HELP! CALENDARS INADVERTENTLY DELETED!!!

[chriswirick]

As a first-time bishopric member, I am pushing hard on the technology front to get our ward on the same page with event scheduling. So I'm "converting" them to the "gospel" of the shared calendar. Alas, we're off to a catastrophic start as it appears someone with admin rights has deleted half our ward calendars, surely by mistake. Can this be reversed? Does the church keep some sort of "recycle bin" for calendars or are they lost forever???

[chriswirick]

Turns out as I was walking our bishopric through the process of adding the calendars to their mobile devices this morning, one of them deleted some calendars thinking they were just removing them from their own subscription list. The similarities between the Choose Calendars and Manage Calendars options are clearly dangerous. He said he didn't get any kind of warning message. Seems like a catastrophic design flaw in the calendar system. No obvious safeguards in place, no visible recovery method. I hope the church tech folks have some sort of recovery mechanism at their disposal. If anything I'm glad this happened early in our transition to the church's calendar, but we'll still lose a lot of work if they can't be recovered, and I can easily see this happening again down the road. NOT GOOD.

[kd7mha]

based on the message you get when you click on the trash can I would say you will need to rebuild

Any scheduled events will be removed. Removal is final and cannot be undone.

[CrockettDR]

The user did get a bright red warning popup with a confirm.

We opened an issue to strengthen the warning message issue to make it clear they the calendar will be deleted for all members of the ward/stake. The current warning is in bright red, and has to be confirmed but clearly some users are not reading it carefully.

We may also need to include a warning when adding administrators. Instead of adding users as editors to specific calendars, clerks at times instead add them as admins and don't give them any training. But in this case it was a bishopric member who is a default admin who wasn't trained. The help files tries to warn against this.

If you delete a calendar the data is gone as the message states. We don't have a "recycle bin" implemented.

In the past four years or so, I believe we have had about five of these cases reported through feedback.

[chriswirick]

Thank you for the insider feedback. You mentioned the bishopric members have admin control over all the ward calendars by default (if I understood you correctly). Do I have any control over this? I won't be unable to convince our ward organizations to use the calendar faithfully if there's a risk of this happening again. I want to lock down the ability to delete calendars to prevent this catastrophe from reoccurring.

[russellhltn]

Thank you for the insider feedback. You mentioned the bishopric members have admin control over all the ward calendars by default (if I understood you correctly). Do I have any control over this?

Aside from training the bishopric members? No.

I think if you tell them to stay on member tools and never go to the web page, that will add a margin of safety.

[chriswirick]

Thank you for the insider feedback. You mentioned the bishopric members have admin control over all the ward calendars by default (if I understood you correctly). Do I have any control over this?

Aside from training the bishopric members? No.

I think if you tell them to stay on member tools and never go to the web page, that will add a margin of safety.

The problem is you can’t really ***do*** anything in the calendar on the Tools app aside from viewing.

[russellhltn]

The problem is you can’t really ***do*** anything in the calendar on the Tools app aside from viewing.

Which is perfectly fine if the person in question is a default admin but isn't expected to be doing anything with the calendars other than looking at them.

[chriswirick]

The problem is you can’t really ***do*** anything in the calendar on the Tools app aside from viewing.

Which is perfectly fine if the person in question is a default admin but isn't expected to be doing anything with the calendars other than looking at them.

Right. What happened here is he thought he was in the Choose Calendars area to pick which ones he wanted to sync to his devices. Naturally he hit the trash can icon to remove the ones he didn’t want to sync. :/

[russellhltn]

The post by CrockettDR indicates that they'll look into changes. But I'm not sure how much that will help. A lot of people are brain-dead to pop-up warnings.