Bug 19 I am my own mother

LegacyUser

Woody Brison said: Looking at GWXN-7SJ, FS/FT suggests a possible duplicate, LHL5-TS2. Looking at TS2, we see that this Sarah has no children.

Now back to 7SJ Sarah and opening the Review Merge dialog, we see that TS2 now has 8 - count 'em - 8 children. And, not to be outdone by herself, one of them IS herself.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: That is not a bug. She is the child in that family. She has 7 siblings. I do think it is confusing having the merge page set up how it is, though. I think you and most people would rather have it show siblings written as siblings: as in have all the people related to her written in a relationship to her and not as familysets.

In conclusion, currently, the merge page does not show relationships from the person being merged, but from a family standpoint. This should change so as not to confuse people.
The detail page differentiates between spouses and children and parents and siblings, whereas the merge page does not.

LegacyUser

Woody Brison said: Not all bugs are in the code. Some bugs reside in the design.

Graphics design is a language. The viewer's eye should be led to the information naturally.

The right-hand Sarah has a child listed. The left-hand Sarah has 8 children listed. It's almost exactly parallel and a normal human mind (coming here from the right-hand Sarah) goes naturally to the idea of "what's on the left is like what's on the right".

Many users will expect that if they hit the [Yes Continue] button, there will be one big family with nine children. When that's not what they get, they'll move kids around and get it more and more snarled until Mr. Bean couldn't straighten it out.

Here is a composite screen capture.

LegacyUser

Jordi Kloosterboer said: Yeah, I understand that. I wrote a post about it. https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

LegacyUser

Paul said: Confusing and a bit messy, but I agree with Jordi - this cannot be described as a bug.

By the way Woody, your numbering of these "Bugs" is not really helpful on this forum, as I believe has been pointed out to you previously. They are just items you have found (some bugs, some not) to which you have applied a numbering system that might make sense to you, but is meaningless to everybody else.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said:

Not all bugs are in the code. Some bugs reside in the design

Designs do not have bugs. Bugs are implementation errors in the code.

When a design is inappropriate or bad, it is a design Flaw. If an inappropriate design is implemented in code correctly, there are no "bugs". The coders implemented the design correctly just as it was created. It is just a faulty design.

Call a spade a spade.The term "bug" is overused and plays down the far greater significance of design flaws, and in some cases, Requirement errors which is even worse.

LegacyUser

Paul said: .

LegacyUser

Woody Brison said: OK, thank you for the terminology correction. But I cannot edit the thread title.

Family Search is one of the worst websites on the planet in terms of user interface. Solutions that were worked out 40 years ago and have been implemented in millions of systems since, are ignored and re-invented here. There are books about human interface. NASA for instance has a living document on it. This thing? I get the impression that it's run by circus clowns. Every single session, I run into another land mine, yet I *have to use it* to get ordinances done for my ancestors, there is no alternative.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: FamilySearch is far from a mature site, Woody. There are many areas that still need extensive development and FamilySearch has very limited resources.

LegacyUser

Paul said: " But I cannot edit the thread title." But you can desist from using the term "Bug" in practically all your posts, Woody - especially when the majority are, as pointed out, either flaws or just how the developers have chosen an item should function.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said:

Every single session, I run into another land mine, yet I *have to use it* to get ordinances done for my ancestors, there is no alternative.

Unfortunately, there IS one alternate that more and more folks seem to be using in order to avoid all of the odd idiosyncrasies and never ending shifting and changing going on with how the FSFT works.

What they do is keep all of their records on a different system that they like (e.g., Ancestry, or a home PC, etc.). Then when they want to submit names from their tree only and avoid FamilySearch FamilyTree entanglements, they create a GEDCOM file containing all the families that they are interested in. They then upload the GEDCOM file to FS, and then when they are using the GEDCOM compare tool to transfer data from their GEDCOM file into the FamilyTree, they just IGNORE all possible pre-existing matches that may already be in the FSFT, and create their own tree in the database totally detached from FSFT for all of the families in their GEDCOM file.

At this point they will immediately reserve and print all the ordinances that they want. They don’t care if the work was already done elsewhere, and they don’t care if the records that they are submitting are duplicates of others. They don’t have to worry about cleaning up duplicates or dealing with others changing their records, and especially, MERGING. All those duplicates are just left there for someone else to clean up.

An guess what? If they later need some more ordinances to do, they won’t even bother going back to the families that they previously transferred from their GEDCOM. Instead, they will just do it all over again only this time they will immediately reserve a different set of records for ordinance work. With this scenario, we see the same multi-generational families being duplicated in the FSFT MULTIPLE times. Each time so that the person doing the duplicating can just cherry-pick a different set of records for ordinance work out of the entire GEDCOM file. Rotkapchen has documented dozens of these occurrences on just the ancestors that she is tracking:
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

With the exception of some recent improvements in the reservation and print processes which tries to limit work being done if it looks like duplicates exist (that can be overridden by just marking it as “not a duplicate”), there is nothing to prevent anyone from doing this. You can do it as much as you want without ramification. FS does NOT consider it abuse. If someone complains about it to the help desk, they will not intervene. And from some of the longest topics to be discussed on this forum, It seems fairly obvious, that the ability to do this via GEDCOM files will not ever be blocked:
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

So if you can ignore the ethical implications of taking a few minutes to create a mess of duplicates in the system that could take other patrons weeks to correct, or the fact that you are likely doing ordinance work that was already completed simply because you don’t want to deal with the system that the brethren have set up specifically to avoid such things, then this is a really excellent way to “bypass” most of the FSFT collaboration and documentation processes in order to get your ordinances taken care of really fast.

Of course, I am not advocating such activity. I am only pointing out that your comment of there being “no alternative” is technically incorrect.