Can I have your help with my merges??

I'm having a problem too, in changing my ancestors' generations. I keep getting the same message - should say kept getting, since I gave up on it. I can't change the parents because IT WILL SPLIT THE TREE!!! It's so frustrating! It's too bad because it's telling me I'm the manager, but I didn't put up the information - my own tree in my computer is correct. My family is WEEKS, and two generations have been merged into one. Very frustating. Have to take a break from all this.

Amen on the break from it!

Does anyone have access to Marc Wheat's profiles?
I have some pending merges dating from quite a bit back.

I have requested some of my collaborators to be my friends as well so that I can regain access to gray profiles.

And sadly, I have several places where I get the "split the tree" message, and pretty much every other problem described. I'm patient, however, because Geni's overall goal is grandiose, so I didn't expect it to actually work. XD

I know it can be frustrating, and I agree that you need to take a break and get away from it every once in awile or it will drive you crazy. But rest assured that it IS possible to solve these things with time and patience- albeit sometimes a LOT..

The problem, of course, is that not everyone who is screwing around in our shared tree understands [or perhaps even cares about] the consequences that their mistkaes have on the rest of us. I found that I can usually get most of these folks to understand after much discussion with them. But often that isn't until after a huge amount of damage has been done. The most common error of these newbies is to assume that, for example, all John's who were married to a Mary and lived in the same millennia must be the same person. Sigh!

Meanwhile, I just keep patiently plugging away...

FYI--I finally emailed Geni Help today. Here is what I said:

I'm not sure if you monitor discussions or not, but you should be aware that among my collaborators there is a near-mutiny of late because of the way merges are handled (or unable to be "handled," more specifically). The screen shots I'm attaching are just two of hundreds in my tree that illustrate the lunacy of the current system. Many profile managers are giving up in disgust, which only adds to the problem, because there is no one on the other end of our merge requests to complete them for us.

Look at the first example (ending in -1471): Anne Martin has only two husbands in reality: Jean Côté and Jacques Raté. But I am unable to clean up my tree to show that. I'm not allowed to combine the two Jeans--I manage only one of them. The gray one is idiotic--why does anyone from the 17th century need to be private? Besides, if it's manager wants it private, then why the f should it show up in my tree? They shouldn't have it both ways! If you don't want to let me collaborate on your profiles, then keep them the heck out of my tree! Nor can I combine Anne Martin with the Add This Person. I don''t get any error messages or permission violations, and the procedure seems to execute correctly, but when it's done, nothing has changed.

Look at the second example: There should only be one Jean-Baptiste Côté, with two wives; instead we have three of him, plus identical profiles for one wife, and the other wife. I can't fix any of it because "it would split the tree" or I do not have "permission," or because the drag and drop simply fails. Of what use is a tree of 50,000+ profiles that look like this?

You've got to do something about all this. I have spent untold hours for nearly two years adding 30,000+ profiles to my tree. I have at least 20,000 more to add, but now I spend all my free time from sunup to sundown trying to fix all these damn duplicates. One woman had her husband attached eight times and vice versa! It's bad enough to need to clean all this up, but it is beyond intolerable that I'm not "allowed" to clean it up when I try. WHy do all those blue plus-signs and yellow caution-signs beckon to me, then turn around and deny me when I try to use them?

I had planned to become a Pro member and enjoy the full fruits of my labors; now I, like so many of my collaborators, am on the verge of throwing in the towel altogether. Geni was a great idea once; now it's just a major #FAIL!

@Marty, you know you're only gonna get a generic reply from those fools, don't you?

@Barbara Well, they did actually undo an erroneous merge for me once, but it took four attempts to get them to understand what the problem was! I'm hoping that I'm not the only one making this complaint to them, and that with critical mass they'll realize they need to change the way the software works, or risk losing their most active users. Won't hurt to try! (Now, come on, everyone complain!)

@ Marty; Don’t you also think that part of the problem with merging is; that anyone can merge anything and everything; even if they aren't in touch (collaborating or family group) with the other managers? I think that there should be some restrictions and limitations regarding merging.

@Ofir, Yes, there are many problems, as someone tried to address with a list recently in this discussion. I don't propose to know exactly how each of them should be corrected, as I am not a software engineer (and I know it can be very complicated). I just wanted the Geni people to see a couple examples of what we face everyday and maybe they will begin to make changes that will remedy, not all perhaps, but at least some of the problems.

I think the gray profiles are left over from before they made all profiles public. When filling out info, if you didn't click public, it would have not showed up for others. Sometime it was automatic and other times not, even when putting it in the settings. I think that is why we see it sporatically and even with collaborators. A Geni issue...should have set all old ones not just new. At least that is my observation. I could be wrong.

I have sent 2 issue requests into geni and yet to hear back about either one. And I spend at least 40 hours a week, probably much more trying to fix stuff...if only I was getting paid not paying for the privilege...

@ Margaret, I think that gray area could also be related to manager's setting regarding who can edit his/her profiles or other options overthere

@ Marty; I'm just saying that if only it was'nt so easy to merge perhaps we had less problems to deal with; and we could also control our merge issues better

If we could do it over, it would have been better for info to be transfered/duplicated from private trees over to the big tree and once there could be fine tuned by those who are paid pros and who choose to participate in the big tree, that way not messing up peoples personal trees. We would all still have the tree we worked so hard to build separate from the big tree. I feel for people who didn't realize what they were getting themselves into, isn't that all of us? If I could do it over, I would. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I made that first merge and I have little backup to pick up and leave.

Also I think the gray profiles are much too sporadic on some trees to have been deliberate.

The "gray profiles" are only because the manager forgot to set the persons as decreased. When you add someone, the default is "living".

It is more likely that the person is not that computer literate and not familiar with Geni.

I know at least one key person at Geni, Noah Tutak, is an active Geni user, and has experienced first hand the troubles that we're all facing. So it's not thet Geni isn't listening to its users. In fact, any of you who have been Pro members since Pro memberships first started will undoubtedly agree that things have improved a LOT over the past 1.5 years. I'm betting that this trend of improvement will continue, albeit at a slower pace than aby of us will be happy with.

Is it worth being on the Pro side?

Connie ....

I like pro, for relatively short money, compared to other sites, you get better searching, divorce ability, hot matches (I like within 10 generations of my own family tree, down side is that it's too easy to match different people with same names when there's no dates or language issues). I get good tech service response time.

Now everything could be better, but I am happy with the value. And the reality is that nothing is for free, if people don't pay their isn't a sustainable business model.

Gene

I think that the merge problem can be resolved if we restrict "big tree" profiles to public profiles. If a user wants to maintain control over his "private" profiles, fine. But all profiles merged into the big tree should be set to public. Then Geni can chose a profile management solution which makes sense. Pro user special rights, super user, manager tracking info; there are many options.
One thing which might be useful is to allow private tree users to add a copy of a big tree branch to their private tree & assume control. We have conflicting needs which must be resolved. No profile needs 25 or 50 managers.

wow...it's great to hear from everyone tonight. I posted in the public forum today the need to make changes to the Geni interface to better resolve not only the profile information during merges, which is actually quite easy to accomplish, but to resolve profiles with existing bad connections. I walked through a scenario where you could be doing a great job stacking and merging, then all of a sudden come to a profile with obvious bad connections that cannot be corrected. The response from the Geni interface? "Sorry, choosing those parents would split the tree". Well, so be it. I would rather split the tree, knowing I was doing the right thing, than to deal with the mess we have now. There is no reason the "Sorry.." message has to be a fatal error, and all work ceases. Instead, it can simply be turned into a friendly warning, with the next sentence saying, "Do you wish to continue?" To which we could reply affirmatively, the interface would then complete our merges, split the tree of all of the bad connections, and finally begin the task of quickly cleaning up this mess. I know enough about applications to know this is not a major request that will take 6 months to complete (ok...maybe 3 months, with testing). We've tried it the "safe" way, with horrendous results. Now it is time to provide the users with the functionality they need to actually fix our tree!

Sorry for the long post. I'll keep quiet now! :-)

Pro accounts get tools that enable you to split the tree! :)

David, I have a pro account, and I haven't figured out how to split the tree during the stacking process. I know how to remove bad connections after I complete merges, which in my view is not when bad connections should be removed, it should be done before completing the merge. If there is a way for pros to split the tree during the stacking process, I'm all eyes!

David, look for my post on page #8 of this thread. Does that describe what you want to be able to do?

David, what you describe is what I am able to do now. Which is why I believe the tree is in the shape that it is in. The process should not be this painstaking.

Thanks for the clarification.

BTW: i agree with you completely. Why should it be so much harder to fix erors than it was to create them?

I've never liked the idea that people who pay are Geni Pros. They aren't, necessarily. And you can't even get your foot in the door here without $60 up front. I don't have that kind of money as a grad student. Yet I think I am learning at a rate to be near Geni Pro material. I even have all 11,500 merge issues showing when I log in. Huzzah.

Here's why, even though I would be interested in helping, I would not currently pay even if I had the money for Geni:

http://i361.photobucket.com/albums/oo54/Paxseko/genitonsoffunforall...

Look at that screen shot. Notice the busted number icon, the 85 bazillion lines in the background from all of the multiples, the locked gray people that can't be merged, the variety of names (those are just the ones I hadn't researched and merged already-- there were tons more!).

I was surprised to see it loaded on my phone line dsl, albeit I had ample time to pour myself a beverage while it sent my processor into a fit of 100% rage.

How on earth is anyone supposed to know which of those are right? And perhaps all of them are somewhat right due to variety of spelling in pre-1600s language? Geni can't accommodate all of those variants, and yet it should, I think.

Just so you know, I didn't go through with merging. I knew I would do something wrong.

Faith, when you go to merge issues, and show advanced controls, there is a checkbox for "Include Collaborators". If you turn that checkbox off, your count of 11,500 merge issues should drop dramatically. When I do it, I go from 47,700 merge issues down to 10. Hope this helps.

Dave.

To compare: If I enable that option I get 104.032 merge issues ;-)

12.651 of these belongs to Scott David Hibbard.

Bjorn, what is taking you so long? You should have fixed those 91,400 other merge issues by now! :-)

Faith ... the tree issues back then are a very well known problem. People have proposed solutions to try and break the log jam; Geni is moving to address it, albeit slowly. The problem is people who merge a bit then back out, it creates a intertwined ball of string that is terribly hard to fix without everyone's help.

I don't believe anyone has stated that paying for the "Pro" level account somehow makes them better or smarter, in fact there's lots of non-pro managers that are very knowledgeable genealogist people.

Gene

Is it possible to change which profile is primary. I have seen many merges where secondary profiles match, but conflict with the primary? Merging compatible secondary profiles would help some, but I haven't found a way to do that.