Tech Forum

We have a Bishopric member who was the ward exec sec and is now the second couns on the bishopric. When we try assigning him as a 2nd counsellor for mls login purposes, we receive the message "The member is already associated with a user - select a different member"
Help!

This is due to the user id being attached to the individuals membership record/number. Log ins for MLS should not be specific to a calling but should be assigned as individuals.

I think you are right. It looks like our whole stake has been doing this wrong. Everyone signs in a "Bishop" "1st Couns Bishopric" rather then by their name. Could you let me know how to correct this and change all the user names to real names.
Many thanks.

To fix this:

1. Sign in to MLS as an administrator
2. Go to System Options
3. For each user, click on the user name (in blue)
4. Note which member is associated with the user name.
5. Change the user name to match the member (for example, if the "Bishopric 1st Counselor" user is associated with "John Doe", change the user name to "John Doe" or to "jdoe" -- you'll need to come up with a pattern you use for creating user names).
6. As you do this, you may find cases where a member no longer has a calling that has rights to MLS; if so, you can also remove/deactivate that MLS user.
7. You may also find cases where a member needs access to MLS, but has no user; if so, you can create the user now and give that member appropriate MLS permissions.
8. Each ward will need to work through this process. It would probably be best if a ward administrator (someone who knows all the current MLS users in each calling) does this in each ward.

Thanks for your help, but that would not work. It still said ""The member is already associated with a user - select a different member"
More help needed!! thanks!!!

Earlier versions of MLS allowed more than one member to be associated with an MRN. See this post, for example.

That fact makes this difficult to sort out. You might have three different users associated with John Doe, and you can't make any change to any of those MLS users as long as that situation exists. So the only solution I've come up with (and yes, this makes me uncomfortable, but I haven't heard of any other effective solution) is to associate one or more of these MLS users with a member who is unlikely to ever use MLS.

For example, you may find that John Doe is associated with an MLS user called "Elders Quorum President" (a calling he once had) and with "Bishopric 1st Counselor" (the calling he now has). Rename "Elders Quorum President" to "ZZ - EQP" and associate it with Sally Jones or some other member who probably won't ever have an MLS calling. The "ZZ - " scheme is designed to move all these to the end of the list and make it so no one is tempted to login with those; you can change the password to these outdated accounts while you're at it.

Keep careful notes of what you do, and work through every MLS user. Removing the duplicate associations for these obsolete users should allow you to clean up all the current users to have appropriate names.