Illogical display of "Occupation" event

Julia Szent-Györgyi

You know those electronic highway signs that purportedly give the time it currently takes to get to various destinations, but the first number they show is confusingly a distance?

Well, the Other Information section is doing the same thing:

Occupation · 2 Sources
Mezőberény, Békés, Hungary
uradalmi földmérő (geometra)

Why is the actual occupation the last thing displayed?

Jaelene Starr

Also I will voice again my wish for a separate box area for occupation. Right now the information is lost amide other data. Occupation is a key piece of information that defines a person.

I would recommend that the year and occupation be listed on the same line, with the ability to click to see additional information. If this information is included in a separate exclusive to occupation area they there would be a clear picture.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Hmm, well, there's an idea for how to discourage people from putting the occupation in the primary name field: include occupation events (if there are any) on the summary panel/flyout/popup thingies. It quickly gets complicated, though, because what if there are a dozen? No, I haven't yet encountered that, but I truly wouldn't be surprised if I did.

I'm not sure a separate box for occupation would by particularly useful, though: it still wouldn't be visible until you went to the profile's details page, and unless you were using a large portrait-oriented screen, you'd still need to scroll to get to it, and at that point, it may as well stay in the Other Information section. Granted, it can get a bit lost between residences and stuff.

I just went and poked at the Beta a bit, to try and figure out how Other Information events are sorted if they're undated — and the answer is, I haven't a clue. It's not in the order entered, it's not alphabetical, it's not by type. It may be by latest change timestamp?

I'm not sure why events have the date as their primary sort key. The Time Line already does that, doesn't it? Why repeat it in Other Info? It would make more sense to me to group events first by type: all of the occupations together, all of the residences together, everything related to military service in one group, and so on. Within the groups things could be sorted according to the current criteria, I suppose. This change would allow us to compare like with like, instead of accidentally skipping over something because it was "surrounded" by other events.

Sorting by event type first would allow all of the personally-identifying information to be at the top: first any alternate names, then any occupations, then the other event types, maybe according to frequency of use in the Tree. (I would assume residences are most common, and then probably immigrations and naturalizations, given how the system classifies all travel as immigration.)