Descendants - web hints

When on the Descendants display (people screen), should the web hints be visible?

I have them on the Pedigree and Family views but not on the Descendants view.

They used to be on RM7 but not there on RM8.

I would like to see them added to RM8.

I used the FamilySearch link in particular on that descendants screen to work down and check I had copied over all details & sources I had just attached to the FS Tree.

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I very much miss Webhints in Descendant View. RM has not said why they were removed. Also, I don’t think the change is officially listed as something that was in RM7 that’s not in RM8. I have a suspicion that the change is because Webhints in Descendant View can make Descendant View very slow to come up.

I complained about the slowness in Descendant View coming up in RM7, but I didn’t want the hints to go away. It’s hard to reverse engineer software sometimes just by observing it’s external behavior, but it sometimes looked to me as if RM7 were generating all the Webhints for everybody in Descendant View before it would display the view at all. Since Descendant View can contain a large number of people, generating the Webhints can obviously take a large amount of time. It seems to me that the simple solution would be to go ahead and bring up Descendant View without the Webhints and then to generate the Webhints after the view is visible.

The same issue existed even in RM7 for People View because there were no Webhints. I think Webhints would be a great feature for People View. People View can have even more people in the view than Descendant View, up to and including everybody in your database if the view is not filtered by a group. But again, I think there is a simple solution. Namely, RM8 could generate Webhints for people in People View only for the people currently on the screen.

Webhints are obviously generated asynchronously by one or more threads which are separate from RM’s main thread which is driving the keyboard and screen. In that sense, my “simple” solution might not be so simple because the main thread would have to communicate to the Webhints thread a list of people for whom Webhints are needed. But surely such communication is already there anyway. But I don’t know for sure because reverse engineering software based only on its external behavior is tricky business.

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Yes, I spend a lot of time doing just what you do. I do a lot of work on FamilySearch and then download all my work to Rootsmagic. The Webhints in descendancy view was great to go back and check if any new hints had shown up that has data I don’t already have as well as a double check if I missed a branch in my research. With Webhints gone, it almost makes RM8 useless to me. I’m glad that I still have RM7. I’ll keep using it until RM8 has this feature added to RM8.

I never had an issue with slowness in RM 7. In descendency view the people would come up right away and then the webhints would march down the line to fill in that column.

Where is the best adress to ask thst tis feature of RM7 gets back to RM8?

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