Setting an inactive member profile to private - Ward Directory

We have members that don't use LDS.org and are inactive or are not to be contacted. Can membership clerks or bishoprics set opt-out/private option for those individuals? We tried via LDS.org but it didn't work. Can it be done through MLS?

jla59 wrote:We have members that don't use LDS.org and are inactive or are not to be contacted. Can membership clerks or bishoprics set opt-out/private option for those individuals? We tried via LDS.org but it didn't work. Can it be done through MLS?

Just to clarify, I can access most members privacy settings, but on some I get this error message.
"Sorry, data is temporarily not available for this application. Please try again later."

What does this mean? Has the member already been opted out? Is it because the member has never created a login?

jla59 wrote:Just to clarify, I can access most members privacy settings, but on some I get this error message.
"Sorry, data is temporarily not available for this application. Please try again later."

What does this mean? Has the member already been opted out? Is it because the member has never created a login?

It has nothing to do with a member not creating a login -- I have set privacy settings for such members. Generally the "Sorry, data is temporarily not available" is indeed temporary. In my experience, it's a problem related to the server, not to the record you are working on, so at some later time I am able to try again and complete the operation.

If you consistently get that error on a particular record, that indicates a server-side error that is related to the particular data. For such a problem, you may need to contact Local Unit Support.

jla59 wrote:Just to clarify, I can access most members privacy settings, but on some I get this error message.
"Sorry, data is temporarily not available for this application. Please try again later."

Do these less-active families have non-member spouses? The symptoms you describe match my experience in trying to edit household profiles that have spurious non-member spouses listed in the directory. See this thread. In my experience in such cases, the "Sorry, data is temporarily not available for this application. Please try again later" error message is wrong in these cases, and has nothing to do with the cause of the problem. Profiles of these records are never available for editing.

In these particular cases -- about 10 percent of the households in my ward are affected -- the underlying problem is that the non-member names apparently are being harvested from the member's own confidential membership-detail record and are being published on the website without permission. These names do not appear in the MLS directory or in the "classic" website directory.

Non-members, of course, have no ability to log in and "opt out" of the directory. The member spouse -- as well as leaders and clerks with administrative privilege -- can log in, but are offered no abilty to suppress just the non-member's name, only the entire household. Even that doesn't work. That member or administrator cannot edit that houshold profile at all. As you have discovered, trying to do so always gets the misleading error message above.

In the web service that feeds the directory site, there is a non-confidential numeric "individualId" for members and households, which should be unique. But these non-member spouses all have an individualId of -1. I suspect that this condition triggers the editing error, which falls through to an error message written for some other error state entirely.

These issues have been reported through multiple channels, but I am unaware of any resolution. Since no one will even affirm that publishing the non-member names without permission at all is now happening as a matter of new policy, my working assumption is that their inclusion is a bug, the root cause of all these issues. But no one has acknowledged that, either.

As aebrown indicated the issue with the error does appear to go away on subsequent attempts. I was successful in making the member in question private; this particular case was involving just a member in the directory. I'm still looking into the non-member issue. First, I will verify in MLS if the non-members have explicit non-member records; if so I will remove them. After a couple days I will return to lds.org ward directory to see if the non-member is removed. I will post again with my results.

jla59 wrote:As aebrown indicated the issue with the error does appear to go away on subsequent attempts. I was successful in making the member in question private; this particular case was involving just a member in the directory. I'm still looking into the non-member issue. First, I will verify in MLS if the non-members have explicit non-member records; if so I will remove them. After a couple days I will return to lds.org ward directory to see if the non-member is removed. I will post again with my results.

If the case you are investigating does not involve non-member spouses, just members, then that is a different situation. The issue I am discussing involves the publication of non-member spouses in the website directory.

In my ward, paradoxically, there are a few special non-member spouses (presumably entered, per express policy, with the permisssion of the non-members). But these non-members do not appear in the website directory. This is not so big a problem as the reverse issue discussed in the other thread, which is that many non-member names that do not have MLS records and do not appear in the "classic" website directory are being published in the new website without permisssion. This is the root problem.