Are there no circumstances in which FamilySearch is wlling to contact a user who is doing damaging w

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Paul said: I don't think you can appreciate the exasperation felt at reckless work being performed by another user - until it affects you! I have frequently read of users refusing to collaborate and continuing to make / reverse changes, but it is currently happening to me and I am at a loss regarding what I can do.

Of course I have sent messages (5 to date), and have added sources, reason statements and Notes / Discussions items, but still a user continues to add a person who never existed as a mother of a person I am working on.

The situation is quite straightforward - his father married twice, once to a HANNAH Danby and then to an ANN Popplewell. I have added children under the respective relationships, noting the original records showing DANBY or POPPLEWELL for the mother's maiden name. However, the uncooperative user keeps adding back a fictitious "Hannah Popplewell" as mother of one of the children, also adding Hannah as a sibling of Ann Popplewell.

Originally, it took several hours to sort out the mess, but currently the problem is just the nuisance of me having to remove relationships each time they are incorrectly reinstated.

I wonder if it is worth approaching Support for help or if I just carry on - for as long as necessary - constantly reversing the changes myself, in a hope the other user will become completely exhausted in dealing with this - before I am?

(BTW - I checked some further work carrying the same display name and found other glaring errors: "Child born before parents" / "Birth after mother's death" error messages, a Scottish family mixed-up with a Yorkshire one, etc. So the damage being done is potentially quite extensive.)

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Chas Howell said: IMO that sounds like a reasonable request for Support.

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Jeff Wiseman said: I also believe that it is an entirely reasonable request.

However,

There have been several other topics posted here that relate to this. Read the following ENTIRE topic by rotkapchen:
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

You will quickly realize that FamilySearch will do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for you. They obviously consider this to not be important enough to do anything, and it appears that they have also directed the support personnel to avoid "entanglements" with this sort of stuff as well.

It is very clear that they do not want to get involved, and that they fully expect us to "work it out between ourselves" even though there are many individuals out there who are too stubborn to "work things out with" regardless of how caring and tactful that you are, what negotiating skills you may have, or how many attached sources and sound logic for a given record there is that disproves what they are doing.

Unless there is VERY obvious malicious intent by a person to destroy data in the Tree (i.e., nothing that could be attributed to ignorance of the rules), FS will NOT intervene! They are the only ones who have both the capability and the power to police these problems and make a HUGE difference, but they continue to refuse.

This makes absolutely no sense to me, but it also seems obvious to me that this is their current internal policy. This is the one single reason that I originally came to this forum a couple of years ago. But I have found that in spite of all the tremendous good that comes of this forum, anything related to this subject (e.g., damage from GEDCOM file dumps) continues to be silently ignored.

And yet because of the critical truths in this reply, it will likely get yanked within the hour. There definitely appears to be a few priority issues at work here.

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Tom Huber said: While I certainly agree with the need, Paul, this may be an instance where FamilySearch simply does not have the resources to:

1) research the individual's actions (which can be extensive) with a specific set of parameters to determine if the actions are nefarious (or not), and

2) contact the user and then monitor the user's activities for future violations, and

3) after xx warnings, put the user's ID on hold.

Note: this has been done in the past, but in those cases, the user was creating and adding names that are not permitted to be added, as outlined in related articles and policy statements.

In one case, the user was a member of the Church who insisted on entering the names of celebrities and groups of people for whom the user had no relationship. The user's leaders were contacted and they spoke with the user, who still continued adding the people. Eventually, she was denied access to FamilySearch and her Church membership account was flagged.

I haven't run into the situation (yet) where a person continued to make changes after correspondence, or got into a nasty back-and-forth set of messages with me. Those need someone from FamilySearch to step in and get the issue resolved.

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Jeff Wiseman said:

I haven't run into the situation (yet) where a person continued to make changes after correspondence, or got into a nasty back-and-forth set of messages with me. Those need someone from FamilySearch to step in and get the issue resolved

Tom, this HAS happen a couple times as reported here about 5 months back, and the issue was not resolved. Actually there was a really good example here a ways back but but the OP had included some emails in the post and wanted them to be removed. Apparently since that wasn't possible "without messing up the content format", the entire thread was removed so you can longer see the grief that they went through.
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea...

Also rotkapchen had also had experience with this. One case she recorded as:

GeorgeThibodeau
September 6, 2018
Made a huge mess and then left
"I ask to remove my family tree. Therefore you do not have to contact me anymore" 3 December 2018, 1:36 PM

Another prime example of someone in the tree that didn't have a clue that it was shared.

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Tom Huber said: Yeah, but my comment had to do with my personal experience, for which I’m very thankful.

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Brian Eric Olsen said: I had this same experience, a person in one of my lines made another line going back ten generations. I was very discourage watching all the temple work being done on duplicates. I tried for over a year to get family search to call this person. I tried every thing I could the person would not respond. I even asked family search to call the persons ward and send the ward family history consultant. To find out what going on. No result, was told we can't do that. I asked why and could I talk with some one that could give the authority to do this and I got no where. Now If I get stuck or ask for help Family Search staff is great. I am instructed to follow the rules and read all the articles. But then when I asked for help on someone one like this that is off making a mess not doing it correctly. Nothing, I ended up taking three days and merged, deleted the ten generations. Emailing those that had reserved temple ordinance on duplicates not to do them. Lucky she has not put it back in. I just don't understand why family search could not have called the ward family history specialist and turned it over to them. Or even send a email to the ward specialist to go see what is going on. The ward specialist could easily teach and train this person to follow correct procedure and learn the correct way of adding data. Even encourage the person to respond with the message system. That is what the system is for. What a easy fix, the local specialist should know the person and help out.

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Christine said: I have personally been involved in two situations where family search took action. In the first someone deleted names, birth dates, relationships, ect, with the reason "I am deleting these so no one can add information to my tree." I contacted support when the person would not respond to my messages, and their account was blocked. It took me many hours to correct the mess.

The second situation I was involved as an innocent bystander. A distant relative had done extensive research and documentation on a ggg grandparent and someone keep creating a looping relationship by adding the son as a husband of his mom (Junior and senior). The distant relative lambasted the one who keep making the incorrect relationships, not just in messages but on public notes for the person. She even added Donotchangeme as the middle name! Because I had been in contact with her before this, she sent me copies of her messages to the errant contributor and they were scathing. She was quite elderly (not an excuse for rudeness) and called me in disbelief when family search contacted her and warned her she would be blocked if she continued her hostile communication. The other person had contacted family search when she continued her unkind messages and personal attacks (not just "this relationship is incorrect because. . .", but "You are an idiot and can't even read my documentation!" I calmed her down, suggested she apologize, and told her I would continue to fix the mistakes. I contacted the person making mistakes and she told me she had had a stroke and had a hard time thinking and she was sorry for her errors. Good lesson to be kind.

So yes, family search does sometimes intervene.

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Tom Huber said: Without a doubt, there can be problems.

Local members (to the person) do not have the authority that FamilySearch (as an organization) has, or that a local Priesthood authority has.

Never mind that a person has been called as a Temple and Family History Consultant, or even the local Priesthood leader over that calling. The T&FHC's calling is to assist and encourage others in their research and temple attendance, and not as someone who can police members' actions.

As Christine (in the next reply) points out, there may be circumstances in which a user operates that impacts their ability to perform reasonably and while a local T&FHC or leader can certainly become involved, the key element is that the user has to be willing to accept such involvement. With the current pandemic and interpersonal restrictions, there is not much anyone can do, even if they are local to the person causing the problems.

At this point, if kindly-written communication isn't working, the a personal call to support may be in order, but again, recognize that in these trying times of a global pandemic, the resources from FamilySearch may be limited.

I know that I'm not being encouraging in getting these situations resolved, but persons adversely impacted by this kind of situation should take certain steps themselves -- maintain an accurate separate tree that is not part of the massive tree that is fully sourced and documented. That way, a base is always available.

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Adrian Bruce said: Hmm. What specific objectives does FS mandate for the use of FSFT? (Not totally sure that objectives is the right word). I'm not sure that it mandates any that aren't high level, "Let's be nice to one another" type.

If there are no specifics, then FS Support are unlikely to want to intervene, unlikely to be able to intervene.

In my view, a failure to respond to messages (not sure about emails because they can't be monitored) should be a cause for suspension.

Failure to successfully complete a training course that explains that there is no "my" tree or "my" data, should be another.

You may spot an issue here... Where are the specific instructions? The training course?

Without specifics, it really is difficult to see how Support can intervene. That frustrates me but is, as I repeat, perhaps the only possible course.

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Tom Huber said: I'm not sure what FS can do, aside from dealing with abusive users (and yes, the organization will attempt to deal with such, as related by Christine), or will do.

Lack of response can be a problem, but generally speaking, I have not had much of a problem in that area. The corrections were accepted and no response were necessary -- this deals primarily with the Pieter Claesen record for which there is sufficient evidence dealing with the false genealogy produced by the fraudulent Gustave Anjou. As to any other problem areas, the only other one is an ancestor for which I have not been able to push back any further and is often confused with a D.A.R. record that claims he was in the Revolutionary War (he wasn't -- the timing is all wrong). And there has been little done to mess that up at this point in time after a couple of years of correcting the record.

Getting back to FamilySearch's options. Yes, they have them, but as I stated earlier, this may be an issue with not having the personnel (especially during the pandemic) to deal with any given issues.

When it comes to creating duplicates -- that is a different issue than just mangling records -- and that is something that the mandate that FamilySearch was given covered. Therefore, reporting (with no success in other areas) duplicates that have resulted in duplicated This was talked about by President Nelson in last nights General Conference session. Therefore, such duplicate creation which results in duplicated temple ordinances for the same person, needs to be reported if the problem is repeated by the same individual (ingesting and mangling records from a GEDCOM file is a different matter that needs a lot of work on the part of FS).

The first thing to do is to merge any discovered duplicates. That will stop the duplicate temple ordinances until the next time duplicate records are created. But policing (as a user) the actions of another user means keeping accurate records as to what persons in FamilyTree are being duplicated and by whom.

I cannot imagine me doing this or remembering to check, if one of my branches in the massive tree are being impacted. Of course, I can go back through the change log, but even that takes time.

If a user member (of the Church) is seeing this problem, then they need to document the issue with the IDs of impacted persons of FamilyTree, and report it through channels with the (message) attempts to directly resolve the issue with the person involved with the problem. At that point, follow up with a telephone discussion after reporting the problem.

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Paul said: Thank you all for your comments. It seems awful that my thoughts are having to be focused on how I can be more "devious" than the other user, in order to stop this silliness.

After detaching "Hannah Popplewell" from relationships with "her" spouse and parents, I have now merged the ID with that of Ann Popplewell. However, that can just as easily be undone, of course, if he/she so wishes.

Under other circumstances, I would have some feeling for someone who genuinely believes they have added things correctly and has perhaps even taken the name(s) to the temple. It must be very upsetting if something like this is the case - or worse, a parent or grandparent might have performed "incorrect" ordinances. (Sorry if I misuse the terminology.)

However, the complete unwillingness to communicate is the worse part of the situation. Still, I am trying to convince myself, this person might not have checked their personal emails, or missed the red mark showing they had a new message to view. But that would also assume they never referred to reason statements or change logs!

Briefly, I thought I'd "got through" by temporarily creating a spouse called "See Messages-Sources", but the changes were again reversed as soon as I took that down.

Hopefully, this might come to a sudden end - otherwise this game of ping-pong might be due to continue for some time yet.

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Juli said: The only way I know of to definitely get a (temporary) block on a user is to somehow get said user to put profanity in a reason statement or note somewhere. This is less than helpful when dealing with little old church ladies: they're clueless and stubborn as all get out, but profanities are simply not in their vocabulary.

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Jeff Wiseman said: Of course profanity can be a relative thing. For example, if in response to a topic posted here in GetSatisfaction.com, someone responds with a comment that it is "stupid" or "idiotic", there is a good chance that they will be censured. In fact you only need to imply ugliness and you can be gone.

This is as it should be so that communications remain civil. But in FS, they seem to be separating language issues out from the issues of willfully repeating uninformed damage to the Tree, ignoring all attempts to contact them about it, and continuing to create large messes that others have to clean up.

Like you say, if they don't use profanity and it is not obviously malicious actions toward the Tree and/or church, FS will do nothing about it.

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Don M Thomas said: A distant cousin and myself had a war with a lady patron last September.

This lady patron did not use profanity but called us and others stupid and bad person and etc. She would put something her way and I would put it back the way it was. This went on for days. I and my cousin assumed that FamilySearch had put a block on her account in that it stopped.

My cousin and I know for certain this same lady patron we had the war with at FamilySearch, attacked both of our ancestry.com trees about 3 months ago. She used the same information she showed at FamilySearch and used the same expressions and language she used at FamilySearch. She had changed her name and was leaving notes all over the same ancestors in our trees at ancestry.com. We made our trees at ancestry.com private.

About two weeks ago a patron at FamilySearch with a male user name attacked again the same ancestors at FamilySeach that we had the war over last September. I and my cousin know for certain it is the same patron now showing a male user name.

The war seems to have never stopped.

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Jeff Wiseman said: I remember that conflict. As I recall, didn't you also attempt to contact FS about it?

So she's attempting to hide her identity now and represent herself as someone else? Well that's perfectly ok as far as the Code of Conduct goes (although I personally believe that passing yourself off as someone else in order to get around being identified should be considered a violation. It is a violation in almost every other online account that I have ever seen dealt with)

FamilySearch/FamilyTree runs similar to the law of the jungle:
"Survival of the stubbornest". When all else fails, unfortunately you either give up, or fight fire with fire.

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Robert Wren said: Just a reminder of the accepted responsibilities of ALL users of FamilySearch:

"Code of Conduct

You agree that you will not individually, or as part of any collective effort, submit or post information to this site (either at registration, as a genealogical submission, through a discussion feature, or through any other feature where any Contributed Content can be provided) that could be deemed harmful or offensive to other users, nor will you impersonate another user in order to hide your identity or implicate another in such actions. You agree not to mine, collect, or use any information from this site with the intent to harm, discredit, harass, or prejudice any person or entity. You further agree to do nothing that might disrupt the flow of data to and from this site, impact the service or performance of this site, or circumvent any of the controls or usage rules that we have implemented. You understand that the result of harmful or offensive actions, or any other violation of this Agreement, may include: revocation of your right to use this site (including your right to use any materials from this site) and other FamilySearch affiliated sites, and legal action against you."

Sounds fairly clear to me for all USERS & FamilySearch (but they hedge, appropriately, by saying "MAY include.")

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Jeff Wiseman said: Heh! That looks awfully familiar! But when I go to the "Code of Conduct" link on the top left of the GetSatisfaction.com landing page:



I get a "Code of Conduct" that makes absolutely NO reference to passing yourself off as someone else!



The "Code of Conduct" isn't even consistent from one place to the next on the web site

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Robert Wren said: Jeff, I'm sure you know that YOUR 'code' post concerns THIS forum's postings, mine refers to the operations in FSTree.

They do have something in common, they both protect FS (which is appropriate, IMO). HOWEVER, my guess is FS 'corrections' of 'users' (on a percentage basis) occurs FAR more often herein!!!

I have no understanding or explanation as to why this occurs, except to relieve users of the need to type and encouraging 'QUANTITY' which is measurable & reportable

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Jeff Wiseman said: Actually, I guess that I had forgotten that. I'm not sure why you would want a DIFFERENT Code of Conduct for the forum than in the FamilyTree other than enforcing it in GetSatisfaction would require far less resources.

So yes, that could be a reason the "correction rate" here being higher.

except to relieve users of the need to type and encouraging 'QUANTITY' which is measurable & reportable

Although true, it is only when viewed through a rather narrow portal. Relieving users of the need to type? What users?

Only the user that is doing the dump from a GEDCOM file.

Certainly NOT all of the other users that end up needing to correct the damage.

In fact there is likely far MORE work involved for others than it would have been for the original person dumping the data to hand enter everything themselves.

HOWEVER,

From a discussion over in the FamilySearch Community forum there was a recent person who wanted to load a GEDCOM file with over 6800 person records into the FS FamilyTree. He got a message that gave the statistics on how many living and invalid records were in his file, as well as the number of records in his file that were already duplicated in the FT along with some other useful stats.

The user was confused by all this because he didn't understand that he was dealing with a single shared tree and that his GEDCOM was not going into a separate personal tree for himself.

So this enhancement to the GEDCOM upload feature has provided some minimal mitigation that at least slowed that person down. Once he realized what he was dealing with, he realized that he didn't want anything to do with the FSFT.

Kudos to FamilySearch for providing information that, although cryptic to a new patron expecting private trees, at least caused enough confusion to them that they came to the community and realized that they were on the wrong track :-)

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joe martel said: Here's my perspective:
There are probably a couple different circumstances that make a code of conduct different than in FSFT.
1. GetSat posts are public and can be seen by a very wide audience, whereas comments in FSFT are typically confined to a person's tree of PIDs and has to be buried in Reason statements and such and are only seen by logged in users.
2. GetSat users can use GetSat as their soapbox and lobby, publicly put other's down, again in a public venue.
3. GetSat user participation can be controlled separate from FSFT. There might be GetSat posters that don't play nice, but are still good participants in FSFT. So having independent control over participation in GetSat vs. FSFT is important.
4. The GetSat and Terms of Use should probably be more in sync, but changing the terms of use has a lot more organization involvement and liability, so maybe not as lean as managing community forums which are often serviced on third party platforms.

But as pointed out above the GetSat CodeOfConduct is an addition onto the FS Terms of use https://www.familysearch.org/legal/terms

Back to the will FS contact a user, yes, especially if the other user is being abusive/harmful. Now changing data to one's own opinion is more tricky. Who is right, who can spend the time to investigate... is a lot of work and picking sides is tough. You can look at FSFT similar to wikipedia - for the most part the community deals\ with almost all the collaboration and reaches to admin only when it's very disastrous or harmful to people.

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Jeff Wiseman said: Thanks Joe. I had no idea that the GetSat Code was intended to be an add-on to the basic code for FS. Perhaps some text to this effect might be added to the code on GetSat? To the uninitiated, it appears as though the requirements for GetSat are far more lax, where the exact opposite is intended.

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Robert Wren said: Jeff, the "need to type" originated in the HUGE GED discussion topic, as the ONLY "answer" to the question -'Why is it necessary or desirable?'
https://getsatisfaction.com/familysea... Ctrl F for "typing" & you'll find it -including one from "Jeff"

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Robert Wren said: As always, thanks Joe, for responding!

BUT GEDCOM infusions into the FSTree DO create a LOT of work for many people (e.g. Rotkapchen) - and have NO declared reason for existing other than to avoid typing!! (But, I recognize that you are aware of that.)

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Adrian Bruce said: Just to highlight "he didn't understand that he was dealing with a single shared tree and that his GEDCOM was not going into a separate personal tree for himself."

In this instance, the overall system worked. But in how many cases does it not? In how many cases of supposed obstinacy seen here, does the inputter fondly imagine that this data is theirs and theirs alone? But somehow, they find one of us altering "their" data? Why, they think, can't we leave them alone? After all, they believe that whatever they are doing doesn't affect anyone else?

To repeat a conclusion that I have come to reluctantly, FS needs to be far more interventionist with its training and testing. Then maybe, just maybe, there wouldn't be as many cases where we wish that Support would intervene. Perhaps.

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Adrian Bruce said: Does anyone here have enough experience of Wikipedia editing to know how detailed its quality criteria are, compared to those for FSFT?