"Name Unknown" Households

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
RossEvans
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#21

Post by RossEvans »

crislapi wrote: I'd still prefer calling and finding out for sure.

I don't think we can rule out the possibility that there is, in fact, an undiagnosed bug that whoever you spoke to at CHQ was unaware of. 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.)

Your own experience with not noticing these spurious records before is consistent with my own, and leads me to hypothesize again that this behavior in MLS is not routine.

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.
lajackson
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#22

Post by lajackson »

crislapi wrote:Perhaps a call to HQ? Wait - I did that already. I was told they are place holders for stats, and would be removed at the end of the quarter.
When I called, I was told it was a bug and to just delete them.
crislapi
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called again

#23

Post by crislapi »

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.)
...
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.
lajackson
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#24

Post by lajackson »

crislapi wrote: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 ...
Oh, the stories I could tell. [grin]

The challenge I have, is that in this very same post, at the top, we have a case where the help desk stated purpose of the Name Unknown entries is not happening. They are not going away after the end of the quarter.

We also have the challenge that in the HT/VT screens, depending on how you call up the Household pick list, the Name Unknown entries will or will not appear. This is very predictable and duplicatable.

The dual list, IMO, is a bug, at least in the display process. That the Name Unknown entries are not going away because they are needed for the quarterly report, I guess I can understand. At least I could if they went away after the end of the quarter. Or perhaps they have to stay there as long as that particular quarter's report remains in the MLS system. Two or three years?

But as for the stories, so far I have been able to restrain myself and keep my promise that I would not retell some of my early MLS stories in this forum. And some not so early ones, as well. [grin]
RossEvans
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#25

Post by RossEvans »

This festering problem really needs to get escalated.

If this is a known bug, that needs to be documented, and CHQ support needs to be educated to explain the bug consistently.

If this behavior is by design, then that also needs to be documented to end-users, and the MLS user interface should be modified to stop inviting users to delete these records when they are seen. More fundamentally, that would be pretty bad design. If the application needs to keep track of phantom "place holder" records for internal purposes, these records should not be appearing in the UI and export files at all.

Most immediately, we really need to know which is the case. If we are not supposed to be deleting these records to avoid harming the reporting functions, the record on this forum needs to be fixed so that we are not advising users to delete them. (I already followed that original advice, for better or worse, because I believed it.)

Who on this forum has the channel to escalate this to MLS managers and report a definitive status here? DJC? TomW?
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