When is an ordinance really available to be assigned

LegacyUser

James Mc Gown Mc Evoy said: I notice that you have changed ordinance assignments so that you can request to personally do an ordinance without having to ask the person who reserved it to release the ordinance. This is great, however, now, I have no way to tell if an ordinance has not been assigned without going to the person's ordinance page. In the past, all I had to do was look at the color of the ordinance icon - green meant that the ordinance had not yet been assigned, red or gray or dark green meant the assignments had been made or the work completed. I wish there was a way to tell if the ordinances had not been completed and not already assigned without having to go to the person's ordinance page.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: That's because when you pull a shared name, you are temporarily reserving it. If you do not complete the ordinance within 90 days (when the temples reopen for vicarious ordinances) then it returns to its former place as a shared ordinance.

If the ordinance was previously unreserved, then you are reserving the ordinance for a two-year period that is changed to one year after the last ordinance has been performed.

Your complaint is common, but that was never the purpose of the green icon. It always have meant that the ordinances were available. Temple-shared required special action to obtain the ordinance. That is no longer required.

I can understand your dilemma. A number of folks have used the icons as an indicator that the profile had ordinances available that were not already reserved. Jim Greene has stated that

We are no longer in a position where names submitted to the temple is more important than to have the ordinances performed. Therefore, while not changing the meaning we are changing the emphasis of the green temple. We need to think of it as "This ordinance is available for temple work to be performed." It does not mean "This ordinance is ready to be requested/reserved or submitted/shared with the temple." (This clarified statement was made by Jim Greene on June 17th.)

The emphasis is now on performing the massive backlog of waiting ordinances. Many have been waiting for a half-decade or longer. Once the temples reopen for vicarious ordinance work, the situation should improve, but the backlog is very great and the ordinances need to be completed.

What you can do, using the green icons, is to open each person's profile and make sure it is complete, with all hints, issues, and possible duplicates resolved. What you may find is that there is a possible duplicate. This now will prevent a user from reserving ordinances, but has not in the past.

One of the suggestions that has been made is to offer two green icon shades -- one that indicates that all ordinances are shared and the other to indicate one or more ordinances can be reserved. That has been passed to the council (led by Elder Bednar) for consideration (two other members of the Council of the Twelve are also on that council).

LegacyUser

JimGreene said: See other posts, green means it is available to perform. Ordinances Ready will pick up any and all green temples, you do not need to worry about it being assigned or not. If it is green it will be done. Either by you if you reserve it, or by someone else if you don't. We are automatically "assigning" ordinances, you no longer need to do that.

LegacyUser

James Mc Gown Mc Evoy said: I used to do work by looking for names that had ordinances that needed to be assigned. Now I have no way to do that. Sometimes a green status truly does have ordinances that have not been assigned. Most of the time the ordinances have already been assigned.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: James,

I'm not sure what you mean by "assigned."

In the past, assigned usually meant handing someone a card to take to the temple and complete the ordinances. You can still do that. FamilySearch never provided a way to track who you assigned a card to.

If by assigned, you mean transfer to another user, such as a member of your ancestral family including their descendants, again, you can still do that with those in your My Reservations section. --

If you want to share a name in your temple shared list, you will have to unshare it first, which should put it back in your My Reservations (if you initially reserved the ordinance) where you can then assign the name to a friend or family member.

LegacyUser

James Mc Gown Mc Evoy said: From your descriptions, I mean reserved. I want to know how I can search for ancestors for whom ordinances have not already been reserved. It was easy before, I just had to look for a green status. But now green really means that a name is ready but an ordinance has not yet been completed and may or may not have been reserved.

LegacyUser

James Mc Gown Mc Evoy said: Thank you for the clarification.