Ministering assignments disappeared

Something odd happened today - wondering if it has happened to anyone else? I didn't see any new conversation about it...

Our ward's Ministering Brother assignments have all disappeared. Gone. Poof. The three districts we had are empty and all households now show as Unassigned. The Sisters' list, however, is still intact.

Initially found the issue in LDS Tools - by and for everyone who has access to see it - and has been confirmed in LCR.

Is it just us? Is anyone else experiencing this? Is it a bug that will somehow right itself? If not, luckily I have a print out from two days ago to restore it.

They are all there for our ward on LCR (both elders and sisters). I don't have access to LDSTools any longer due to an obsolete device.

When you select the Ministering tab on LCR, be sure you are clicking on the "Current Assignments" option and not the "Proposed Assignments" option. The Proposed Assignments will be blank unless someone begins making draft assignments there. This is a recent change.

Thanks. I am quite familiar with the Proposed Assignments as we have been utilizing the feature. They are all still there, just not the Current Assignments.

Unless someone with access went in and deliberately removed every companionship, this has to be a bug affecting more than just us. Anyone?

I will be making sure a bishopric member, clerk, or ministering secretary did not delete them on purpose.

I have not seen this problem, but perhaps it is a bug where someone "published" a set of blank proposed ministering assignments? Of course, I am not about to test this theory.

We are seeing the same thing, all assignments are gone for both Elders and RS. All families are 'unassigned', and all brothers and sisters have no ministering assignments.

We saw the same thing. I looked in 'Proposed' assignments and found all of our current assignments in there. I was able to go thru the steps to make proposed assignments the currents assignments, and thus restore all of our assignments.

We are also seeing that all ministering assignments are showing up blank. Maybe there is a server down somewhere that the information is pulled from? Hopefully they are not lost.

Yep, ours are gone as well. Sure wish I knew how to remedy this. Very frustrating.

Ours are showing for both EQ and RS as of moments ago. Neither organization has begun using the "proposed" sections yet.

Our current assignments have never disappeared.

If someone wishes to be very brave, it might be nice to test my theory that a totally blank set of proposed assignments will overwrite an existing set, leaving everything missing.

A member of our stake HC called the GSC.

"According to GSC support, the lds.org system had issues last Monday night. Any ward who was in lds.org in the ministering area that night had all their data deleted (ministering assignments and interview tracking). Unfortunately, while they've fixed the system so it won't do this again, those affected must re-enter all their ministering assignments and any interviews they had recorded for the 4th quarter. "

Bummer. Thank goodness for a printout backup - printed the night of the issue.

nmecantwin73 wrote:Bummer.

Bummer indeed. Thank you for the report.

And do not try what I suggested.

The GSC was correct. There was a bug that caused ministering assignment data to be corrupted. Anyone who logged into ministering during a brief time period was affected by it. (That includes two developers who were validating the release after it was deployed.)

Does anyone know if there is a backup? Our EQ lost all assignments, and it is proving very difficult to recreate.

Assignments for my quorum have also disappeared. Anyone find a solution to this?

nmecantwin73 wrote:Something odd happened today - wondering if it has happened to anyone else? I didn't see any new conversation about it...

Our ward's Ministering Brother assignments have all disappeared. Gone. Poof. The three districts we had are empty and all households now show as Unassigned. The Sisters' list, however, is still intact.

Initially found the issue in LDS Tools - by and for everyone who has access to see it - and has been confirmed in LCR.

Is it just us? Is anyone else experiencing this? Is it a bug that will somehow right itself? If not, luckily I have a print out from two days ago to restore it.

This exact same thing has happened to our ward as well.

Same thing happened to our Relief Society as well. It seems the Elders information is still intact. Is it true we have to re-enter all of our ministering companionships as well as interviews held?

sdavidson91 wrote:Assignments for my quorum have also disappeared. Anyone find a solution to this?

As the post two previous to yours indicated, there was a bug in the system that caused data loss for some units. That post was from a developer who works on LCR so he knows what he is talking about. Since he didn't mention it, I assume they don't have a backup that they can use to restore the data. So you probably just have to try to recreate the assignments from any printouts or other information you may have available (maybe even by asking people what their assignments were).

hhort480 wrote:Same thing happened to our Relief Society as well. It seems the Elders information is still intact. Is it true we have to re-enter all of our ministering companionships as well as interviews held?

Yes, unfortunately, you will need to re-enter all of the ministering companionships and assignments. Hopefully you have a recent printout backup.

I had to do this, as well. When I entered in all of the companionships, the system seemed to remember the interviews that had already been marked for the quarter, so that was a plus!

I have a hard time believing that they cannot restore ministering assignments from backups.
Surely, if this were financial, they would have a backup. People are as important as dollars.
Seem like poor planning on their part AND mine.

How can Local units make a backup of ministering assignment information in order to keep from having to renter it next time?

We have system backups, but this case would have required restoring the most recent backup to a separate server, comparing the two databases to identify which units were affected, and then manually migrating data from the backup into the production database for affected units.

As I said, there were two developers affected by this who were validating the release after it was deployed (see dogfooding). The decision whether to go through the process of restoring and migrating from a backup was made with the full knowledge that THEY would have to recreate their ministering data or go back to their ward leaders and explain that their data was corrupted and would need to be recreated.

Same thing happened to us last week. It's a relief to know I wasn't the only one!
The following day, one of the districts repopulated, the rest were blank. I checked again yesterday and still only had one district.
Upon checking the "Proposed" page all the districts were still there and populated, except one. It had all the companionships, listed, but no sisters assigned to them.
After many calls, texts, emails, etc, I was able to re-create that district.
I'm terrified it will happen again! Guess I'll be keeping an up-to-date spreadsheet at hand. I hate having to print the 23 + pages required to keep a paper copy - especially since in my ward it needs to be changed once or more a month.

calkinsc wrote:I hate having to print the 23 + pages required to keep a paper copy - especially since in my ward it needs to be changed once or more a month.

The reports in LCR are all PDF files. So rather than actually printing it you could just save/download it to your local computer.

We don't think it's likely to happen again, but I also don't like to say never. We know specifically what caused this issue and have made changes to address the cause.

There had been some ongoing discussion about the complexities of selectively restoring data from backup for units that we can tell were affected and where we can do a clean restore.

I'm not sure that's not the case, but, I do know that I was using the "Proposed" site a couple of weeks before the "crash" so it wasn't blank. Interesting theory though. And no, I'm not prepared to test it! lol

Since some units have already tried restoring the lost data manually, has it been considered to simply email the backups as a pdf to leaders in affected units (or provide it upon request), so that we can manually reenter it from the backup? I know my EQ would benefit significantly if we could simply get our hands on a copy of what it was before the data loss occurred.

Last night, we completed running a process that selectively restored data for units where we could positively identify that they were affected by this issue. Basically, if you had data before and don't have data now, you data should be restored. If you had created any new data, your data was not restored.

For units where the data wasn't restored but they want it restored, the ward clerk can contact the Global Service Center and ask to have the unit's ministering data restored from the backup. THIS WILL OVERWRITE ANY MINISTERING DATA THAT WAS ENTERED OR CHANGED AFTER THE BACKUP.

jasonmorganallred wrote:Since some units have already tried restoring the lost data manually, has it been considered to simply email the backups as a pdf to leaders in affected units (or provide it upon request), so that we can manually reenter it from the backup? I know my EQ would benefit significantly if we could simply get our hands on a copy of what it was before the data loss occurred.

The backup is a restore of the relational database. There isn't an automatic way the generate and email a PDF to leaders from the backup. We would have to stand up a new instance of the entire system, point it to the restored database, and have someone manually log in and generate PDF files. Alternatively, we would have to pull someone off another project and have them do some work to automate generating PDFs for this, which would prevent them from completing other work.

We have the same issue for our ministering routes. Our ministering secretary made the proposed changes permanent, and now they're all gone. I have a separate ministering assignment spreadsheet I keep that includes a few non-members who are ministered to, otherwise I would have no idea what our assignments are. I'm hoping this is a bug and that our routes and assignments are restored!

So I guess I should have read this last post before I replied. Are you saying that once we get that pdf backup, we will need to enter everything in manually again? Ot will this allow the ward clerk to restore it?

Marcieb wrote:Are you saying that once we get that pdf backup, we will need to enter everything in manually again? Ot will this allow the ward clerk to restore it?

scgallafent wrote:Last night, we completed running a process that selectively restored data for units where we could positively identify that they were affected by this issue. . . .

For units where the data wasn't restored but they want it restored, the ward clerk can contact the Global Service Center and ask to have the unit's ministering data restored from the backup. THIS WILL OVERWRITE ANY MINISTERING DATA THAT WAS ENTERED OR CHANGED AFTER THE BACKUP.

So there is no pdf backup. Your ministering assignments have already been restored if they were empty. If you made changes to ministering data after it disappeared, but before Friday, November 30, the backup was not restored.

If your ministering data right now is not the way you want it, the ward clerk can contact the Global Service Center and ask to have the data restored from the backup. This will overwrite what is there today.

So the clerk needs to decide. Keep it as it is now and continue to correct it, or start over again from the way data was before the glitch. If you want to start over from just before the glitch, call the GSC.

It's happening again. We just got everything back into the system last week. But then today, when I tried to record a ministering interview on my phone, LDS Tools froze. Then when I went back in, all our ministering assignments are now blank again. They are also now blank on LCR.

We're currently working on a server issue that is likely the cause of this. The data shouldn't be gone, but one of the back-end services isn't responding correctly, which would cause what you are seeing.

Is there an estimated time for the fix?

I'm seeing them now. Thanks!

I just had this happen on Sunday (March 24th, 2019), so this bug is still happening. All districts and companionships have disappeared and I don't have a backup printout.

ejray2k wrote:I just had this happen on Sunday (March 24th, 2019), so this bug is still happening. All districts and companionships have disappeared and I don't have a backup printout.

I'm seeing what looks like complete data for your ward. Do you see data now? It may have been a temporary issue where the services couldn't communicate with each other.

Why is this continuing? With greater emphasis on visiting our families it seems counter intuitive that we no longer have access to the list of our assignments.

i am trying to make changes to our ministering assignments. I can print a current list using the Ministering interviews page and see everything under current assignments but when I go to proposed assignments it is all blank and I don' know how to get the current assignments there to start making changes. I would prefer to get it all set up under proposed assignments before having everything available for all to see.

When a leader with access to edit the ministering assignments goes to the ministering tab and selects "Proposed Assignments" there should be a button that says "Start with current assignments." If they click that button, the current assignments will be copied to the proposed assignments and changes can be made without affecting the current assignments. When the changes are complete and approved, the proposed assignments can be published to replace the current assignments.

The EQ ministering assignments have all disappeared - both the published and proposed changes.

The last changes were made the evening of 5/7/2019.

This is for unit 1060872.

Thanks

I'm also hitting this issue of ministering assignments having disappeared. In our unit the EQ assignments are done, but the RS are still visible.

natenez wrote:The EQ ministering assignments have all disappeared - both the published and proposed changes.

The last changes were made the evening of 5/7/2019.

This is for unit 1060872.

Thanks

When the problem occurred for 1060872 our Bishop was approving proposed changes. He indicate that it had errored twice, but I am not sure what the error message was.

"Ministering Assignments" Category and Information No Longer on List with other Categories such as Contact, Household, Membership Information, Callings and Classes, since I installed Members Tools. Is a fix being worked on for this?
Also, is there an ETA on the repair of having the temple information on Member Tools.
I am syncing several times each day. Thank you!!

We are having a related but different problem. Out ministering lists are reverting to an much older outdated version of the ministering assignments. When I try to change in back to the current listing, as soon as I log off, and return, the old list is back, with none of the changes being saved. This happened in just the last few days of today Sept 5, 2019. No answer from the help desk. As of now, I cannot update the listing.

Short of asking your Stake President to bring it up in his coordinating counsel, the Global Service Desk and feedback from the Ministering page are the official support channels for the church. You will probably need to wait for them sort it out.