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Popular Profiles Enhancements
(33 posts)-
@mike all I get is path search in progress, etc., which obviously means they're not related to me. Again, the box is pointless because it asks a question with an obvious answer: no, I'm not related. I severely doubt most people will be related to most profiles that appear there.
What would be useful is if it showed top profiles you ARE related to.
Instead of "are you related?" and then "oh, no, I'm not", it should be "did you know you are related?" and then it could show somebody who is related. Although, with the way it currently defers path searches, maybe this could be hard.
Posted 1 month ago # -
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@Mike, I'm not sure if it is working as you described. My mother and step-father are visiting this weekend. As I was showing off Geni, he click on his relationship to Madonna. While it said the search was complete, Geni didn't come back with anything. It didn't tell him he was related or that he wasn't, it just provided the upgrade to pro screen (and maybe something about linking outside his family group, can't remember). I then logged in (Pro user) and was able to see my relationship and path to Madonna.
Posted 1 month ago # -
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@shmuelakam does the mini history in the top right of those deface profiles, tell you who edited them?
@Martin_K and @Mattt we don't know before the search is done, whether it's going to find the path. For some people it finds many, I'd say a majority of paths to those popular profiles. For others, as you've experienced, it may find few or none at all.
@Jeffg I'll make a point to test the non-Pro experience tomorrow. Noah may know off the top of his head whether this is supposed to give you the relationship description for free (but no path) -- I was recollecting what I thought I'd seen when testing the site as a non-Pro user but it wasn't what I was testing so I may be misremembering.
Posted 1 month ago # -
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Okay I re-tested this and here's what I found. If you stay on the profile page or return to it after the search is complete, you will see the relationship description along with the message "We found the path you requested to Rosalie MacDowell. Click here to view the path" which, when clicked, will take you to an upgrade page. If you navigate away you'll get the green notification at the top that reads, "We found the path you requested to <name>. Click here to view the path" and clicking that takes you straight to the upgrade page without first stopping at the profile page to give you the relationship description.
Posted 1 month ago # -
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@mike well "just as well" as the recent activity "mini-history" usually records stuff. You know, you STILL loose "half" of the history when merging profiles.
There are quite a few TYPES of changes that aren't registered at all, such as moving profiles around to assign different parents or setting up a pending merge where someone ELSE completes it (it's very nice that the merge/compare screen now shows who set up the merge, but once completed, that information is lost).
While this feature is really nifty, it's a shame that you guys focus on the "PR" features before giving us user the tools to deal with the results of this attention. Being the manager of many biblical profiles, I have six of them in the Top-100 (and a couple more managed by others)...
In the last 24 hours alone, I have received three requests to merge trees (which is nice), AND two other people went ahead and merged one profile near Adam. Do you know how long it presently takes to merge an average-sized (500 profile) copy of the Bible Tree? About a week! What will the big-tree look like in a week, Mike?
Yesterday I thought this feature was neat. Today it's the carelessly opened Flood-Gates of Merge Hell. And then you have people who look at the tree and say "'your tree' has lots of duplicates I won't merge with you..."
Posted 1 month ago # -
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@shmuelakam thanks for your frank feedback, which echoes what some other users have said here as well. I'm confident about our long-term plans for this (meaning probably six months out) but Noah and I will revisit our more immediate plans to see what we can do sooner.
Posted 1 month ago # -
@mike the fact that you have to plan to test the non-pro experience later speaks volumes. I really, really get the feeling that you guys don't load up the non-pro pages anymore before publishing features. Or maybe the QA intern in the dungeon has a look. Cause some of these new features you are so excited about... they aren't so exciting from the lower decks.
Here is an idea of how the right side of the page looks like to a non pro.
Inbox: constantly telling me I have merge issues I can't fix without collaboration.
Are you related? : No, I'm not. I'm not to any of these. You could say better than me but my hunch is that the majority of Geni users are not related to the majority of profiles that may appear here. This means the majority of the time, the feature is annoying or misleading. (but that's the point, isn't it? Thanks, marketing! )
Hot Matches: 3 random profiles I can't do anything with. In fact, the profiles aren't even linked, so sometimes I have no clue what they are.
This takes up most of my right-side without scrolling. This means I rarely see useful features, like recently online, because I have to look at a bunch of stuff I can't use.
If that's just how it is for users who don't pay then fine - I'll just ignore the right side of Geni in the same way I ignore the right side of Gmail. ;)
Posted 1 month ago # -
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I dunno Mattt, I posted how I thought it worked for non-Pros and agreed to test it again (even though it's not my feature) because my understanding of the feature differed from what the forum users said. I double-checked and confirmed that my understanding of the feature was correct. And it's worth saying that we're now giving those relationship descriptions to non-Pro's for free, which is a step forward for the "lower decks" is it not?
Posted 1 month ago # -
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To respond to your "right side" issues:
1. Inbox / Merge Issues. We've been releasing features that allow you to send requests to take care of these, if you don't have permission to do so yourself. While being Pro certainly gives you the opportunity to broaden the scope of profiles you can edit (through collaboration), our requests should enable any user (Pro or not) to suggest the correct course of action to the person who does have permission to modify the profiles / tree.
2. Are you related? This is brand new and we're still fine-tuning it based in part of feedback from the forum users. We certainly hope that we can deliver a module that is of interest to both Pro and non-Pro users, both in the big tree and still working in relative isolation.
3. Hot Matches. The profiles you see there should either be in your Family Group or managed by you; is this not the case? Merging these is as simple as sending a merge request, which does not require you to be a premium subscriber.
Please correct me where I'm deficient in my understanding of your own experience -- your feedback makes Geni better for everyone!
Posted 1 month ago # -
Mike,
If you aren't Pro you don't see those Hot Matches, just who supposedly has hot matches. Unfortunately with the lack of effective search abilities as a non-pro user the chance of finding the matches a Pro would see are iffy at best. I have spent a lot of time trying to find hot matches and most times I come up empty. Occasionally I find something but I have stopped trying to use search it is much too frustrating. I did take advantage of the free trial and you definitely get different results than a non=pro using basic search to find what Geni calls a hot match. No need to express my feelings about providing real search capabilities to all users...... I have done that ad nauseum and everyone is aware of them.
In summary the Hot Matches taking up space on the right hand side as Matt points out is annoying at best and maddening at the least for non-pros. The system is becoming annoying for constantly having the PRO stuff thrown at you in a very nmisleading way and it does anger the causual user even more than the dedicated but non-pro user.
Posted 1 month ago # -
Mike, thanks for the responses. About the hot matches, actually, I was mistaken in that I can actually find out who it is they list by clicking on "view matches". That takes me to a clickable name on the next page (and big pro upgrade screen). Of course, this is still entirely useless, as I can't see the hot matches. It's basically a big ad for pro that's always on the right side of the front page because there's nothing that it tells you other than there might be some matches for these profiles (but, as I discovered during the trial, 99% of the time, you will find nothing and spend hours clearing out all the false matches). As Judy said, how would I merge these? I can't see anything.
As for the inbox thing, I think you need to consider the reality and not the theory. In theory, yes, there are great tools for sending requests. In reality, people might answer a few of them (at best) and then stop responding. With collaboration, you can just send that one request to people and then get off their backs and go to town. Without collaboration, it's a slow mess and not worth doing. I don't want to send 30 messages to the same guy about profiles which are all connected to each other. But even if I did, he would be very unlikely to read all of them.
Posted 1 month ago # -
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Thank you both for reminding me that only premium subscribers can see the hot match list. I agree with @Mattt that this more or less amounts to an advertisement for Geni Pro, but rather than being a static ad we're trying to give you a preview of the value. As to the quality of those matches, we've got a couple people currently working on fine-tuning those to eliminate the less-likely matches so that the ones you do see should be more relevant.
How could a non-premium user merge the hot matches? It obviously takes more work; you could do a Geni search for the name that we've shown you, and if you find what appears to be a match for the profile in your tree, contact the manager. If you and he/she agree that to merge, you could add each other to your Family Group (even if only temporarily) to do the merge. I'd be in favor of making this last step easier to get to the side-by-side merge request -- let me see what the product team has to say about that.
Posted 1 month ago # -
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I WOULD delete some of the profiles based upon books and assumptions (i.e. Noah and the tribe connected to Adam), however there have been WAYYYYY too many profiles merged into the beast of a tree, and I have 10,000+ dupes to worry about right now!
Posted 1 month ago #
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