Private or public - why?

I make as many profiles private as possible, because there is a person that is changing names on our profiles.

There has been complaints and reporting of this person, but she seems to have an aliance with some curators.

As long as this person are on Geni, I will make as many profiles private.

There is a third option which is Master Profile (MP). For any older profiles in families that are touched a lot by new members where we have done research and begun cleaning up the lines, a number of the curators use MPs to help protect against future erroneous edits and merges. There is also the option to field lock data fields that are known to be correct.

I personally keep most of the profiles that I work on public and I have not had issues other than as I mentioned on older, very popular lines, and there the MP does help a lot. MPs are public.

The only profiles I keep private are more distant family members of my family. I believe that their closer relatives should make the call as to public / private.

There are great advantages to having profiles public. I have found numerous relatives -- 2nd cousins to 6th cousins on Geni, including many lost branches in Israel, because my tree is public.

Personally, not speaking for Geni, I would advocate making anyone who is deceased more than 30 - 40 years public. My cut off is people born earlier than say, 1900. And as I said, I have made many of my own close family public, albeit not the living members.

@ Elna Kirstine Plougmann Pedersen

Hm, why don't you simply block that person you are referring to? Hit the button 'block user'. Shouldn't that be enough?

The method you're using now will most certainly block almost all users on Geni.com from taking part of 'your' profiles - not only one specific person (that you obviously say you're having trouble with).

I find that method of yours awkward, counterproductive and not user-friendly.

Have you told that specific person what you feel about changing 'your' profiles? This is a special kind of community, and we should all help other users in the quest for knowledge about our roots and ancestors.

You say someone's changing the names in the profiles. Have you, or that person, any evidence supporting the names you use?

If not, you may write a few lines in the 'About' section, telling the rest of us about your theories, instead of being counterproductive when setting your profiles private.

That's about my 2 Cents at the moment.

Kindly,
Peder

Peder -- Blocking now only keeps the person from contacting you. It does NOT prevent them from altering profiles you manage. This is despite the fact that at http://www.geni.com/account_settings/blocked_users it clearly says "Blocked Users" "Prevent specific users from contacting you or performing actions on profiles you manage." - Just a current example where Geni made changes to how it worked, failed to update its documentation!!

Also -- Geni does not always tell you when profiles are updated or merged -- there is apparently a maximum number it reports, if more than that are changed, you may not even see a notification about all of them, even if they are relatives and/or profiles you are following -- Since all Pro can merge and/or update all Public Profiles connected to the Big Tree, this or me is another reason to keep the Profiles Private.

I always make Private every profile I possibly can. I am interested in putting up profiles for sharing family info with family. And I know some of my Family Members are very private.

If you add thru Tree View, Geni does not always default to Private. There are other ways you can add Profiles where it defaults to Private because it also defaults to Living -- Suggest you do not add profiles those ways.

Since info in a person's Timeline includes the birth info on their children who are quite possibly still living, plus quite possibly other info on living folks, and many also put this info on living descendents etc in the About as well, I think it is extremely important that we can keep these folks private.

And yes, there have been many long, heated discussions on this topic.

Lois!

Thank you for explaining this topic (or whatever I should call it), pros and cons, etcetera to me.

I'm starting to understand why the 'Private' option is there. I suspected there had been a lot of discussions on this topic, but it took me too long finding these discussions, hence my questions.

Once again, thank you for your kind reply.

Best regards,
Peder