Tech Forum

Hi, our Bishop has asked that a Ward History be created using articles in a Ward History category of the newsletter. As a history, the articles should remain available essentially forever. However I understand that articles expire, maybe after one year. Is there a way short of printing and saving in a binder to keep these articles available for a number of year?

The Newsletter help system has a rather cryptic statement in the "Limiting Retention Time" section of Privacy Guidelines:

Newsletter Help wrote:To avoid potential claims under various data privacy laws, newsletters may not be retained longer than a year. If the newsletter will be incorporated into a ward/stake history, a more formal approval process must be followed.

Frankly, I don't understand either sentence:

• What does it mean to say that "newsletters may not be retained more than a year"? Does it mean that we'll get in trouble if we don't clean out our older newsletter items within a year? Or does it mean that the system will automatically remove all newsletter items that are older than a year? Obviously there is no technical impediment to our creating copies of older newsletter items just before the year is up and deleting the old ones; if we're willing to go to that work, we could maintain items indefinitely. But is that exposing the Church to potential liability risk? Is that true in all countries?
• What does it mean to "incorporate [a newsletter] into a ward/stake history"? Are they talking about printing out (or copying and pasting) a newsletter item and including it in the official ward/stake annual history? If so, why would the source being the Newsletter tool make any difference at all in the approval process? Or is this implying that there is some special approval process that we can go through to get Newsletter items to last longer? If so, what is that process? And even if items last longer, how would they be included in the ward/stake history?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions. And since the Newsletter tool is less than a year old, no one can answer the expiration question from experience (in our stake, the oldest item is dated 1 June 2012).

JayVRobertson wrote:Is there a way short of printing and saving in a binder to keep these articles available for a number of year?

You can "print" them to a PDF file and save them in a file folder.

Even if it was possible, I don't think I'd rely on the newsletter app to be your ward's history. All the old articles might one day go "poof". Or, some day in the future, a next-generation newsletter feature will come out and it may not support migrating the data.

aebrown wrote:... since the Newsletter tool is less than a year old, no one can answer the expiration question from experience (in our stake, the oldest item is dated 1 June 2012).

Well, now I can answer that question. That Newsletter article dated 1 June 2012 is still part of our Newsletter site, as are many other articles more than one year old, so it's clear that the Newsletter tool does not automatically clean out articles that are more than one year old.

I'm still scratching my head about the complete meaning of that statement in the Newsletter help system, but at least we have an answer to that particular expiration question.

I have noticed some missing attachments on older articles. Maybe it's just attachments that are deleted for privacy laws...

sbradshaw wrote:I have noticed some missing attachments on older articles. Maybe it's just attachments that are deleted for privacy laws...

I doubt that. Our oldest article (dated 1 June 2012) has an attachment, and it is still present and downloadable.

Newsletter Help wrote:To avoid potential claims under various data privacy laws, newsletters may not be retained longer than a year.

I wonder if that's something that depends on the settings made by the area office. Much like the difference between opt-in and opt-out in the directory.

It could also be a "no guarantees" statement – that if something more than a year old goes missing, they can just refer you to the help. Maybe they had plans to purge old articles when they start taking up too much storage space, but that limit hasn't been hit.