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I tried to import my calendar into a different Google account - and was successful. BUT, it wasn't up to date. It didn't reflect a change made last night. (I think the change was made after the robots.txt file was updated. I was able to use my browser to download a ICS file just a couple of minutes later, and it was up to date. So it appears that Google was using a cached copy of the file.

aebrown wrote:I have no way of knowing now whether generating a new Sync URL was an essential step; it may be that caches finally got completely cleared out, and so it would have worked now even with my old Sync URL. Perhaps someone else can try it with an existing Sync URL and report what happens.

I think the new sync URL allows you to side-step Google's cache and speed things up. I'll just leave my main account alone and see when it reflects last night's change.

But at this point, I think things are back to normal - but our testing is showing some of the lag in using Google calendar instead of a native app on a device.

russellhltn wrote: How long did you wait? There's a 9 minute throttle on the calendar.

I waited for few minutes, more minutes and now I've waited for two days. Anyway I don't remember exactly what I did. Today I tried the direct sync link again in two different browsers and ascii text content was received (readable in notepad). The content seemed like it would be usable for syncing. However I still don't see my lds calendar in my google calendar. If the content received is error free, I assume the problem is at google's end. Any idea what I can do to fix it?

russellhltn wrote:It's addressed in the LDS.org calendar not sending email updates thread.

Thank's for the link. I'll check that.

diidu wrote:Today I tried the direct sync link again in two different browsers and ascii text content was received (readable in notepad). The content seemed like it would be usable for syncing. However I still don't see my lds calendar in my google calendar. If the content received is error free, I assume the problem is at google's end. Any idea what I can do to fix it?

We know that the Church changed robots.txt on LDS.org sometime yesterday afternoon. Sometime this morning it appears that Google's cache of that file finally expired, opening the way for Google Calendar to properly process synced calendars.

So the remaining delay for existing calendars should be related to however often Google Calendar checks for updates to the content on a Sync URL. No one seems to know that time for certain, but there have been reports that it is around 24 hours. So an automatic update might not happen until sometime tomorrow morning.

If you don't want to wait, you can certainly generate a new Sync URL (on the Sync page of the LDS.org Calendar) and use that in your Google Calendar. That should let you see your LDS.org calendar on Google Calendar within a few minutes.

russellhltn wrote:I'll just leave my main account alone and see when it reflects last night's change.

My Google calendar has updated by itself with no intervention on my part. I'm sure in a little bit that my phone will update to reflect the calendar. So at this point It think it's safe to say everything is back to normal.

I was just able to successfully sync my Google Calendar using the url. I did not get the robots.txt error message. Thank you to whoever worked on this!

russellhltn wrote:I'm sure in a little bit that my phone will update to reflect the calendar.

It finally did. I was disappointed in the lag between the Google calendar and Android update. Apparently a update coming from a URL doesn't do a push update to devices.

Still, even if the update takes 48 hours, that's probably adequate for most usage. I'm assuming that leaders are not in the habit of making last-minute changes and when they do they send a email. But it would suggest that those who really want up-to-date syncing should look into installing an app that can sync from the URL directly.

After recreating the sync url and resetting it to the google calendar things started working just few minutes ago. Great. Thanks.

ok, so I now also have success with importing LDS Calendar to google calendar. Now Im just waiting for it to update on my iphone calendar!! nothing yet...it's only been about 15 mins...would think this would be quicker...how long will I need to wait for google calendar to be pushed to ical on my mac or iphone calendar??

rbraithwaite1995 wrote:how long will I need to wait for google calendar to be pushed to ical on my mac or iphone calendar??

Good question. I don't have a answer. Based on my experience, it could be a day. I think things manually entered into Google gets pushed out faster, but somehow Google doesn't "trigger" on changes coming in from a URL.

rbraithwaite1995 wrote:ok, so I now also have success with importing LDS Calendar to google calendar. Now Im just waiting for it to update on my iphone calendar!! nothing yet...it's only been about 15 mins...would think this would be quicker...how long will I need to wait for google calendar to be pushed to ical on my mac or iphone calendar??

Google doesn't push to your iPhone, anymore than LDS.org pushes to Google Calendar. Both are pull operations. So the question is how long it takes your iCal to pull new data from Google. I don't know those apps, but you might be able to do something in those apps to request an update if you want it to happen faster.