Tech Forum

We were about to start a hands-on training for building schedulers and ward calendar administrators (9 people) tonight when the calendar went down for maintenance. It was 8:30pm Pacific time. Is there any way to broadcast the maintenance schedule? This is prime time for teaching classes on the West Coast and we would have rescheduled if we had know. This is the second time this week that the website went down for maintenance around this time without any warning.

Thanks.

We all can appreciate the problem this creates. Unfortunately we are community members just as you. Those who manage the servers and specific websites may or may not frequent these forums. To get this issue to those who can manage this is best accomplished by submitting feedback using the "Submit Feedback" link found on the main page of LDS.org any many other LDS.org web pages.

We have noted that not all website down time is scheduled maintenance. Server problems may also cause websites to go down. When a website is down the standard display message states it is down for maintenance. This is better than getting an HTML error code, which in many cases is criptic and provides little information nor identifies where the actual problem is. With the "down for maintenance" page displayed we at least know the problem is on the Church's end and not a local issue.

Thanks, I'll do just that.

As far as training, I like to use screen shots and create a PowerPoint presentation. Done with a script, it looks live. (Just move your mouse to the right spot and click to advance the slide.) And you don't have to wait for the server.

Under most circumstances, our apps are really almost never down for maintenance. Unless there is maintenance happening in the data center (which we have no control over) we don't take our apps offline. Even when we redeploy for upgrades, the app should never be unavailable for more than a few seconds, if at all.

We have had major upgrades in the past (the 2.0 upgrade) where we did not do a very good job of giving advance notice, but we have determined to be better.

Anytime we anticipate down time, we will announce it in this forum.

Unfortunately, the instances this week were caused by the app servers crashing due to problems communicating with our database. We'd love to have advance notice of things like that as well...

We didn't really think of a powerpoint presentation because we wanted our people to create events and reservations during the meeting. We asked them to bring their laptops so we could guide them through their event/reservation creating processes.

As for the crashes, yes it would be nice to program the database to give you a day or two warning of when it will be crashing . Since that is impossible it would be better on our end to see a message not of "down for maintenance" but of "experiencing errors" or something of the kind. Then we know that something is wrong and it isn't just routine maintenance that is preventing us from using the site.