How many days for updated meeting time to appear on meetinghouse locator?

We have a slight change to meeting times for next Sunday. I updated the time in LCR on Monday morning (since I couldn't access LCR on Sunday). Two days later, the meetinghouse locator doesn't yet show the change. How long does it take for updates to make it to the meetinghouse locator?

mevans wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 10:34 am We have a slight change to meeting times for next Sunday. I updated the time in LCR on Monday morning (since I couldn't access LCR on Sunday). Two days later, the meetinghouse locator doesn't yet show the change. How long does it take for updates to make it to the meetinghouse locator?

Usually takes a few days to flow through all the systems, Monday being a holiday might take a little longer.

Is the change just for one Sunday? It's usually used to adjust the time for the new year. Which makes me wonder how well it will work for a one-off.

russellhltn wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 11:08 am Is the change just for one Sunday? It's usually used to adjust the time for the new year. Which makes me wonder how well it will work for a one-off.

Meeting times can be changed as often as the times actually change. There is no just one time a year change rule.

garystroble wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 1:49 pm Meeting times can be changed as often as the times actually change. There is no just one time a year change rule.

I don't disagree, but the question is how everything is set up behind the scenes. In the ever changing development, it might have been turned off with the expectoration it wouldn't be needed until the new year. It's an IT question, not a Handbook one.

Well our ward is changing not only Sunday times but going to sacrament meeting last in October, combining youth classes and Primary with another ward in our building. Hopefully I don't have to call the GSC to change the times and sequencing.

garystroble wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 3:44 pm Hopefully I don't have to call the GSC to change the times and sequencing.

That most likely won't be necessary. The meeting times that can be edited are the "First Meeting" time and "Sacrament Meeting" time.

russellhltn wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 3:05 pm

garystroble wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 1:49 pm Meeting times can be changed as often as the times actually change. There is no just one time a year change rule.

I don't disagree, but the question is how everything is set up behind the scenes. In the ever changing development, it might have been turned off with the expectoration it wouldn't be needed until the new year.

Why wait until the new year to change meeting times? Many units change in September to align with the school year. Other units change whenever a ward or stake division takes place, which might occur any time of the year.

During COVID, wards in our stake changed times almost monthly.

On average, I found that the meeting time updated in two to three days, so we always changed them on Mondays. If one of them slipped through the cracks, I also found that it could not be triggered again and the GSD had to fix it for us. But there was no consistency as to which unit did not change, if any.

lajackson wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2024 5:11 pm Why wait until the new year to change meeting times? Many units change in September to align with the school year.

New one on me. In my area they change with the calendar year. Again, I'm not saying this is policy, but IT might have shut down the sync to take care of some change.

If you don't see the change in a few days, I'd call support.

Here we are on Thursday and it's still not updated. Maybe I'll call GSC today and see what they know. We periodically get visitors and I want people to see the correct time on the meetinghouse locator. But if it takes days for that to update, it's kind of useless.

mevans wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 8:52 am Here we are on Thursday and it's still not updated. Maybe I'll call GSC today and see what they know. We periodically get visitors and I want people to see the correct time on the meetinghouse locator. But if it takes days for that to update, it's kind of useless.

Since there's a bit of uncertainty here in the Forum, hopefully you can also post whatever info GSC provides, so that we have a good reference going forward. I know with building addresses there's been some discussion about potential dual databases that both need updating (for the meetinghouse locator and for the FM Group, I believe). So it would be good to make certain that by updating meeting times in LCR, that is sufficient to cover all bases. And that we can make changes as often as is required. II expect yes, but would be good to confirm that's still true in Aug 2024...

I called GSC. They checked and saw that the update had been applied to CDOL (I forgot that CDOL has meeting times, but I looked up our ward and saw it's there).

The person at GSC said there are "a bunch of different systems." She couldn't figure out the problem and took screenshots to show the disparities and created a ticket for someone to look at the problem. I guess there's still a day to see if it gets fixed before Sunday. I'll see what happens.

I got the impression one time that there's two CDOLs - the old one that was taken off-line due to security concerns and the new one that we have now. (Or maybe the old one is now fully retired - things change.)

I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

russellhltn wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:29 pm I got the impression one time that there's two CDOLs - the old one that was taken off-line due to security concerns and the new one that we have now. (Or maybe the old one is now fully retired - things change.)

I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

Nor the users that have to deal with live systems being up/downgraded while in use.

mevans wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 4:37 pm The person at GSC said there are "a bunch of different systems."

And the moral of this story is, never post in one convenient centralized place what you can easily post in many places where you are able to forget to update some of them from time to time.

I fully agree with russellhltn:

russellhltn wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:29 pm I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

GSC got back to me and told me they weren't able to get the fix done in time. But, I just checked and saw that Meetinghouse Locator was updated! So, either someone hung around late on a Friday and got it working, or a miracle occurred and the systems finally synced.

Here's something else the GSC said:
"I did also find out that the system should update automatically after you make the changes in LCR, but it can take up to three days. In this case it looks like it didn't update correctly, however in the future it may respond correctly if you need to do this again."

Granted, I'm a technical person and the person who wrote this probably wasn't too careful with words, but this statement doesn't give me much comfort: "in the future it may respond correctly"

lajackson wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2024 11:05 am And the moral of this story is, never post in one convenient centralized place what you can easily post in many places where you are able to forget to update some of them from time to time.

While it's great to have everything in one centralized place, it's easier said than done. Any large organization is going to have a variety of systems. Some of them will be custom-built software and others will be commercial systems. Just trying to figure out the appropriate place to get certain data can be a challenge when you have a lot of systems. Even though it can be complex, it should be able to work reliably and notify people about problems so they can be resolved. There are even orchestration systems you can buy to help with these integrations. Perhaps improving systems integration is not an important area for the church right now. I'm working on improving a system integration with a third party for my employer right now, and it can be quite painful and time consuming to get it working correctly, as well as identify error situations and how to handle them--especially if you don't have control over some systems (vendor APIs, third-party providers, etc.). But it's taken us a few years to put effort into improving this integration. I can understand the desire to make it work vs. having the budget to fix the problem. But maybe now that the church is aware of the problem, someone will investigate further.

russellhltn wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:29 pm I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

Maybe you're referring to trying to troubleshoot something in production? I don't know what the church IT department does internally, but I do remember 12-15 years ago when they were asking church members to help that we had access to non-production systems on which we could test. But, considering the church has several systems, it may be unlikely that they have a full sandbox running of all the disparate systems talking with each other.

mevans wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2024 8:43 pm GSC got back to me and told me they weren't able to get the fix done in time. But, I just checked and saw that Meetinghouse Locator was updated! So, either someone hung around late on a Friday and got it working, or a miracle occurred and the systems finally synced.

I take that back...I just checked again and it no longer has the revised time. So I started hitting refresh and it alternates between the correct time and incorrect time. So it looks like it's load balanced and one server is updated and the other isn't. That's really strange. I would expect servers to be hitting the same data source.

But now that I'm doing it more, it looks like the revised time is sticking. Strange stuff.

russellhltn wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:29 pm I got the impression one time that there's two CDOLs - the old one that was taken off-line due to security concerns and the new one that we have now. (Or maybe the old one is now fully retired - things change.)

There are still 2, but the old one is only for CHQ and only until we can get the new one to have all the edit functionality that the old one has

russellhltn wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2024 6:29 pm I don't envy the developers that effectively have to develop on live systems.

It's definitely interesting trying to fully retire the old system, especially since it had been around for so long and had so many things entangled in it. We are getting there but there's a lot to the membership and unit systems. And like you said trying to keep two systems living and in agreement with each other can be challenging.

I updated our meeting times back to the normal time on Sunday evening. New CDOL wasn't updated on Sunday, but I just checked it now on Monday and see that the meeting time has been updated. It's still not updated on Meetinghouse Locator. I'll check back tomorrow.

I checked today and the reverted meeting time hasn't appeared yet. But, I guess 3 days won't be until tomorrow.

It hadn't updated on Thursday, and I checked again this morning...still not updated.

I contacted GSC yesterday and was told "It looks like the system is running a little slower than normal, it looks like it should be updating by Saturday." The rep helping me wanted to know if it's not updated by Saturday so the case can be escalated.

I'm curious if it updates tonight sometime. That's when it got fixed last week. Maybe there's a weekly update process for Meetinghouse Locator data? I imagine the data doesn't change that frequently, so weekly could be adequate. Thinking about it, perhaps it refreshes the entire database: all addresses on the planet, all ward boundaries, all ward meeting times, all contact info, etc. I'm just guessing at things. A weekly update might be overkill for some information. I'd think meeting time and contact info could be more frequently updated data. I don't know how often there are ward boundary changes in the church. At a previous employer, our data provider gave us USA address changes monthly. It was a good chunk of data, so I could see updating every address in the world taking a few hours. It's not something you'd want to update every day.

Oh well, I'll see what happens tonight.

The ward meeting time is correct now.

My theory is that the meetinghouse locator website is updated weekly on a Friday night batch job. A weekly update makes sense. It's a read-only website. This gives people in church departments a few days to update any boundary, organizational, and leadership changes that typically occur on Sundays so that the Friday night update is capturing current information for the weekend.

I see some outlier cases where such and update plan is less convenient. For example, there are some units in the world that don't meet on Sundays, so a Friday evening update process would mean any changes for them are less current. Changing the meeting time for a particular week, like I did, may not work for those units. I don't know what time the update process completes, but if you're visiting some place like Kiribati that's UTC+14, you'll want to check your meeting time on Sunday morning to make sure your meeting time didn't change while you were sleeping. But that same guidance might also apply to places in Asia, Australia/New Zealand, etc.

Apparently the new "Unit Websites" tool doesn't get refreshed meeting times the same way other things today. I changed our ward's meeting time last Sunday and have observed that on the meetinghouse locator that the time updated as expected. On the our Unit Website, it still has the old time.

This thread has some more details on the issues Unit Websites had and some of the current timing challenges.

An update for anyone who finds this thread. Things have changed and meeting times are now updated more quickly. I haven't paid attention if it's same day or if it needs an overnight batch job, but it seems to get updated much more frequently than once a week.