Dear Geni Team,
To say I am disappointed in and feel betrayed by you is the wildest understatement possible. I had enjoyed my Geni experience up until today's morning when I stumbled upon unimaginable stupidity of your tech team.
A person I had invited to join Geni decided to erase their account, which resulted in automatic deleting of 47 profiles I had personally added. Hence, I was forced to perform a tedious work of undeleting these profiles, merge and reconnecting the whole big family tree for the second time. Mind you, the person in question was not the manager of these 47 profiles, he was not the one who added them, and he was not even the person in the center of that tree. However, despite all that, 47 profiles and relationships between them, worth many hours of my personal work, were instantly erased without my consent just because someone on the periphery of the tree decided to delete their own one single profile.
You put valuable work your users entrust you with at risk of someone else's whim, and it ends up destroyed. I don't know what outrageous incompetence could possibly lead to this rotten mess, but I'll have you know, as a long time, contributing user who had achieved over 900 profiles added with top quality sources, that this is simply pathetic and absolutely unacceptable. I am writing this to you in case there is some error that allowed it to happen when it's not intentional design. Otherwise, any reason to invite anyone to join my tree is lost for good, because I risk one day discovering I had lost months of deep research work. Why does such a default function exist at all? Why does the system automatically erase numerous profiles not created by someone when this person deletes their individual account?
It seems to me, you need to rewrite the rules of which information is erased when someone deletes their profile. Because someday it will lead to significant losses of united work of other researchers, as it happened to me today. But thankfully, I have a habit of logging my research progress separately on my side, which allowed me to recover the lost tree manually, by merely spending part of my life on it once again. And for the first time in a long while I experienced hostility towards the Geni service, because I was flabbergasted by how simply someone's work can be trashed without an option to protect it in advance. In other words, I build a separate branch of family tree, invite someone to join and have a look at my good work. They join, check it out and like, "Okay it was cool but I'm not interested, I'm deleting my account" - and boom, the system automatically annihilates my personal work. Guys, come on, this sounds absurd, and yet it happened to me today.
3 comments
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Barry King i have spend years finding relatives on this site, which was wonderful. However, everything has now disappeard!!!
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Barry King It is Barry King again. I still received notfications of newly found relatives sent to me at bking228@comcast.net; Howevwer, when I click to gain access, it takes me to my account at pendac41238@comcast.net, which is another of my email adresses, but hasd no family tree. When I click on anything there, I get a popup saying:
Email Sent to Another User
Can you switch my email to bking228@comcast.net as that is where I am getting update messages from Geni? It appears that my account that I built up over many years has been hijacked!
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Job Waterreus Did you look at the Frequently Asked Questions?
It seems you have multiple accounts that you should merge.
If you cannot manage to do that yourself, you should contact Geni and ask for help (see How do I contact Geni about my subscription?)