But this just shows that the only reliable way to book a building is to create an event. Reservations are not a reliable way to book the building.
Although I don't disagree with this statement, I do have to say that my stake is trying very hard to disprove it... For one reason or another, not completely known to me, our stake has disallowed scheduling on all the buildings/recreation property in our stake (unchecked
This location can be scheduled by Wards and Stakes option on all the locations.) The desire was to have all building scheduling coordinated through the couple who have been called as the stake building schedulers. This has effectively made Reservations, the only way to "book" a specific building and rooms. This basically works since there is only one married couple doing all the reservations (though a couple of High Council members and now myself as a stake website administrator have also been added as schedulers) As you can imagine, this current new bug has put a damper on their ability to schedule buildings for stake members who email/call them to request it.
I hope to change all this in the next few weeks/months as we have just had a new stake presidency called, and I think it shouldn't be difficult to help them see how much easier this could be and that we're doing it all wrong.
Maybe some of you can help answer a question that occurred to me though... for a "regular Joe member" who isn't a calendar editor for any calendars in the ward or stake, it makes sense to have someone in the ward or stake called as a building scheduler whom they can call to schedule the building for them if they are requesting it for something like a wedding or family gathering. But when that happens, on what calendar to the building schedulers place the event? This question occurs to me because in the process of troubleshooting the reservation issue with our stake building schedulers, I discovered that they are not calendar editors for any calendars in their ward or in the stake. My impression/understanding is that if scheduling was turned on for all the locations, by virtue of being a scheduler for a building, they can edit any event that was scheduled for that building, but that doesn't give them specific calendar rights, so can they add new events, and what calendar do they add them to?
I tried going to the beta version of the calendar to test that out myself, but I had 2 problems with that - the Beta version seems to be having issues (taking forever to load buttons like the add event button and never seems to get to where the calendars load for me, so even after I add an event with the add event button, I can't see it on the calendar since it never loads) and besides that, I'm both stake and ward website administrator by calling so I can put events on nearly all calendars. Probably would have to test with my wife's login to make that work for me, if I could get the beta to load.