Recently I was doing a bunch of additions to my wife's family tree, and I got a complaint from my cousin that she was getting lots of updates (by email and on her main geni page) about all the new profiles I was creating--naturally she didn't have much interest in knowing about my wife's distant ancestors and cousins, since none of them are related to my cousin. And in the past I remember another case where a distant cousin of mine was doing a lot of edits to parts of his family that weren't blood relations of any of my close relatives, and some of my relatives were complaining about the constant updates and even asking to be taken off geni in some cases. So, it would be really nice if there was an option (maybe a default option) to not alert family members to edits you are doing if the edits involve profiles that aren't biologically related to them. As far as I can tell there's no way to do this now, is there any possibility of getting this implemented?
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Jesse Mazer To add to the suggestion, it occurred to me that this might take too much computing power if the site had to do a search for *any* genetic connection between the profile being edited and the person getting the alert, no matter how distant. So I'd also be happy if there were an option where relatives would only be alerted to an edit to a profile if the profile could be shown to be genetically connected to them in X steps or less, where X is some reasonably small number (so they might be alerted to edits of their third cousins but not fourth or higher, for example).
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Jim Henderson Sounds good.
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Jeff, Geni Curator Under the "News & Notifications" in their Account Settings, users can define their family group to not include in-laws and modify their notifications to not receive such updates.
https://www.geni.com/account_settings/family/
https://www.geni.com/account_settings/notifications/
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Jesse Mazer Jeff, does that solution require all my blood relatives to edit their own Account settings to avoid getting notifications when I edit my in-laws' profiles? Or if I define my own family group not to include in-laws, does that mean when I edit in-laws profiles my blood relatives won't get notifications regardless of their own notification settings?
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Jeff, Geni Curator Users control their own notifications. Not sure it would make sense to allow someone else to define what notifications you get as a user.
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Jesse Mazer I guess I was thinking in terms of an analogy with a site like facebook, where you have some control over who gets updates on their feeds about your own activities. But maybe it's different because on geni your activities involve edits to profiles that are related to them in some way.
What about just trying to find some way of making it more obvious to the less tech-savvy geni users how they can avoid getting too many notifications about things they aren't interested in? It wasn't obvious to the relatives I mentioned in the first post, and although I can explain things to the ones who specifically complain, I don't like the idea that I may be inadvertently spamming a bunch of other relatives who don't speak up when I do a lot of editing. Maybe every time a notification is sent by email or appears on someone's main geni page, there could be simple explanation at the bottom (in print at least as large as the notification itself so it won't easily be missed) saying something like "Too many notifications? You can control the types of updates you get by changing to your 'notification' settings, and you can control who you will be updated about (so you can exclude overly distant relatives or in-laws of blood relatives) by changing your 'family group' settings." A message like that could include direct links to the notification and family group settings to make it as straightforward for people as possible.
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