Access denied

I’m the Relief Society Secretary and I tried logging into the leadership and clerk and it says access denied. I went to the executive secretary about it and he tried to log on and it said the same thing. Please help. Not for sure what to do.

sarahjuneculler wrote:I tried logging into the leadership and clerk and it says access denied.

LCR was down earlier this morning but seems to be working again now. You should try again.

It's giving me this error again today (second week in a row). I'm spending 2–3 hours per week simply trying to log in.

I suggest we all try to perform as many tasks as possible on days other than Sundays. I have two reimbursements to process, but I will wait until the church server load is lower, so I don't prevent someone else from performing a time-critical task.

I'm even getting Access Denied here on the forum. It's random. Refresh a bunch and it will randomly load a page. (On a Tuesday afternoon)

My name Johannes Swartbooi Windhoek Namibia Ditrict President. I cannot access LCR all thought i had access in past.

It seems that LCR has gotten much less reliable over the past several weeks. I have had a number of leaders from wards in our stake contact me asking about not being able to log in. I have had trouble myself on multiple occasions. This morning, I can login to LCR, but when trying to open finance, it fails saying that signin.lds.org can't be reached (too many redirects). I was able to do a bit by switching from Safari to Chrome, but mostly I keep getting the frustrating "Uh Oh - we're sorry" message.

Perhaps a sprint or two of the development team needs to be redirected towards quality improvement and pause on feature additions. I would much rather have a reliable website with basic features vs one with lots of nice features that can be accessed maybe 50% of the time - which seems to be the status right now...

LCR Finance seems to be getting more and more unstable every day. Bishop asked me for some details on the budget in the middle of last week and it took multiple attempts over three days with the site failing at various points in the process before I got a partial success to look at the budget page.

Now they moved check support from MLS over to LCR exclusively in the middle of this. I have spent most of today trying to get checks printed and unlike reimbursements I cannot do approvals and printing at home so they either have to wait until next week for a check or I get to make an extra trip to the church during the week. Hooray!

None of the Finance clerks in our building have been able to log into the finance part of LCR all day so far. This is the 3rd week in a row it's been down on sunday when we are busiest.

See this post and other topics in the Leader and Clerk Resources area for details on this known problem which appears to be at the top of the list of things the developers are working to resolve.

rickk wrote: Perhaps a sprint or two of the development team needs to be redirected towards quality improvement and pause on feature additions. I would much rather have a reliable website with basic features vs one with lots of nice features that can be accessed maybe 50% of the time - which seems to be the status right now...

Which development team? I'm guessing the issues are NOT necessarily caused by the LCR Finance team.

I'm not trying to just blow off the question, just trying to point out that there is a lot that goes into making a system stable, especially on Sunday when the load of many interrelated systems is significantly higher than the rest of the week.

Part of the problem is that there are many different changes going on right now. For example internally we are still working on changes from moving the domain from lds.org to churchofjesuschrist.org. There are also a couple of key parts of the sign-in/authorization path that are being upgraded/converted. All of those pieces contribute to the issues affecting the sites. As scgallafent pointed out in the linked post those teams are aware of the issues and working hard to stabilize things.

As has also been pointed out in other threads there are many of the IT staff that are in leadership/clerk positions, so we are aware of the disruption it causes and understand the frustration when trying to do your calling and are striving to make the systems as stable as we can.

jonesrk wrote: I'm not trying to just blow off the question, just trying to point out that there is a lot that goes into making a system stable, especially on Sunday when the load of many interrelated systems is significantly higher than the rest of the week.

I understand there is a lot going on here, but as someone who has done engineering for 30+ years, when you have lots of inter-related pieces involved in a problem, leaving it to the individual teams to try to resolve is very inefficient. You need a concerted effort from many areas to get to the root of the problem - which was the reason for the comment about delaying feature development in favor of problem resolution.

The church has moved so much to the website, that we can’t really function anymore without it being reliable. My son teaches seminary and can’t get on to take care of his assignments. My stake presidency counselors can’t record endorsements for BYU. My finance folks in the stake can’t enter expenses or write checks. And it is not just Sunday - I see problems during the week fairly often as well.

Sorry for the tone, but things have gone downhill pretty significantly here, so it is frustrating for those of use tasked with using it. I’m sure that does include a number of the developers given their church callings, but it doesn’t make it any easier to get things done knowing they are suffering as well.

Rick

rickk wrote:I understand there is a lot going on here, but as someone who has done engineering for 30+ years, when you have lots of inter-related pieces involved in a problem, leaving it to the individual teams to try to resolve is very inefficient. You need a concerted effort from many areas to get to the root of the problem - which was the reason for the comment about delaying feature development in favor of problem resolution.

While you may have plenty of development experience, you aren't aware of the details of what is happening or the architectural concerns involved. Your suggestion is well-intended, but there are plenty of talented people working on the issues and telling them how to do their jobs seems a bit presumptuous.

scgallafent wrote:

rickk wrote:I understand there is a lot going on here, but as someone who has done engineering for 30+ years, when you have lots of inter-related pieces involved in a problem, leaving it to the individual teams to try to resolve is very inefficient. You need a concerted effort from many areas to get to the root of the problem - which was the reason for the comment about delaying feature development in favor of problem resolution.

While you may have plenty of development experience, you aren't aware of the details of what is happening or the architectural concerns involved. Your suggestion is well-intended, but there are plenty of talented people working on the issues and telling them how to do their jobs seems a bit presumptuous.

Is there anything we can do as users to avoid or lesson the issue when using the system? I'm sure the answer is no, but thought I'd ask. e.g. is the problem specific to chrome, or is it specific to people bookmarking lds.org and being rerouted to churchofjesuschrist.org use, etc

I'm probably just hoping for a work-around but thought I'd ask.

chriswoodut wrote:Is there anything we can do as users to avoid or lesson the issue when using the system? I'm sure the answer is no, but thought I'd ask. e.g. is the problem specific to chrome, or is it specific to people bookmarking lds.org and being rerouted to churchofjesuschrist.org use, etc

I'm probably just hoping for a work-around but thought I'd ask.

Right now there isn't anything you can do. When you look at Sunday's issues with LCR Finance (to pick one isolated issue), I can think of at least four systems where the relationships contributed to the overall problems yesterday. Individual members trying to change their behavior to either influence performance or avoid the collective issue isn't a realistic proposition.

I would Also like to register frustration with this problem. I understand there are limited resources, but it seems that server capacity (in this age of cloud computing) could be set up as a highly dynamic system to meet the demands of Sundays.

I’ve been locked out multiple times almost every Sunday for the past several months as I’m doing clerk work. The recent developments of online record keeping are excellent, but if we can’t access it all the time, it makes the work much harder.

Thanks for your consideration (whoever is reading this) and your great work.

mbell2034 wrote:but it seems that server capacity (in this age of cloud computing) could be set up as a highly dynamic system to meet the demands of Sundays.

From what's been said, it's not as simple as server capacity.

Yeah, problem is bad today. More than recent weeks.

russellhltn wrote:

mbell2034 wrote:but it seems that server capacity (in this age of cloud computing) could be set up as a highly dynamic system to meet the demands of Sundays.

From what's been said, it's not as simple as server capacity.

That’s fine. Obviously it is a problem having to do with use load so “server” was just layman’s speak for the real problem. Whatever the problem, it needs to be addressed. Hence all the comments.