Tech Forum

Something odd happened today and I thought I'd try to explain it here to see how it might have happened. If this is part of another thread, I apologize. I only looked quickly at the top page of topics before deciding to post. Here's the situation.

This morning I received an email notification about a new calendar item added to the YM/YW Calendar. It was not forwarded to me or a reply to a previous email. The notification was for an event scheduled on the YM/YW calendar for another ward in another stake.

There are some interesting details to add to help track down how it happened.

The calendar entry was made by a person who used to be in my ward - but is no longer, his records were moved out about 4 months ago. Other members of his family are still in my ward but not him.

The calendar entry was NOT made on my ward's YM/YW calendar (or at least by the time I looked for it, it was not there - a few hours after receiving the notification. I would assume that I would have gotten a delete notification if it had been added and then removed from my ward calendar). It seems that was made on the "other" wards calendar - but I can't look to find out, of course.

When the brother was in my ward, he was the YM Secretary and had access to my wards YM/YW calendar to add/edit events. He's now the YM Secretary in the "other" ward and has access to add/edit events on their calendar (or at least I assume so).

The question is how did the entry of an event on another wards calendar create a notification to members in the brother's old ward?

I don't now if anyone but me got the notification. I'll also note that I'm the bishop of the ward just in case bishop permissions come into play here somehow.

Thanks
Corry

Maybe he still has admin rights on your ward's calendar, and added the event there; then, he could've realized the mistake and deleted it from that calendar before you checked but after the email was sent out... Sometimes people remain in their old callings (probably a bug) when their records are removed before they're removed from their calling in MLS. That happened to me when I switched stakes. I had to do a data refresh in my old stake to make my name appear next to my old calling again (even though my records weren't in the unit) and remove myself from the calling to remove my extra access rights in my calling in that stake.

There are no specific people with access rights only callings. The brother did have the calling but since his records were moved out of the ward the calling should have been removed, too.

If this is a known bug it seems like there could be some security concerns here. Only members of the ward should be able to edit the calendar. Anyone else ever see something like this?

I also had someone contact me a couple days ago about removing her name from our calendar email lists. She was in our ward but no longer is. The funny thing is that in the lds.org directory, her name does not appear, but in the ldstools app it does. Her current profile says she is in the new ward so we know her records have been moved but for some reason she is still receiving the calendar emails.

There is nothing you can do. She needs to go in the calendar on LDS.ORG and go to the subscriptions page. That will reset the calendar.

srobertp wrote:The funny thing is that in the lds.org directory, her name does not appear, but in the ldstools app it does.

LDS Tools will continue to display her in her previous unit for members of her previous unit until each member of her previous unit individually resynchronize their individual installations of LDS Tools to get the latest updates and changes. The fact that she appears in LDS Tools has no connection to her receiving Calendar notifications from her previous unit.

russellhltn wrote:There is nothing you can do. She needs to go in the calendar on LDS.ORG and go to the subscriptions page. That will reset the calendar.

If they are out of the ward and stake they shouldn't see any calendars from their old ward or stake to subscribe to. I have a person who recently moved from our stake and is still getting notification emails for our stake calendar events. She stated that she had checked her subscriptions and doesn't have anything from our stake on the calendars. Why then is she getting notifications for a calendar that she no longer has access to.

I called the global service desk and they referred me to the wiki and forums (which I had already looked at) so that wasn't much help. I have asked her to go into the settings and options and under the Subscriptions and Notifications section unselect everything, exit to the calendar and then go back in and select everything she had selected before. I'm hoping that it is just a database commit issue and that by unselecting and then reselecting the notificaiton options it will force the notifications to stop from our stake.

If anybody has any other ideas, I would welcome them since I'm just guessing here.

The one thing I'd suggest is to make sure they have actually gone into the subscription page. Some people are under the mistaken idea that the checkboxes on the main page is their "subscription". I believe that it's the entry into the subscription page is what triggers the database update. I'm thinking that CMIS doesn't have a way to "push" a moveout. The calendar site has to "pull" it. One would hope that going to the main page would be enough, but the subscription page should do it.

There is one aspect that could use closer examination - what kind of emails are they getting? Is it a "new announcement" or a scheduled reminder? There might be a bug where if you were subscribed to a calendar when someone scheduled a email for "later" that you'd still get the email even if not in the ward. I don't know how that's set up internally, but it seems possible.

The member is getting new and previously scheduled notifications so it isn't something that relates to one type of notification or another I don't believe.

If there is an issue that the subscription needs to be changed when a person moves from one ward/stake to another, I would suggest that this is a very big problem. I fortunately haven't seen this before but it could just be that people don't want to go to the effort of letting their old ward/stake know there is a problem and they just shut notifications off which compounds the continual communications hurdles that we already have in getting information to members.

We will see if the member continues to have issues.

Everyone I have helped with this issue has done two things.

They have made sure their membership record is actually in the new ward. This is almost always true if they are getting new ward calendar information.

They have gone through LDS.org to the Calendar site, which somehow triggers the Calendar system that they live in a new ward.

After these two steps, some have continued to receive some messages, and those have gone away when they do as russellhltn said, go all the way into the Subscriptions tab, and then back out. I have yet to have someone still have a problem after this third step, so I usually encourage members to do it the first time they login, just to be on the safe side.

But they have to get all the way past the main page into the Subscriptions tab for it to work.