FRUSTRATION!!!

"Ok, this is getting out of hand. I came on tonight, hoping to fix the now 1255 issues I have"

I couldn't agree more, Richard.

"and the first one I come across is for Margaret de DE LACY (DE BRAOSE),. I look and it say parent conflict. Ok, one of the reason is there are 35 pending merges. Oh come on, people are just merging and merging and merging and not finishing it. I can see maybe a few, but come on!!!"

Not everyone has enough collaborators to fix what we can... Richard. That's one of the primary reasons I started the Collaboration Pool thread.

"The more CRAP that Geni adds, the worse this is getting."

Yep... though it's not, entirely, Geni's fault... much of the blame actually lays with the users for having uploaded crap copies of gedcoms from internet sources.

"I am about to close my account, this isn't Fun, IT IS NOW A NEVER ENDING BATTLE."

I would rather you didn't... though I fully understand why you would want to.

If you quit, though... you would dump your problems onto another user or users.

If you feel you really must quit... please ask those you collaborate with (and who are *active*) to take over your tree.

Please don't just leave it to a manager who may well be inactive.

In other words... please don't cause any more damage, just because you don't want to do this anymore!

Jason P Herbert

thats nothin'. i got 23302 merge issues. lol

@Joseph Frederick Strausman : That's because you have the "Include Collaborators" checkbox selected.

Goto your merge issues... click on "show advanced controls".
Remove the mark from the "Include Collaborators" checkbox... and the click "Update List".

That should show a dramatic reduction in your merge issues.

Jason P Herbert

holy shit! thanks man now i only have 25 merge issues. i was wondering y i had ppl who im not even related to haha

No problem... many people have run into that problem.

Jason P Herbert

I don't want to drop this in anyone's lap, I want those who created the problem to fix it, by not merging and merging and merging, and leaving the bulk of the merging on those who manage the profile. In this one instance, there were 5 that were not even the right person to merge to, and 12 all created by the same person on the same day. You have to go and view the tree, an click the blue circle and complete it, or go and view and see the major mess that is cause by doing that, that is my frustration

and all the merges are mine, include Collaborators is off

Richard I took care of over half your merges for you. I didn't touch the tree merges though (parent conflict, partner conflict). You were over a thousand and now at 417.

Richard-
I appreciate your frustration, and also the support you have already given me. Perhaps we should ask Geni to track open merges for each user on the home page and make it easier for users to get back to their own open merges. I have already asked them to consider adding a link on the "merge request pending" page to get back to the pending request so I can cancel it if necessary.
I think many, esp. new users, do not understand that merge is a two step process, & many do not continue on to complete the necessary profile merges.
That & fixing zombies will go a long way.
Does anyone from Geni read this discussion? Or does one of us have to rewrite this mess as a suggestion. A Geni rep should at least sign in & say "Noted!"

Jeez, "Living Private," how did you do that so fast????

P.S. I'm on here all the time and it took me a long time to realize my merges weren't complete until I worked the blue circle. I know I'm the cause of a lot of junk but I'm working hard to correct it.

I'd hate for you to leave, Richard. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

What do you do when the people you should merge have been locked by a collaborator's collaborator's collaborator... I hope Richard does not leave.

I am wondering that myself. So many of my Dufour ancestors are locked that I can't merge the trees even though I know they are the right people.

I hate to advertise my own threads... but the topic and general direction of this thread seems to lead in this direction.

@Russell Varcoe , @Private , and @Janice Carol Dehod... ya'll should consider joining my Collaboration Pool thread here: http://www.geni.com/discussions/6000000008539319639

The idea is to greatly expand each person's access to the big tree... by collaborating with as many people as possible.

That should help with alot of your merge issues.

"I don't want to drop this in anyone's lap, I want those who created the problem to fix it, by not merging and merging and merging, and leaving the bulk of the merging on those who manage the profile."

Define "those who created the problem"?

Is it the user who's ignorant of how things should work on geni?
Or is it Geni (the company)?

I could argue either way.

"and all the merges are mine, include Collaborators is off"

I figured as much... I have 2397 myself (more than 60 thousand with the "Include Collaborators" mark on).

"Richard I took care of over half your merges for you. I didn't touch the tree merges though (parent conflict, partner conflict). You were over a thousand and now at 417."

Holly holy... I use Firefox as my browser and linux as my os (with dual monitors, I might add)... and I'm still not that fast.

How, on this earth, did you do that?

Jason P Herbert

I had to jump on this discussion.

With regards to fixing merges issues and assisting my fellow collaborators, I don't have a problem with this at all for the good of the tree.

What is frustrating is starting to complete the merge (blue dot) and then getting profiles of dead people (no disrespect to our ancestries) that are blocked out. This is where parent conflicts are happening ect:

This to me, is the biggest challenge I see. Why are people who want to collaborate, unwilling to show there tree????

I started working on one the other day, and keep going around and around in a circle because of block/locked profiles.

I did want to add, to those I do collaborate with and have open trees. Thank you for your research in allowing me to know more about my past then I could ever of dreamed of doing myself.

Edward Albert

If you have followed the discussions in the forum you would notice that the major problems is not people actively locking people out, but zombies (profiles that should have been marked as deceased) and abandoned accounts.

Collaboration does not help on none-public zombies, only family group with the manager, and hopefully they will get with some changes regarding this soon.

I just wrote to a user who has locked profiles and requested that they begin wroking through any merge issue with their locked profiles, since that left me unable to make the changes myself. I hope this helps.

I totally understand the frustration. I'm glad this thread was started. Maybe if we all work together, PLEASE write to those people (using the "contact the profile manager")you find with locked profiles that need merging and ask them to work with us. Maybe then we can get this done??

thanks

Colleen

Rarely does anyone add me to their family groups so I can access a zombie profile. Why should they? I am not family. These requests are a waste of time. Geni needs to change all profiles earlier than the past 100 years to deceased...Period! They can't be alive and it should never have been an option.

I think that a lot of the problems are caused by people who have abandoned their trees, and/or have blocked Geni messages from their mailbox. Maybe we need to ask Geni to establish a renewal policy to support active users. Always show a last logged in date in a user profile. There is no reason to inhibit other Geni users from knowing if you are active. I have one holder of locked profiles who joined on Nov 17, 2009, & last logged on the same day.
He probably doesn't know he didn't mark profiles he "inheirited" deceased. He is unresponsive to communications.
Also, for Margaret, profiles married to or with children over 100 years old should be marked "deceased", or "probable deceased" if anyone is offended.

Thanks for your comments with this thread - I too have run into many of the same frustrations and am in agreement with most of the ideas shared! I hope we can see some resolution to the problems soon.

Deceased could be set automaticly as default=Guiness oldest living plus 1.
Any users without a log in inside of 6 month, should be warned by e-mail, and given two weeks to log in or their profiles released for other users.
Geni should have a quick user guide with basic functions and check boxes, witch all new users had to check (if not read) before they could start their tree.

Private
Richard, I would hate to see you leave Geni. We have so many profiles where we have already collaborated. I certainly understand your frustration. I spend one or two days a week clearing merges. If someone sends me request, I will try to do it as soon as received. The rest of my Geni-time is devoted to working on my own tree.

@Jason Peter Herbert
Thank you for starting the pool. My mother's family is primarily of English-speaking descent, at least for the last 200+ years. I am hopeful of finding someone, someday, who can help me with my father's side of the family, where I am only the second generation of English-speakers. I am encouraged because of all the European collaborators I now have. One day I will find one who has roots in the Austria-Hungary Empire.

For all the suggested improvements, I heartily support a default = dead approach. I heartily support a new user tutorial that has to be completed as a new user begins his or her tree. I agree that it would be nice if a staffer read these public discussions and left us notes with solutions or suggestions. I think the idea of emailing a user who hasn't logged in recently to do so is good, but if someone has changed emails or consigned Geni to Spam, we won't get to those people.

Thanks, everyone, for any help you've given me on Geni.

Happy ancestor-hunting!
Maria

I can understand how you feel. It can be realy frustrating having to sort through a lot of crap.

When I attack a profile, I try to merge as many as I can. I am one of the small group of us who can merge the majority of the profiles. The relative newbies do not have a large inventory of collaborators so they are not able to complete merges. There are a number of areas where there has been little action since the advent of geni. I am working around Fulk V and there are an immense number of spouse and ancestor issues that lead to an immense number of unresolved merges. So far, I have whittled down a few key profiles.

There needs to be a plan for when we eventually go into the maintenance mode. I define that as the time when the Ancients have merged as much data as can be accurately filtered such that there should be no more changes. We need to be able to lock profiles that have the best available data. The newbies can merge into them to adopt the line but there will be no changes to data or structure of the line.

Geni needs to resolve the issue of those who refuse to play well with others. There needs to be a default collaboration for the ancients so that we can resolve the merge issues (Frustrations). If necessary Geni needs to be able to establish a separate playground for those who refused to collaborate and complete merges.

We need to identify classes of users. The best way to do this is by the number of collaborators that they have. The newbies/dabblers have very few collaborations and go back 6 or less generations. The Family Historians go back 10 or more generations and have broken into the cloud with a number of collaborations but usually limit their activities to tending to their own lines. The Genealogists have large numbers of collaborates and spend a lot of time resolving issues with the Ancients. We would probably be surprised to find that there are fewer than 50 of us who actively tend to the Clusters of Ancients where many, many merges pop up. I look at problems like that as targets of opportunity. I also like untangling large hairballs of wire and I have other nasty habits. I like these kind of puzzles.

One easy improvement I would like to see is a number in a circle that represents underlying merges like the number for similars. Geni is fun.

Rick

accounts inactive for more than 6 months should be released by geni by making profiles public. If this is a problem (privacy) geni could transfer ownership to nearest active relative in the tree.
By the way I have 27 306 merge issues and now i will try advanced tools without the checked collaborator box.

It's frustrating, but when things finally do work out, you get to see a lot of interesting things....

I think that a long period of inactivity should mean forfeiting any public, deceased accounts one manages to the public. I don't think it's too much to ask to login every 90 days. Also, any pending merges that the user has would be automatically turned over to the person who requested the merge to finish. This simple step would fix most of Geni's problems. Seriously.

I think a lot of the problem is not understanding how Geni works, especially when one uploads their GEDCOM. I know that I have some unsourced data in there that I found on the Internet, but I didn't realize that such data would end of confusing everyone who views that PERSON's profile, not just my set of data, until I merged or eliminated it. So I am always actively trying to clean up my mess and the mess of others who probably weren't aware of how Geni works when they enthusiastically uploaded ALL of their data, including the 'look into this when you have time' set.

Tried advanced tools and wept I only had 1 merge issue with 3 profiles. However I will keep trying to merge profiles of my collaborators, and within my own connexions.

We'll I gave the (last right's) to a lot of Zombies today and pronounced them dead:(

I will make it a point to keep a close watch on this with myself and fellow collaborators!

-Ed

Rick, interesting thoughts on different "types" or "classes" of users. There have been a few forum discussions on just such topics. Also lends creedence to the notion that, over time, users can graduate from newbies to historians to genealogists as they spend more time here, gather additional collaborators to work with, and connect to the big tree. I just want to make sure that because I did not load a GEDCOM to Geni, but rather input by hand over 11,000 profiles until I found matches to the big tree, that I am somehow not considered one of the few that you classify as a "genealogist". The ancients are my relatives too, even though I did not load a profile for them (contributing to the merge issues), but instead "connected" to an existing profile.

My $.02

Dave.

Rick, you're invited to join "The Mergettes" - a couple of other goofs who love unraveling and cleaning up messes (including my own)!