What to do when the Portal is down

As many of you experienced this weekend, the portal was having problems. I apologize for the inconvenience. Again let me repeat again, the system was not originally designed to facilitate the amount of events that regional conferences produce. It is like trying to pound a 2 inch diameter peg into a 1 inch hole. We are working on a solution to allow the system to handle regional conferences, (making the hole bigger). It is going to take some time to do so. Please have patience in this matter.

In any case, none of that matters in the heat of the moment and you can't get to the portal or it is really slow. With some preparation, this can be overcome for the configured sites. I would recommend doing this in any case.

When setting up an event, a event details page is created. This page can be accessed any time before the event begins by the STS and any assistants, by clicking on the event link. On this page, contains the configured sites and the links(URLs) used to connect to the player for these sites. Once the event is scheduled, these URLs do not change. These URLs can be copied and saved. The appropriate URL then can be sent to the person in charge of the receive site in case of an emergency. The person at the receive site then pastes this URL into a browser and it will bring up the player and connect to the event. The portal is not needed to receive the event.

If you know that you are part of a regional conference, consider making the event "public". This will allow all members of the stake that can log into the Portal find the event immediately without the use of the event code. It does not make the event public to all, only those who are members of the stake. To make the event "public", when scheduling the event, uncheck the "Hide event link" check-box.

If this doesn't work, I would suggest more preparation pre-event.

rannthal wrote:If you know that you are part of a regional conference, consider making the event "public". This will allow all members of the stake that can log into the Portal find the event immediately without the use of the event code.

That might be good from a technical standpoint, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea from a policy standpoint. Given the limited capacity of the webcast, I'm not sure as I'd make any webcast "public". Granted, not many know about the portal, but I've always been leery of security though obscurity. In the era of social media, obscurity can disappear very quickly.

And for this past event, the instructions I saw were quite clear in that it was to be streamed only to where a stake representative was present and not to be streamed for individual members.

Anyone wanting to make the webcast "public" should consider the potential downside as well.

russellhltn wrote:Anyone wanting to make the webcast "public" should consider the potential downside as well.

I agree, thats why it was only a suggestion if you feel that there may be problems. I personally use the first suggestion on copying and saving the configured sites' links and give them out only if the can't get to the portal.

We email the bishops and branch presidents the unit links, less hassle for them to try to login that way vs using the portal.
We generally also make it public, not many people know about the portal, so we haven't run into any issues with too many people.

Aaron Z

rannthal wrote:As many of you experienced this weekend, the portal was having problems. I apologize for the inconvenience. Again let me repeat again, the system was not originally designed to facilitate the amount of events that regional conferences produce. It is like trying to pound a 2 inch diameter peg into a 1 inch hole.

There's a reservation system in place. Are there no alarms that go off ahead of time warning that portal demand for a given time-slot will outstrip capacity??

Yes there are. In fact due to the previous problems earlier then last week, there have been many fixes (band-aids) put into place, for server space. We are currently working on upgrading the system to more permanently being able to handle the amount of traffic that regional conferences cause.

Last weekend issues was a different problem not cause be server space. The server(s) in which the portal is housed had issues. This caused the portal to become slow/down. This, in turn, caused some to not being able to get to the receive site links. The server issues are being addressed.

If the links were able to be gotten to and the player was able to be brought up, the events should have functioned properly; not counting any local problems exclusive to their own stake.

The work-around (and good practice) for the portal being down/slow can be found at the start of this thread.

Would it be possible to have a "one click" button to export the information for all the sites on that event?
IE: "Click here to download all the URLs, sites and assistants as a CSV"
Then the CSV could then be emailed out to the Bishops, Branch Presidents, etc and it would take 30 seconds for the whole event vs 30-40 seconds per site.

Aaron Z

Wish granted!!!
That is one of the things that is currently being worked on and should be released soon.