formats of both of those lists has been constantly in flux and usually contained errors and omissions for many months now, the only reliable source of that information is via my AQ compare facility. So I've usually tried to avoid needing to use a lot of detail from those lists as possible since I could never really trust them.

Those two different lists have obviously been maintained by two different groups in at FS and they've had their own ideas how to implement it. It would be great if FS could make these more consistent. accurate, easy to understand listing of changes would help tremendously, especially when prior mistakes have been made in the database.

LegacyUser

Adrian Bruce said: I had this vague feeling that I'd seen something before - hence my "Apologies..." bit - I didn't expect it to be that long-standing.

The idea that the two lists might be "maintained by two different groups" isn't one that had occurred to me because I'd never analysed them that closely - though I do remember Joe saying something about the difficulty in doing X (possibly in the All Changes for a Profile?) and me thinking that it sounded like a reconstruction was going on, rather than a straight dump of a change log, which was not what I was expecting, and which might make lists like these notifications more difficult