Users are great but...
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... I didn't realize it was going to be more work for me too :)
Buying the new stronski.org domain has paid off nicely for me. Traffic is way up and I've gone from 2 to 7 users in the past week. Most of the new users are quite distant relations from New Zealand but I've also managed to connect with some cousins that I hadn't heard from in 20 years or more here in Canada. Overall quite a cool development.
A couple have even added some info which I welcome. It does cause me to need to do a little more work fixing dates and adding commas in place names and such but I don't mind too much.
A slightly larger problem comes with double entries and undeleted mistakes. I've had to try and figure out a couple of these situations where the same indi was added twice, etc. and I think it's being caused by disappearing edits. Seems like sometimes, but not always, when a change is made or info is added the new stuff doesn't show with the border around it (for not yet approved items). It just isn't there, so the user thinks they did something wrong and add it again. Looking in the tracker it seems that there is a bug report for this.
So I thought that I would work around this by turning on auto-accept. But then I would have a harder time seeing places where I need to correct place names and dates and I might not notice accidental deletions and things.
I thought that a good compromise would be to auto-accept new indis and events but leave approval on for editing of existing indis/events or deletions. It isn't possible now so... Is it feasible? Is it a good idea? (There is still the possibility of missing situations where someone adds an incorrect parent/sibling/child, etc.) Should I submit a feature request?
Another possibility I thought of is a beefed up version of the "Recent Changes" list just for admins. It could show the diffs like the current "accept changes" does, and then the admin could give a final okay or revert the changes. So in effect you could have a 2 level acceptance. Auto-accept changes could be set for some users and the changes would show immediately, but there would be a last chance for the admin to revert the changes. For users with autoaccept off the same system as there is now would apply. Opinions?
Stew
Aaaaaah, you've discovered the 'pleasures' of a popular site. With nearly 200 users, I have no one else who I trust to accept their input. Even ones supposedly well-versed in genealogical terms and traditions appear to forget etiquette or formatting preferences. I must review each and every requested change.
With the advent of tabbed browsing and bigger (higher res screens), opening multiple windows and tabs is our approach. We'll usually look at the INDI or FAM page that is changing, as well as the RAW data, each in its own window. I scan for bad place names (left off countries or left out counties is the most common, or lack of spacing, periods instead of commas or no commas at all). Then we examine the naming conventions (usually if adding a married relative, they will forget the _MARNM tag), or missing MARR Y tags in FAM data. Finally, we try to add some sourcing since most users refuse to annotate their entries.
Ooooh, so much to do, but I don't criticize as I welcome the data.
After over 4 years at this, I certainly would not advocate any auto-accept changes routine, but the choice would be yours. I seem to recall a stepped-change, selectable modification routine concept by Greg as a possibility with going 100% SQL, but I'm not sure I fully understood his intentions. Maybe they would log changes and allow reversals - or - maybe not.
-Stephen
Not to mention, users in different countries. A country has different names in different languages. The Place Hierarchy looks prity funny.
Also, borders of European countries has been changed a 'few' times so try to standardize that.
sources, notes, custom events...
Date expressions like "in the fifty's"...
Giving hints to users/beginners would be nice. Maybe in the User-admin setting a check box for "Give this user hint's in a 'Balloon'"
It's hard to review all the changes and re-edit them if needed, but all data are welcome.
-Im
I find that once I fix a place name to the standard I use, the user will start using that. Especially with auto-complete. Other times even I have a hard time figuring out to put. Galicia, Austria or Galicia Austro-Hungarian Empire or Ukraine? Can be a puzzle :)
Things like "I don't know" or "not sure" are certainly descriptive but not really standard. Some people seem to hate seeing any blank spots even if they don't know what belongs there, hehe.
Balloon tips sound like a pretty good idea actually.
Balloons are OK, but we've already got all sorts of pop-ups and hovers going on. That can get messy.
One solution I've used in a few places (because I'm comfortable hacking some of the core code) is to add short decriptive comment and / or example beside data entry fields. If you look, there's often a blank space somewhere near. I just use basic old html code, with an italic, small font.
What about persuading the users to click on help icons--and then make sure the text that appears is good (or they'll not bother to click again!)
Yeah I started thinking about how to add balloons and decided it was a bad idea. Adding more javascipt on hover is sure to be a nightmare. Adding any javascript is a real pain with all the stuff already in there.
The only real problem so far is getting users to add "place, place, place" and not use periods or abbreviations. Dates aren't too bad because PGV does a good job of converting them. Just the occasional "?" "around", etc. to worry about.
One strange thing I get is a user that often seems to add records with @N.N. as the name. When I look at the raw gedcom I see:
1 NAME //
2 GIVN Forname
2 SURN Surname
No idea how that happens.
See also Stephen's comments on another thread on how he has written SUPERB FAQ entries and configured his them to make sure more potential users see them. (I read it within the last hour, but now I can't find it!)