FYI--I finally emailed Geni Help today. Here is what I said:
I'm not sure if you monitor discussions or not, but you should be aware that among my collaborators there is a near-mutiny of late because of the way merges are handled (or unable to be "handled," more specifically). The screen shots I'm attaching are just two of hundreds in my tree that illustrate the lunacy of the current system. Many profile managers are giving up in disgust, which only adds to the problem, because there is no one on the other end of our merge requests to complete them for us.
Look at the first example (ending in -1471): Anne Martin has only two husbands in reality: Jean Côté and Jacques Raté. But I am unable to clean up my tree to show that. I'm not allowed to combine the two Jeans--I manage only one of them. The gray one is idiotic--why does anyone from the 17th century need to be private? Besides, if it's manager wants it private, then why the f should it show up in my tree? They shouldn't have it both ways! If you don't want to let me collaborate on your profiles, then keep them the heck out of my tree! Nor can I combine Anne Martin with the Add This Person. I don''t get any error messages or permission violations, and the procedure seems to execute correctly, but when it's done, nothing has changed.
Look at the second example: There should only be one Jean-Baptiste Côté, with two wives; instead we have three of him, plus identical profiles for one wife, and the other wife. I can't fix any of it because "it would split the tree" or I do not have "permission," or because the drag and drop simply fails. Of what use is a tree of 50,000+ profiles that look like this?
You've got to do something about all this. I have spent untold hours for nearly two years adding 30,000+ profiles to my tree. I have at least 20,000 more to add, but now I spend all my free time from sunup to sundown trying to fix all these damn duplicates. One woman had her husband attached eight times and vice versa! It's bad enough to need to clean all this up, but it is beyond intolerable that I'm not "allowed" to clean it up when I try. WHy do all those blue plus-signs and yellow caution-signs beckon to me, then turn around and deny me when I try to use them?
I had planned to become a Pro member and enjoy the full fruits of my labors; now I, like so many of my collaborators, am on the verge of throwing in the towel altogether. Geni was a great idea once; now it's just a major #FAIL!