Family Discovery Day website link not working

[russellhltn]

The Family History tech team is different from ICS.

True, but these URLs are all on lds.org, not familysearch.org, so it is indeed ICS that is responsible for them. The content probably comes from FamilySearch, but the infrastructure such as (load balancers) relevant to this discussion are all part of ICS.

I think John is talking about motivation and escalation, not who needs to do the fixing. I think he has a valid point. I'd suggest following his tip.

[swigginton]

I called the FH department in SLC. They walked me through many of the steps I've already done. Of course, since it works fine for them (being on the church network), their focus was on browser config, etc. Once we got past that, they felt it should be discussed with the global services support. I called them, and went through pretty much the same steps before they seemed to give up and said they didn't know what to do. I'm pursuing a couple of parallel paths to raise awareness/urgency of the issue, including trying to reach someone at HQ who oversees the Family History Days events, since they would have an interest in seeing this fixed. We'll see what happens.

[eblood66]

There is another link that redirects to the same website:
http://www.lds.org/familyhistoryday
That link works fine for us. It also changes the url prefix to "https:", so I don't think that's an issue.
http://www.lds.org/familydiscoveryday should redirect to the same website, but fails. Unfortunately, that's the one on the printed materials.
I'll try calling SLC after lunch to see if they have any ideas and will post an update.

Both of these are now working for me but I had to clear my cache before the second started working.

[russellhltn]

I can't get the first one to work, but the second one is working in both browsers. Since that's the one on the posters, that seems to be the big one.

[swigginton]

We're getting closer. It's now working for me in Chrome, but not IE. I've cleared cache and cookies, but no go.

[eblood66]

We're getting closer. It's now working for me in Chrome, but not IE. I've cleared cache and cookies, but no go.

It looks like it's using a 301 permanent redirect. For at least some versions of IE it looks like clearing the cache doesn't clear saved 301 redirects. I found one site that claimed that switching to private mode, visiting the page and changing back to normal mode would clear it. It might be worth trying.

You may also want to try it on a computer which never visited the page in IE and see if it works there.

[russellhltn]

I found one site that claimed that switching to private mode, visiting the page and changing back to normal mode would clear it. It might be worth trying.

Bingo! Both browsers work with both links now.

[swigginton]

Well, lds.org/familydiscoveryday has stopped working this morning. Tried multiple browsers on multiple devices and networks. It was working last night. lds.org/familyhistoryday still works fine. Not sure why they can't direct both to the same url. Strange.

[eblood66]

Well, lds.org/familydiscoveryday has stopped working this morning. Tried multiple browsers on multiple devices and networks. It was working last night. lds.org/familyhistoryday still works fine. Not sure why they can't direct both to the same url. Strange.

For me lds.org/familydiscoveryday is working but lds.org/familyhistoryday is no longer working. I am on a different network now (work rather than home).

[johnshaw]

I called the FH department in SLC. They walked me through many of the steps I've already done. Of course, since it works fine for them (being on the church network), their focus was on browser config, etc. Once we got past that, they felt it should be discussed with the global services support. I called them, and went through pretty much the same steps before they seemed to give up and said they didn't know what to do. I'm pursuing a couple of parallel paths to raise awareness/urgency of the issue, including trying to reach someone at HQ who oversees the Family History Days events, since they would have an interest in seeing this fixed. We'll see what happens.

Try not to drive yourself crazy working through the insanity. The Church is just NOT setup to work with a member rather than an employee.

I experienced all these same things when the Kansas City Temple Open House reservation went live without the church turning it on for external access. Everything you described here was my experience (it works for me, etc...) - i asked them to page out their network team, but they said the only thing they could do was log a point. I couldn't understand how much the team seemed NOT to care that thousands of members of the church were being impacted by something that eventually took about 5 minutes work for the network team. (there ended up also being a leap-year problem in the logic which also took a bit to fix also). Multiple Stake Presidents were unable to get it escalated either.

It's not really their fault either, it is just how they are organized.