Add 'Contact Remarks' field to the Add Family screen?

[jefft]

Jethro has a built-in 'Contact Remarks' field, which shows when adding a Person:

However this field does not appear when adding a Family:

Is this perhaps an oversight? If there's any time I'm likely to add remarks, it's going to be when adding a new family/person.

[jefft]

PR #1132

[tbar0970]

Hmm, it wasn't an oversight but a strategy for managing complexity.
"Contact remarks" is intended for notes such as "Can't take calls during business hours" or "Rarely reads emails". That's why it's shown next to all the contact details.
But it's easily confused with person notes which are for such things as "I met Jeff yesterday and he's interested in joining our church".
When adding someone new you're likely to have the former but not the latter. And so to avoid confusion between the two, and to avoid field overload, Contact Remarks is left out of the create family form.

[jefft]

"Contact remarks" is intended for notes such as "Can't take calls during business hours" or "Rarely reads emails". That's why it's shown next to all the contact details.
But it's easily confused with person notes which are for such things as "I met Jeff yesterday and he's interested in joining our church".

Wow, I never knew that. I always thought it was "remarks about this contact". So, apparently, has everyone else in my church. We have 1589 people with a 'contact remark', and only 9 are anything to do with "means of contact" (mostly landline numbers, and home address). The rest are general "remarks", i.e.:

• interpersonal relationship ("brother of", "friend of" etc). 45% are of this type in my church
• where they come from
• where they work
• where they live
• school year
• past church
• appearance
• etc etc.

It's the same for all EJ churches I've checked, including ASNE.

My church uses notes to store point-in-time interactions, such as prayer requests (and SMSes), mostly initiated by action plans. By contrast, a 'contact remark' is a perennial snippet of information about the person. The 'contact remark' could not be note 1, as it would be quickly lost under chronologically newer notes (mostly SMSes).