Ok. As promised, I looked into it a little more tonight. Back in July we had 55 Name Unknown, First Middle listed on the Households Being Taught report under HT organization (356 total). Tonight we have 164 Name Unknown records out of 394 total. However, none of these name unknowns show up under the HT statistics report. They are not on Households not visited, Households not assigned to be home taught, or unassigned potential home teachers.
More interesting is that we have some names of people who moved out back in May (but not all) as well as names of some who moved out in August (but not all). So while it is supposed to be removing them after the quarter ended (in June), some names still linger. It also does not include the names of everyone who moved out this quarter (determined by looking on the Lists > Member moved out report).
Even more interesting is that we have supposedly 164 who moved out this past quarter (a new semester started, so that's not unreasonable for us), yet the members moved out report only shows 128, with the earliest being 18 May 2008 and the latest being 17 Sep 2008.
boomerbubba wrote:That would not be the first time in the history of software that first-level support staff is wrong. (For that matter, sometimes second-tier support staff can be wrong, too.)
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There have been several threads on this forum discussing the anomaly, and the forum is frequented by some Church developers as well as some pretty knowledgeable end users. The advice you report from CHQ support is the first suggestion I have found that the behavior is by design. I still suspect a bug.
I agree that this is unusual, and if intentional, not the best technique.
lajackson wrote:When I called, I was told it was a bug and to just delete them.
Wanting to be sure, I called again tonight. I spoke with an MLS analyst (option 3, then option 2). I appreciate that these guys probably don't receive the best training and may not even have that much experience with MLS. However, as soon as I mentioned what my question was (Name unknown on the hometeaching reports) he knew exactly what I was talking about. He informed me (without any prompting) that these were place holders for those who have moved out of the ward, and were there to accurately compute statistics for the quarterly report. Sometime after the quarter ended these records would be removed They apparently need to work on this aspect, but they do get removed at some point, or we'd have at least a thousand of them.
I mentioned this forum and some of the techniques that had been discovered that would remove these names from the list. I didn't go into any detail, but he did tell me to not delete them.
Ok, I'm convinced that I'm just going to leave them alone. Yes, it'd be nice if they didn't show up on the report but I can't do anything about that. I would welcome the comments of a developer at church HQ or someone else's experience who spoke with an analyst.
I wish I could answer why lajackson and I got different answers. However, I got the same answer twice. Perhaps because it's first-tier support like boomerbubba pointed out.