Mikerowaved wrote:As someone who's been on the programming side, let me just say your suggestions are NOT going unnoticed. I don't think anyone is claiming the current release of NFS is "glorified and perfected" in its current state, however, adding features in a major program is sometimes akin to trying to turn a battleship in open water. It takes a LOT of planning, time, and room to do it.
I am incredibly pleased that someone from programming (assuming that you are programming for NFS) is watching these threads. I don't envy your job. We have a proprietary lineage-linked genealogy program that we use where I work to manage the original research for thousands of clients, and after 15 years we're still making improvements weekly. I know that NFS will be a work-in-progress for some time.
As far as the "glorified and perfected" database, you and I know it's got problems, but that's the way the church membership is seeing it. Everyone I talk to has a completely different understanding of what it will do (I live in SLC, most people don't have access to it yet), but EVERYONE is under the impression that this is the holy grail of genealogy, and it will solve ALL the problems. I'm currently assisting our ward Family History Consultant in a genealogy class, and he just can't stop talking about how "glorified and perfected" the new system is. It's a little unnerving.
As far as the battleship analogy, I understand that too. A lot of what I hear from employees at NFS is that there's lots of beaurocracy involved in making changes, and they're too tightly managed to make any real changes without a lot of red tape. All of the major kinks will be worked out of the system, I suppose, and I like where it's eventually headed with evidence and source images. I could also deal with a long and drawn out beta program, and even a limited pilot program in one or two temple districts that lasts for a couple years. I'd be okay with submitting thousands of concerns and waiting a year for them to get implemented.
What I'm terribly worried about is sending the battleship into war while it's still faced backwards. Before we get it turned around, it very likely could be sunk.
There's not enough training, not enough caution, and not enough people who care about sources and authenticity for this to become what it needs to become. Tying online temple submission into NFS at this point is a mess. THAT is my main concern - Duplicated and erroneous temple work and research. Have family tree, pedigree viewer, life browser and record search all up and running perfectly before you take away the ability of members to check names through TempleReady. It's WAY, WAY, WAY too early in the development of the program (even if it is 5+ years old) to implement online temple submissions. Too many bugs, too many problems, too many concerns, too many errors, too much duplication, too many false-positives.
But, like a battleship headed into the port at 20 knots, there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it, and I feel a terrible collision is imminent.