Actually, my opinion is a little more nuanced than that TreeShare’s lack of ACCEPT ALL is a good thing. I was simply reporting why it is the way it is.
It seems to me as if there are three basic ways to use TreeShare.
- Do all your work in Ancestry. Use TreeShare to download a local copy of your Ancestry data to run reports, download media files, find errors, backup your Ancestry data, and that sort of thing.
- Do all your work in RM. Use TreeShare to share your data on the Internet or to get Ancestry WebHints in RM.
- Work in both RM and Ancestry. Use TreeShare to sync your work in both directions.
This is a very basic list and surely is not exhaustive. For example, TreeShare could theoretically be used to allow two researchers using RM to collaborate by using a single shared Ancestry tree which is connected each of the two researcher’s local RM database. Although this is theoretically possible, and I don’t think it’s even remotely practical because of data losses that occur when data makes a round trip from RM to Ancestry and then back down to another RM.
That being said, I think an ACCEPT ALL would be perfectly safe for users operating in basic way #1 or basic way #2. I think the only dangerous situation for ACCEPT ALL would be with basic way #3. Here’s my thinking. With basic way #1, you can always achieve an ACCEPT ALL or repair any data corruption by deleting your RM database and downloading it again from Ancestry. With basic way #2, you can always achieve an ACCEPT ALL or repair any data corruption by deleting your your Ancestry tree and uploading it again from RM.
I operate in basic way #2, working only in RM and uploading to Ancestry. I never do the manual syncs between RM and Ancestry because doing so doubles the time I spend working in RM. Instead, I periodically delete my Ancestry tree and reload it from RM. So I do wish there was an ACCEPT ALL in TreeShare, provided it could be limited to being used in basic way #1 or basic way #2.I’m not sure how you could limit TreeShare in that way, but I would love to have an ACCEPT ALL that only worked for uploads from RM to Ancestry.
There are a couple of little glitches in my scheme. The first glitch is that deleting my Ancestry tree and reloading it removes all my WebHints approvals. The hints are regenerated, but the approval history is lost. The second glitch is that I don’t find Ancestry’s privatization tools to be adequate, so I keep my Ancestry tree completely private. So I wish TreeShare had an ACCEPT ALL that goes only from RM to Ancestry. And I wish that TreeShare had a way to limit the initial upload to an RM group rather than uploading everybody. That way I would be comfortable making my Ancestry tree public. As things stand, the only way I can share my RM data publicly on Ancestry is to make a second RM database containing only the data I’m willing to share and to upload that RM database to an Ancestry tree that I make public.