Receiving calendar notifications from previous ward

I moved to a new ward and stake five months ago. I went into subscriptions and changed all settings to reflect my new location. Approximately the last month I started receiving notifications from YW, but the listed events were not on my ward/stake calendar. Just recently a notification was received and it had listed instructors for activities and those members are from my old ward. I did not request any notification from YW or YM when I was in that ward as I had no children involvement or calling responsibilities in that area. I don't know how, let alone why, I am now receiving these notification nor do I see a why to fix it. Please help me.

First, I would check with the ward clerk to see that your membership record is still in your new ward. Then I would go into Calendar again and look at the subscription page. That should reset the Calendar (again) to know that the new ward is your correct ward.

If for some reason your record moved to your prior ward and back again, that may have started those notifications.

Make sure you checked your Calendar subscriptions online at LDS.org and not just on a mobile device. That seems to make a difference.

Calendar notifications was broken for quite awhile, so that explains part of it. As long as you checked your calendar subscriptions on-line, I'm not sure why that's happening.

CrockettDR wrote:We believe notifications has finally been fixed. We did have an issue for the last couple weeks where we were pointing to an old membership database causing some notifications to go to old email addresses.... But we believe this has all been resolved. So, if you are seeing problems with notifications now, let us know.

Dave Crockett - calendar product manager

That probably explains your issue, and hopefully it is now fixed

Hi All:

Sorry to hijack the thread but I don't know how to get the message to the right people. Same issue (unexpected calendar notification emails from notifications@lds.org) has been reported by an executive secretary in a ward for one of the members that used to belong to our stake. Her records are not in our stake. She has visited the subscriptions page many times. She received a reminder notification from our stake on 9th November 2015 which is well after the statement made on 19 September 2015. We've asked her to follow the guidance in the following:
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17032
http://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15969
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11734

As well as this thread. Any guidance would be appreciated.

Sincerely,
Jacob

jacob.metro wrote:Same issue (unexpected calendar notification emails from notifications@lds.org) has been reported by an executive secretary in a ward for one of the members that used to belong to our stake. Her records are not in our stake. She has visited the subscriptions page many times. She received a reminder notification from our stake on 9th November 2015 which is well after the statement made on 19 September 2015.

Where are her records? In a "normal" place, or in Address Unknown, or perhaps a out of the country in a ward that may not be a part of the calendar system?

You say she received the notice on Nov 9th. Any idea of when the event was scheduled and if her records were in the stake at that time?

Thank you for your comment. Her records are in a ward and stake in Utah. She has been out of our stake for around 2.5 years. She has received a number of notifications from various stake-level calendar entries. The item from November 9th was set up just a couple of months ago - a last minute fireside and a bunch of reminders for youth activities. The text of the original statement by her is that she has been getting more of them "lately". I assume that the executive secretary of the ward wouldn't have contacted us unless her records were properly in that ward. What do you recommend I do?

For historical reference, this is the guidance I gave the ward executive secretary on the far side, the primary stake technology specialist in our stake, the stake executive secretary in our side who set up the meeting, and the stake clerk on our side. If there is anything inaccurate regarding the information I've provided already, please let me know so that the record can be corrected and we can try additional steps.

Sincerely,
Jacob

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Statement 1:
I can confirm that the sister's records are not showing up in any of our online systems that I have access to. I've copied stake executive secretary on this message since the calendar entry responsible for the message that you sent us as an example is controlled by the stake executive secretary.

Despite the fact that her name is not on any of our online systems that I have access to, I believe that I have a hypothesis that should be tested regarding this matter. The hypothesis is "subscriptions". Specifically, calendar subscriptions. To validate and correct, the sister should log in to lds.org as herself and then perform the following protocol: Under My Ward chose Calendar. Choose Options. Verify that the only three options selected are: Auto Subscribe (ward & stake) and Allow email reminders. If the hypothesis is correct the issue is a lingering subscription to the stake calendar (specifically Allow email reminders) in REDACTED Stake. Go back to the My Ward, Calendar. Under the cog, for settings, chose Subscriptions. Look for the REDACTED Stake calendar. Turn the tuner for Subscribe to off for all Stake Calendars under REDACTED Stake. Alternatively, uncheck the notification check box next to each calendar. Then have the sister log out. We could send a manual reminder from the web application to confirm that she no longer receives reminders from our stake.

If this hypothesis is incorrect, the issue is a technical support problem as the calendar does not support custom email distribution lists. This would not be able to be solved at the stake level since we are not able to even see who is subscribed to any given calendar much less remove anyone (https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18312 and https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17678).

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Statement 2:

This appears to be a known issue. You can see:
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17032
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15969
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11734
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12988
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13155
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14524
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21233
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13107

You can also see the tech request to the forum for your request here (tacked onto the end of another thread):
https://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22915

The gist of all these forum entries as I understand them is the following:
There is an issue
The calendar delivery team is aware of the issue and working on it
The issue can often be resolved for an individual by simply going into the subscriptions field
The subscriptions field may not be the main page with the checkboxes after clicking on subscriptions, but actually each individual checkbox for each subscription that is wanted
You may have to do this from a desktop browser instead of a tablet/phone
If it can't be solved using these means, the global service desk is the next step.
The global service desk may well refer us to the same forum threads above
The calendar delivery team should be informed that the issue persists
Following the guidance of others on the threads above, I'd recommend selecting the subscribe button on each calendar to turn off all subscriptions for all calendars, stake and ward, logging out, logging back in again, and subscribing again. This may cause the calendar system to recognize the new ward and stake units. Then again, this is troubleshooting what is a blackbox to us - for the system designers it is probably very transparent. As a general comment, while a slight imposition to personal privacy, it might be warranted to provide all responsible parties access to view subscriptions - just as disconfirmation of any lingering subscription.

To set your mind at ease, I believe taken together all this information provided confirms that you are not being singled out (the issue affects others) and that our stake isn't holding onto your membership record in any way (as I wasn't able to find any evidence of your name in any of the systems I have access to).

For this sister, she does NOT see the REDACTED Stake calendar (and I wouldn't expect her to) and only sees events from her current stake. According to the record provided to us, she has recieved notifications/reminders of Music and Cultural Arts and Primary, as well as Young Women/Young Men events from our stake recently.

Any chance that she didn't visit the subscription page prior to event being set up?

Please note that the method of going to the subscriptions has changed in recent versions of the calendar:

• Go to https://lds.org/church-calendar/
• Log in as self
• On the left hand column, up at the top of the scroll bar, there's a button marked '>>' - click that.
• You are now on the subscriptions page - a place where you can subscribe or unsubscribe to ward and stake calendars.
• I do not expect the old ward to appear, but I do expect that by going to this page that any subscriptions to the old ward will be automatically be removed.

The above is what we mean be "going to the subscription page".

Two more things to check:

Carefully examine the email notice. It may require digging into the header. Make sure it was really sent to her mail address, and not to another address that somehow got forwarded or landed in her email account.

Check the membership records of the stake to make sure her email isn't somehow attached to someone else's record. There may be a custom report you can do in MLS that would simplify that task. Be sure to check both "household" and "personal" emails.

Good points. I will communicate this to the local parties. Jacob