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Super user status to ensure good data

David Zittin

August 30, 2011 15:25

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I spent untold hours creating a family tree after long discussions with elderly family members. I invited family members of all ages to join who in turn invited others. One of the adult contributors just discovered he was a family member and knew more than the rest of us and has irrevocably ruined a tree of many hundreds of nodes. Over time the tree was ruined and nodes duplicated by others with all kinds of inconsistencies and merge requests. It would be nice if one or a few people can serve as "sentries" to a tree so it does not get crufted up by bad information. Perhaps someone who wants to contribute posts and a feature would allow a group pow-pow that would approve/not approve the proposed data inclusion.

5 comments

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  Dan Cornett September 03, 2011 14:35

  Would it work to be able to "lock" certain fields?  (Curators, for example, can designate "Master Profiles" (MP), and can lock some fields so that any merges into those MP's do not change the locked field data.)

  The main issue could become, however, who can unlock the fields if, for example, the original 'manager' died (or just gets tired of doing this stuff) before unlocking those profiles or passing "management" of them to someone else?

  I haven't tried it, but I've seen in a few places a "block user" option ... but it hasn't been clear to me if or how that might be useful in this situation. (Or any particular situation -- I don't know yet what "block user" really does -- I might have to check the help!)

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  Marianne Lyons Dagher October 17, 2011 18:48

  I've come across locked profiles which only tied my hands about adding the right relationships.

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  Dan Cornett October 17, 2011 22:20

  Hmmm... I have not yet run into a situation where I couldn't request a merge to create a 'missing' relationship -- although, depending on the level of locking, the Curator of that profile would have to agree and complete the merge.

  Changing/deleting relationships for a locked profile requires the 'owner' (Curator) to get involved -- as it should.

  (Locked, a.k.a. Master Profiles, should not be confused with private profiles -- not even Curators can't do anything with private profiles unless they are invited into the "Family Group" to do so).

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  Bjørn P. Brox October 18, 2011 08:08

  Marianne - assuming you are a Premium user and you are annoyed that you have access to edit a public profile, but not add to it?

  The reason why it is locked for you is probably just because you are not a manager or collaborating with one of the managers.
  The solution is naturally to start collaborating with at least one of the managers or simple send a message to them telling what relationships that are missing.

  The main reason for this lock is that Geni currently does not have full revision handling on connections with an option to undo such changes.

  They are however working on this, including undoing profile merges. 

  A basic-premium user does however have locks on adding profiles which falls outside their own family-group.

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  Bjørn P. Brox October 18, 2011 08:10

  Sorry - no edit or delete option: "basic-premium user" should be read as "basic user"