MLS Download Site Changed

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
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dajoker
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MLS Download Site Changed

#1

Post by dajoker »

Could somebody update the wiki, and this thread, and the various FAQs online, and whatever else I've missed with the new download site for MLS? The old one has been returning a 404 for over a week and while I found 3.4.3 last Sunday somehow (lucky I guess) now I am having a terrible time finding anything, and it would probably be best to have all of the Google-found links just be updated to be correct.

For reference, the old (or at least broken) site is http://mls.lds.org/
jdlessley
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#2

Post by jdlessley »

The old site, mls.lds.org, is inactive. If you use that URL your browser will be redirected to the correct site. The new site is found in Applications under Resources in Record-Keeping and Technology Support. The Applications page is tailored to calling/position after logging on to LDS.org. If not logged in you will only see the general membership applications and you will not see the MLS download link.

The wiki page is in the process of being migrated to LDS.org. Making changes to it is not necessary since the new LDS.org help pages will have the correct information.

What FAQs are you referring to? Could you provide links or URLs?
JD Lessley
Have you tried finding your answer on the ChurchofJesusChrist.org Help Center or Tech Wiki?
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dajoker
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#3

Post by dajoker »

> The old site, mls.lds.org, is inactive. If you use that URL your browser will be redirected to the correct site.

I assume this statement, as written, means it will happen at some point in the future, since that definitely does not happen now.

> The new site is found in https://www.lds.org/callings/melchizede ... s?lang=eng under Resources in https://www.lds.org/callings/melchizede ... t?lang=eng .
> The Applications page is tailored to calling/position after logging on to LDS.org. If not logged in you will only see the general membership applications and you will not see the MLS download link.

Ah yes.... that's mostly true as well. If you get to the 'Applications' page then anybody can see 'About MLS' and 'MLS Release Notifications', but the link to 'Download and Install MLS' is not there unless logged in. If you click on 'MLS Release Notifications', though, you can see there is a link to download MLS from that point too (which requires a login to work). This could be a fair bit simpler if the links showed up all of the time and the login was required at download time. More than just for this use case of end users going there through this series of links, having something like 'Download and Install MlS' present fr anonymous users would also enable search engines to help us when we cannot find the site ourselves, even if Google cannot download the actual file itself due to a lack of a username.

> The wiki page is in the process of being migrated to LDS.org. Making changes to it is not necessary since the new LDS.org help pages will have the correct information.

This is not really helpful, though. Google for 'download mls' and tell me what you get first. Now do the search on this forums site (exclude this this thread) or other parts of lds.org . If your results are like mine you'll get a thousand hits of mls.lds.org, and a few hundred pointing to threads in here which all talk about mls.lds.org, which does not forward you anywhere and just says 404. If the wiki had the instructions you provided above, or simply a link to https://www.lds.org/callings/melchizede ... d?lang=eng directly, that would be much easier since everything finds that wiki page first.

> What FAQs are you referring to? Could you provide links or URLs?

The one Google found here on the first page of results:

http://tech.lds.org/faq/7-member-and-le ... wnload-mls

Thanks.
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johnshaw
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#4

Post by johnshaw »

dajoker,

These points are well made, I tried the link to http://mls.lds.org and it does redirect to the correct place, but like you said without logging in the link does not show up.

This transition from the wiki to the clerksupport site is difficult at best, knowing where to find something, unless you are a regular board participant, is not easy. It is something we'll just need to deal with until everything is transitioned. The end date is not known, we're transitioning from a community support mechanism to a church-sponsored mechanism with correlation and translation in the mix... it usually takes months to publish something. We're going to clearly need a place for quick-access information (like this board) and for the steady, church-approved, category information (like the clerksupport). But it seems we're transitioning alot... ldsclerks --> tech.lds.org/wiki --> Clerk.lds.org --> clerksupport.lds.org All in the last 6 years or so.
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aebrown
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#5

Post by aebrown »

dajoker wrote:> The wiki page is in the process of being migrated to LDS.org. Making changes to it is not necessary since the new LDS.org help pages will have the correct information.

This is not really helpful, though. Google for 'download mls' and tell me what you get first. Now do the search on this forums site (exclude this this thread) or other parts of lds.org . If your results are like mine you'll get a thousand hits of mls.lds.org, and a few hundred pointing to threads in here which all talk about mls.lds.org, which does not forward you anywhere and just says 404. If the wiki had the instructions you provided above, or simply a link to https://www.lds.org/callings/melchizede ... d?lang=eng directly, that would be much easier since everything finds that wiki page first.

If you're concerned about the wiki, I would point out that it is, well, a WIKI, and so you can feel free to fix it yourself.
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dajoker
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#6

Post by dajoker »

Yes.... I posted last night when updates were not allowed (I tried, really... logged out, back in... even tried that 'Discussion' (usually called 'Talk') link... nothing was working). I can now make edits as I have in the past and am doing so.

This thread, though, was also started to fix other links, and to fix mls.lds.org entirely (apparently it should forward, and obviously it does not... :-( ).

Thanks for the input. Consider this one part done.
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aebrown
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#7

Post by aebrown »

dajoker wrote:.. and to fix mls.lds.org entirely (apparently it should forward, and obviously it does not... :-( ).

I just tried going to mls.lds.org and it smoothly forwarded me to the Applications section of ClerkSupport.lds.org. That's what it should do, and what it does (at least for me). Are you seeing something else at this point when you go to mls.lds.org?
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dajoker
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#8

Post by dajoker »

aebrown wrote:I just tried going to mls.lds.org and it smoothly forwarded me to the Applications section of ClerkSupport.lds.org. That's what it should do, and what it does (at least for me). Are you seeing something else at this point when you go to mls.lds.org?

Yes... an lds.org-branded 404. Apparently you're seeing the redirect, but at least two of us are not. I tried in three different browsers just now, two of which have never been to lds.org before and were not open before I tried them. I also tried my main browser (FF 16.0.1) again after logging in to http://www.lds.org to ensure it wasn't something that only worked when logged in, but same issue.

Are you going only to 'mls.lds.org' or is there any other part of your address bar filling in? Have HTTP Headers of your interaction to show which page you are hitting exactly and the output from it (like a redirect)?
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aebrown
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#9

Post by aebrown »

I'm going to mls.lds.org or to http://mls.lds.org, which does a javascript redirect to http://www.lds.org/mls/login

Code: Select all

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!-- Begin
window.location="http://www.lds.org/mls/login";
// End -->
</script>
<noscript>
When I access http://www.lds.org/mls/login, the HTTP response is:

Code: Select all

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
location: [URL]https://www.lds.org/callings/melchizedek-priesthood/records-and-technology-support/applications[/URL]
Server: BigIP
Content-Length: 0
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 15:36:13 GMT
Which is exactly what I would expect for a permanent redirect.

When I get to that Applications page on clerksupport.lds.org, what I see depends, of course, on whether I am signed in to LDS.org at the time. But either way, the redirect works flawlessly (I tried it on Firefox, Chrome, and IE9). Deleting cookies and clearing the browser cache has no impact -- it continues to work just fine.
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dajoker
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#10

Post by dajoker »

Good news! The redirect is attempted!

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.lds.org/callings/melchizede ... plications

Bad news: the result of going to THAT page is a 404. Now I know you're going to copy it and it will work. The headers also show that after I get the redirect for some reason my system appends ?lang=spa on the end of the URL. Now I know one or two words in Spanish, but have certainly never run my browser in any foreign languages, so I have no idea why that happened, or why every browser on my system would do that. I also have at least two cookies for various lds.org sites with 'lang' in the name set to 'eng' so that's a little suspicious.

So in summary, at least two of us probably have those mysterious languages appended for unknown reasons. If I go to https://www.lds.org/ I also see a language appended, but it's 'eng' as it should be. This only happens when trying to get to the target of the redirect for the MLS site; if I try to get there following the (new) instructions in the wiki by working through a half-dozen menus, all is well. I logged in and explicitly set my language on the site both while logged in and then again after logging out, both times to English. The 301 redirect still behaves badly for me. Again, the other two browsers I tested have never been to this site before.

A couple possible fixes/workarounds:
1. Have the site default to the English version if nothing else can be found. Most programming projects work this way, at least with some default locale.
2. Figure out why some of us have browsers forcing us to languages other than English. I, at least, do not speak Spanish well enough to have ever set it as a browser preference (I'd never be able to change it back if I did).
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