WeRelate:Suggestions/Sound off page!!

Sometimes I get so frustrated with WeRelate and just want a page to vent or to say what about WR is SO frustrating. But I don't want to do this where the general public can read it and perhaps would be a negative influence on newer users. Maybe I should just take a walk around the block but that wouldn't help get irritating things fixed. I want to get the msg to "the powers that be" without influencing the general user with my frustrations.

I am currently trying to upload a reasonably small GEDCOM and am about ready to chuck the whole idea. Sigh...but I won't. I'll go see if there is anything in the suggestion list to add my vote to.

Well, since I'm sounding off, I'll mention what is bothering me.

1. How does the system decide who is the root person in a new GEDCOM upload? It certainly isn't the person I would have expected.

It's the first person in the gedcom file. Many genealogy programs have a way to set this, but frankly, it's not important. WeRelate doesn't use it in any way.

2. I have divided up my large database to try to upload it in smaller bits. I started with my earliest ancestor and have a couple of generations uploaded. But now I can't connect later generations to them because "they are too early"!! A week ago the system let me upload Person:Samuel Jackson (84) who was born in 1706, but now I can't upload his brother John born in 1701 (or John's wife born in 1713) because they are 'too early'. What is happening here?

We have a rule that people born before 1750 can't be uploaded. But so that we don't break up families, if at least one family member was born after 1750, then all family members are uploaded, regardless of when they were born.

3. Dorothy Covenhoven who died in 1808 was excluded for being 'too early'. I found an estimated birth date for her but the system wouldn't accept her even after I edited her page with the new birth date.

Yeah, in these cases, editing has to be done in the desktop genealogy program and then a new gedcom uploaded. Sorry.

4. Almy Seaman, #4 from the root, with no dates was excluded, but Almy Seaman, #7 from the root, with no dates was accepted. Can't figure this one out either.

The system jumps through a complex series of hoops trying to estimate when people without dates were born. Basically, if someone without dates is the spouse or parent of someone who was born before 1750, then they're assumed to also have been born before 1750.

5. I would like to see a print buttom on the location matching page like is on the warnings page. I have a location 'Woodlawn Cemetery' no known county or state. The system has linked this to Woodlawn Cem, Washington, Iowa but I have no idea of what record this location is attached to as I can't easily click on it to see if the Iowa location is logical or not. I have various locations that mention churches - probably from marriage locations - and we don't make even historic churches into places. I would prefer to print out the locations with suggested matching locations so that I could check over the list at my desktop. Otherwise, I'm going to give up and just not try matching locations. It's just too much bother.

One thing you can do is "right-click" on the place listed in the places tab, and select the menu option to view a list of people with events in that place. I agree place matching needs to be better, especially to ignore churches and simply match them to the town or city that they're contained in.

6. Speaking of buttons - another that would be very helpful is a button to print a list of excluded persons. After uploading several hundred persons, who is going to remember to go back and try to fix the exclusions without a list to go by? I tried writing my own list as I checked the persons, but it would be much easier if the system would enable me to print such a list.

Good point. I'll make that into its own suggestion page.

Well, that's enough Rant for now. What do you think, could we have a Rant or Sound Off page that just the admins can see? And can any of my concerns be addressed? --Janiejac 23:17, 5 January 2012 (EST)

I think that a suggestion page, just like you did here, is pretty good. Anyone can see it, but I think that most of the frustrations are the result of things that could be better in the software, so what better place to sound off than a suggestions page?--Dallan 22:30, 23 January 2012 (EST)

I had completely but reluctantly given up on WeRelate until recently a couple of folks offered to break up my large database for me so there would be small enough GEDCOMs to upload. I call that real collaboration! So I've just uploaded the first of these smaller trees. I spent two days!! creating new cemetery pages as I reviewed the GEDCOM - so I'm not just uploading my data, I'm helping build the website page to match to! I carefully matched my sometimes insufficient burial info to the new cemetery pages I was creating. I thought the info on the person pages would show the new cemetery info. But NO . . .instead my insufficient info was placed behind the bar. So it links to the correct cemetery place page, but it SHOWS my not so good cemetery information. NO WAY I'm going to go back to remove the bar from all those folks!! How can this be avoided in GEDCOM review so this doesn't continue to happen??

If I see something that doesn't appear correct in the GEDCOM, matching it to the correct something doesn't fix it. Must I just remove the GEDCOM, fix that one item and try again to upload? People just aren't going to work this way!!

Status

It looks like this requirement is being addressed (however inadequately) by the Suggestions page. I am going to archive this suggestion.--DataAnalyst 17:48, 8 April 2017 (UTC)