iCal sync not working - Mountain Lion

Discussions about the Calendar Tool at lds.org. Questions about the calendar on the classic site should be posted in the LUWS forum.
russellhltn
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#11

Post by russellhltn »

csneddon wrote:Your Calendar couldn't be refreshed. There was an unexpected error with the request on subscribed calendars (error -1).
Is this during the setup phase or on a system where the calendar has already been set up.

Do you have any control over how often the system checks for updates? Because the new system only allows one update an hour for all of your devices.
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ssnow92253
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#12

Post by ssnow92253 »

I'm confused too. In iCal preferences it says refresh every...(I can select every minute) minute, I guess this is different than "sync. I've always been able to sync my wards calendar in iCal. Whats up? Is this the church's problem, or Mt Lion's? WHEN will it be fixed. And I dont get how to "save " the ical "file when pasting the URL generated sync, into my browser. I get nothing on that page. (I'm in Safari). HOW do you save something thats not there? What am I doing wrong? Will this (if you can better explain your technique to make it work) FIX this problem? I NEED to make this work, please help Scott
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aebrown
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#13

Post by aebrown »

ssnow92253 wrote:I'm confused too. In iCal preferences it says refresh every...(I can select every minute) minute, I guess this is different than "sync. I've always been able to sync my wards calendar in iCal. Whats up?
You obtain your personal sync URL from the Sync page under Settings in the LDS.org Calendar. Anytime you or any system accesses that URL, that is what the LDS.org calendar calls a "sync." Currently you can only do a sync once per hour. That's a temporary measure, but we don't know how long it will be in place.

So if you have configured your iCal preferences to sync every minute, or ten minutes, or 30 minutes, those sync operations will fail. You should set your sync to happen every 120 minutes or more (something very safely larger than 60 minutes).
ssnow92253 wrote:Is this the church's problem, or Mt Lion's? WHEN will it be fixed.
It's a problem with the way the Church's calendar system is doing the synchronization. The developers haven't figured out the exact problem yet. But one thing that is definitely making things worse is when people configure their third-party calendars (such as your iCal) to refresh too often. That puts unnecessary strain on the Church servers. Church calendars are not changing very often, so a refresh once a day should keep you quite reasonably up to date and configuring it that way will reduce strain on Church servers.

I know the developers are working on this problem, but I haven't heard any specific date they expect it to be fixed.
ssnow92253 wrote:And I dont get how to "save " the ical "file when pasting the URL generated sync, into my browser. I get nothing on that page. (I'm in Safari). HOW do you save something thats not there? What am I doing wrong? Will this (if you can better explain your technique to make it work) FIX this problem?
Saving the iCal file is really just a troubleshooting step. It won't fix anything. The fact that your iCal is accessing the sync URL frequently is making it so you can't save your iCal file. But don't worry about figuring out how to do the save -- since it won't actually fix anything, there's no reason for you to make the effort to figure it out.
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russellhltn
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#14

Post by russellhltn »

Refresh, sync, in this case it's the same thing. You can NOT refresh more often then once an hour. ANY attempt by any means to do it more often will result in a blank file. I'd suggest you set your refresh rate to once every 4 hours or more. To leave room for any other devices you own to be able to sync.

It's not going to work if you keep on trying. You've got one chance, then you have to wait an hour.
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tomjoht
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#15

Post by tomjoht »

I need to add a note in the calendar help about manually setting your synchronization in iCal on Mountain Lion to once every 120 minutes. However, I don't have Mountain Lion. Can someone list the steps for manually setting that sync interval?

Thanks,

Tom
boliviakid
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#16

Post by boliviakid »

Hi,

I have a MacBook Pro and just upgraded to Mountain Lion (10.8.2) today. Here are the steps to set it to a manual sync, because there is not a choice to have it automatically sync less frequently than an hour (the only automatic interval options are every minute, 5, 15, 30, and 60). So to set it to manual:

Calendar --> Preferences --> Accounts --> [select the "Refresh Calendars:" list of values to "Manually"]

I have the LDS calendar subscription link in my MacBook Pro iCal, in my iPhone calendar, and in my iPad calendar, so it looks like I'm going to have to set all of them to manual in order to avoid the once-per-hour limit, and then try not to refresh any two of them (manually) less than an hour apart! :(
MarshallCL
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Past events disappear

#17

Post by MarshallCL »

Hi everyone, I would like to add my experience and seek help. I have 0S 10.8.1 Mountain Lion on a MacBook Pro.

Sometime in August the following two events occurred to my subscribed LDS calendar: a) the calendar would not refresh properly, an exclamation mark in a triangle was shown next to the calendar name (I assume from information in this thread this was caused by the once-per-hour refresh limit); b) all events prior to August disappeared. No-one has mentioned the disappearing events problem - has anyone else noticed this?

This occurred when version 2.2 was introduced - before then it worked fine. It also coincided with the release of Mountain Lion which I thought might be a factor, but since my other calendars work OK, I assume the Church calendar upgrade is the problem.

To try and fix it, I generated a new sync URL, deleted my existing subscribed calendar, then created a new calendar with the new URL. Result: a completely blank calendar. I set it to refresh once per day, so there is no one-hour limit issue, but still no events show. Interestingly, no matter what name I choose for the the new calendar in the setup dialogue box, when it appears in the calendar list it displays the name of the old calendar - is there an information cache somewhere that I need to clear?

Incidentally, it might be helpful if a brief message was displayed on the Church calendar sync page - I assume people worldwide are tearing their hair out over this, not realising its a universal problem.

Craig
russellhltn
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#18

Post by russellhltn »

boliviakid wrote:Here are the steps to set it to a manual sync, because there is not a choice to have it automatically sync less frequently than an hour

I'm sure many will thank you for that. Good information to have. Interesting that you can't go more then a hour before an automatic refresh. I've been pretty happy with the once a day sync that I get via my Gmail account.
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russellhltn
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#19

Post by russellhltn »

marshallcl wrote:all events prior to August disappeared. No-one has mentioned the disappearing events problem - has anyone else noticed this?
I haven't noticed, but since the changes were made to control the server load, it wouldn't surprise me but what "past" events, or at least "distant past" events are not synced.
marshallcl wrote:I set it to refresh once per day, so there is no one-hour limit issue, but still no events show.
I assume you are subscribed to a calendar with events - is there another device syncing that may be blocking you? Remember, the once a hour limit is for all devices that use that URL.

marshallcl wrote:Interestingly, no matter what name I choose for the the new calendar in the setup dialogue box, when it appears in the calendar list it displays the name of the old calendar - is there an information cache somewhere that I need to clear?
With Google, I found it memorized the URL and I couldn't change the name or settings until I generated a new URL. I know you said you generated a new one, but I'm not sure of the sequence of events.
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MarshallCL
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#20

Post by MarshallCL »

Thank you for your comments, RussellHltn. I have an update: after leaving all devices in my household (2 iPhones, an iPad, 2 MacBook pros) idle for a carefully measured hour, events have re-appeared in my MBP laptop. Clearly my blank calendar was a result of one or more other devices syncing less than an hour previous. However, in ALL my devices events prior to mid-August 2012 are still missing.
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