Heads Up: Notebooks, Tags Unreliable; Use at Your Own Risk
Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 3:17 pm
I truly hope your experience with the online study notebooks and tags is much better than mine (but I see from many forum entries I am not alone). We appreciate the ability to look up and read scriptures both online and on portable devices. But the online study notebook tools are UNSTABLE: Scriptures saved in notebooks evaporate without warning. Tags assigned to scriptures don't always stick. And there is never a courteous warning of problems on the web site. ... We've wasted MANY hours. Be forewarned...
Our experience: After being called as senior missionaries, my wife and I decided to develop lesson plans along the lines of Preach My Gospel. We planned to store specific scriptures in specific sequence in the study notebooks. Separate notebooks would be created for the different lessons and sub-topics. This was our first use of these particular online tools (we're not computer novices). We spent many hours creating these notebooks, then synced them to our portable devices. Then we noticed the content of these notebooks would change: scriptures would disappear, and the column of entries in a notebook would show many duplicates. Similarly we've seen tagged scriptures dropped. One day we would have 10 scriptures tagged with "Faith," and the next day there would be three! ... We've now gone to lesson plans on Word documents with scriptures looked up individually the old way. None of the potential efficiency of notebooks or tags has been realized.
We've sent numerous messages via the Feedback link on the bottom of many pages. Usually we hear that the issue is being referred to someone who can deal with it. (I believe that person is now serving a mission in a location without electricity, and has been there for quite some time!) ... Does anyone know if developers or people with authority read these forum posts?
I wish either sufficient resources would be dedicated to these tools to develop and test them properly before releasing them on lds.org, OR there would be some banner indicating the tools are under development and with current problems. If I'm the only one with these problems, that's OK. But if not, this part of lds.org is a POOR reflection on the Church. I love the Church. I find most of lds.org to be very good. But this notebook tool needs to be MUCH more reliable before given to the public. (End of rant; this is mild compared to my frustration. Sorry for the length.)
Our experience: After being called as senior missionaries, my wife and I decided to develop lesson plans along the lines of Preach My Gospel. We planned to store specific scriptures in specific sequence in the study notebooks. Separate notebooks would be created for the different lessons and sub-topics. This was our first use of these particular online tools (we're not computer novices). We spent many hours creating these notebooks, then synced them to our portable devices. Then we noticed the content of these notebooks would change: scriptures would disappear, and the column of entries in a notebook would show many duplicates. Similarly we've seen tagged scriptures dropped. One day we would have 10 scriptures tagged with "Faith," and the next day there would be three! ... We've now gone to lesson plans on Word documents with scriptures looked up individually the old way. None of the potential efficiency of notebooks or tags has been realized.
We've sent numerous messages via the Feedback link on the bottom of many pages. Usually we hear that the issue is being referred to someone who can deal with it. (I believe that person is now serving a mission in a location without electricity, and has been there for quite some time!) ... Does anyone know if developers or people with authority read these forum posts?
I wish either sufficient resources would be dedicated to these tools to develop and test them properly before releasing them on lds.org, OR there would be some banner indicating the tools are under development and with current problems. If I'm the only one with these problems, that's OK. But if not, this part of lds.org is a POOR reflection on the Church. I love the Church. I find most of lds.org to be very good. But this notebook tool needs to be MUCH more reliable before given to the public. (End of rant; this is mild compared to my frustration. Sorry for the length.)