Beta Maps Site

I have gone to the beta maps site and used it a couple of times. I have even gone through and verified all the address. Now when I go back to the beta site it is not working properly. It will load the Ward boundaries, but when it starts to load the locations of all the housholds in the ward IE will hang.

The website address I am using is beta-maps.lds.org.

mmacconnell wrote:I have gone to the beta maps site and used it a couple of times. I have even gone through and verified all the address. Now when I go back to the beta site it is not working properly. It will load the Ward boundaries, but when it starts to load the locations of all the housholds in the ward IE will hang.

The website address I am using is beta-maps.lds.org.

You need to keep in mind that the program is still in BETA, as noted by its web site URL. I would recommend that you use the feedback feature on the site and report the issue. This is the quickest method of reporting a problem, as we cannot guarantee that the programmers of the site are monitoring this web forum.

mmacconnell wrote:The website address I am using is beta-maps.lds.org.

Wow, I had no idea this existed! Very cool. It actually prompted me to sign up for a forum account just to suggest one thing:

If there could be some sort of option to view the whole stake (not just your ward), that would amazing. I'm thinking along the lines of emergency preparedness planning. I'm in CA, so earthquake planning is always on someone's mind. To have everything for the stake would really be awesome.

Thanks for this work. It looks great so far, even for a beta.

bbdd wrote:If there could be some sort of option to view the whole stake (not just your ward), that would amazing.

That is has been available since the beta release in November 2009. To view the stake boundaries you must be signed onto the site. Then at the My Ward tab make sure the "Show resources and services assigned to ward on map" option is checked. Click the link for your stake. If the boundary is not displayed click the "Zoom to > Stake boundary" just above the households names list.

jdlessley wrote:That is has been available since the beta release in November 2009. To view the stake boundaries you must be signed onto the site. Then at the My Ward tab make sure the "Show resources and services assigned to ward on map" option is checked. Click the link for your stake. If the boundary is not displayed click the "Zoom to > Stake boundary" just above the households names list.

While this does, in fact, show the stake boundary, I was hoping to see the members as well.

I find it interesting that as a member I can submit corrections to locations of church facilities but not my own residence.

Our institute building is accessed from a road after it enters campus, but the geo-coded location is always just at the edge of campus several hundred yards away. I can click on the icon for the institute, click move, click on the roof of the building, can click submit. A line is drawn indicating the correction that I submitted.

robartsd wrote:I find it interesting that as a member I can submit corrections to locations of church facilities but not my own residence.

Although I can see your point, I would guess it is a matter of handling volume efficiently. Corrections to locations of church facilities will be on the order of hundreds, perhaps thousands. The regular Church departments can handle that load. But corrections to individual homes could be on the order of tens or hundreds of thousands, and there are good reasons why a ward or stake would want to control consistency.

I suppose the Church could set things up so that corrections submitted by individual members were sent to ward clerks rather than to a central Church department, but that would complicate the feedback mechanism. Nonetheless, I can see how that would be a helpful improvement at some point.

I'm the emergency planning coordinator for my ward and this tool is useful for visualizing where members are located. I told a member of my bishopric about the beta site and he signed in and noticed that he had some options for assigning households to emergency response groups, and it sounded like he could mark locations as verified or something.

Is there any way that the bishopric can note that I'm able to perform some of those actions as well?

bschecketts wrote:Is there any way that the bishopric can note that I'm able to perform some of those actions as well?

As far as I know, currently address verification can be done only be actual bishopric members or ward clerks (including assistants). That seems like an appropriate restriction to me.

But it does seem reasonable for people with callings related to emergency preparedness (who very often are not clerks) to be able to modify the emergency prep information on the site. It's not possible right now, but it would be a good enhancement.

I AM Ward Clerk, and have yet to find a place within MLS to 'Verify An Address'

Am I just having a "Male Moment"?

jstoddard wrote:I AM Ward Clerk, and have yet to find a place within MLS to 'Verify An Address'

Am I just having a "Male Moment"?

You're confusing the MLS program with the new Beta Maps site.
The address verification being discussed here is that in the Beta Maps site.

jstoddard wrote:I AM Ward Clerk, and have yet to find a place within MLS to 'Verify An Address'

Welcome to the forum! These names are changing so fast, it can be hard to know what people are referring to! this thread is not referring to verifying anything in MLS.

This thread discusses a ward clerk's ability to 'Verify An Address' on the beta LDS maps site, which I think we now are calling the "Meetinghouse Locator Tool," and it is accessible via the "tools" section in www.beta.lds.org under that name, or via direct link. It's not widely known yet, because it is still in beta, but seems fully functional.

It's best done with a high-speed internet connection. Try it, it's very cool, but you must sign in with you LDS account to see your ward. The site then recognizes you as a ward clerk (if called properly in MLS) and allows you to "verify" your ward members addresses by dragging their member icon to their house on a satellite image.

Your member addresses for the maps site come from MLS, and any address changes must be made in MLS.

jstoddard wrote:Am I just having a "Male Moment"?

All my moments are "male moments." Just ask my wife and kids...

I love the beta-maps web site, but the site appears to have gone down in the last couple of days. I hope this is only a testing or reconfiguration issue. Please tell us that it will return soon!

nicklewis wrote:I love the beta-maps web site, but the site appears to have gone down in the last couple of days. I hope this is only a testing or reconfiguration issue. Please tell us that it will return soon!

It is working for me in Firefox.

What browser are you using?

Can you not even get to the site?

Or what error are you seeing?

http://beta-maps.lds.org/ isn't working for me either. IE8. I just get IE's "unable to connect" page.

RussellHltn wrote:http://beta-maps.lds.org/ isn't working for me either. IE8. I just get IE's "unable to connect" page.

Hmm. I tried it both with Firefox 3.6.6 and IE 8.0.7600, and I had no problems at all.

It's not working for me either with FF3.6 (cannot connect).

RussellHltn wrote:http://beta-maps.lds.org/ isn't working for me either. IE8. I just get IE's "unable to connect" page.

For me it redirects to https://beta-maps.lds.org/ I don't know if that will make a difference to try the https url directly or not.

Alan_Brown wrote:Hmm. I tried it both with Firefox 3.6.6 and IE 8.0.7600, and I had no problems at all.

I'm a frequent user of https://beta-maps.lds.org and all I get today when I try to connect is a "Connection was reset" error from Firefox. (IE fails also.)
I'm in SLC, UT on Qwest DSL if that helps at all.

I have been using both IE 8 and Chrome for months on beta-maps. (The print function in Chrome doesn't work. I would switch to IE 8 for printing.)

I am running a RoadRunner ISP at 10meg in central Florida. Still no luck signing on.

ryan jones wrote:It is working for me in Firefox.

So far we have 4 people reporting it doesn't work, and 2 people reporting that it does work. The 2 people reporting that it works (Ryan Jones and I) are on the Church's network; the 4 people for whom it doesn't work are not on the Church network. Coincidence?

Alan_Brown wrote:So far we have 4 people reporting it doesn't work, and 2 people reporting that it does work. The 2 people reporting that it works (Ryan Jones and I) are on the Church's network; the 4 people for whom it doesn't work are not on the Church network. Coincidence?

I thought about that and disconnected my VPN and it still was working for me. It might be that I was already logged in. I'll try again.

Edit: It worked fine for me without my VPN and a new browser (IE 7). I got the main page and was able to sign in and view my ward.

ryan jones wrote:For me it redirects to https://beta-maps.lds.org/ I don't know if that will make a difference to try the https url directly or not.

Whether I use https://beta-maps.lds.org/ or http://beta-maps.lds.org the results are the same. I get the "cannot connect" error. I'm using FF3.6.6

Interesting that I can use http://beta.lds.org while others cannot.

It wasn't working for me in two different browsers (blank page, cannot connect) five minutes ago. Just now it worked in FF 3.6.6. Try again?

I wonder if some of the servers are down but not all of them.

ryan jones wrote:For me it redirects to https://beta-maps.lds.org/ I don't know if that will make a difference to try the https url directly or not.

Still no joy. Neither Http nor https works for me.

I can ping it. 216.49.176.52 is what responds.

ryan jones wrote:I wonder if some of the servers are down but not all of them.

Sounds likely. I tried again and now it's not working again.

It's back up again. Sort of like the B of M history

techgy wrote:Sort of like the B of M history

It's the Web Server Pride Cycle.

But is it beta.maps.lds.org or beta-maps.lds.org because the first work (for me).

marianomarini_vi wrote:But is it beta.maps.lds.org or beta-maps.lds.org because the first work (for me).

The URL beta.maps.lds.org will indeed take you somewhere, but it is only to the regular maps.lds.org site, not to beta-maps.lds.org.

If you look closely, you'll see that beta.maps.lds.org and maps.lds.org bring you to the exact same page.

The regular maps.lds.org site has a link "Try the new version of LDS Maps" that will take you to beta-maps.lds.org.

How do you submit feedback when you can no longer access the site? For many of us, it has been inaccessible for days.

The Feedback link on most beta sites should suffice to submit any feedback to the Church.

To me it still don't work...

The website is down for me as well. I have tried both on the church network and at home. I have even tried with Sefari as well as IE 8. The beta-maps.lds.org site will not come up and has not work for about a week. There is no link to provide feedback as the site itself is down.

I discovered an interesting thing. I took my laptop to church and was able to access the site, possibly because we are running through the Church firewall there even though I am using the same ISP at home. But at home on the same laptop, there is still no joy.

It seems that as of this evening, I again have access to the beta map site at home. I have no idea what happened since this afternoon when it didn't work, but I am grateful to have it back! Thank you!

The site has always worked for me, however, this morning when I used it I was given a map of the Nevada area instead of my home ward in California. This has never occurred before. After the page had completely loaded the only way I could obtain the correct map of my home ward was to click on the link to it.

It's been a few weeks since I've used the beta-maps.lds.org site but it's never displayed this problem. I've always been given the appropriate map upon the completion of the loading of the page.

Edit: I guess that's why they call it a BETA site

Joy is so fleeting...Lost it again...

techgy wrote:The site has always worked for me, however, this morning when I used it I was given a map of the Nevada area instead of my home ward in California. This has never occurred before. After the page had completely loaded the only way I could obtain the correct map of my home ward was to click on the link to it.

It's been a few weeks since I've used the beta-maps.lds.org site but it's never displayed this problem. I've always been given the appropriate map upon the completion of the loading of the page.

Edit: I guess that's why they call it a BETA site

I've noticed that the maps seem to use cookies or settings from Google and/or Microsoft to display the last location I was looking at with either maps product. Sometimes that has bothered me that the beta site doesn't remember and override separate from my other map searches.

kgthunder wrote:I've noticed that the maps seem to use cookies or settings from Google and/or Microsoft to display the last location I was looking at with either maps product. Sometimes that has bothered me that the beta site doesn't remember and override separate from my other map searches.

Yea, I noticed that. I had already cleared cookies just prior to going to the site (the browser dumps it all when it closes). It only happened once. Subsequent logins all provide me with the correct home ward map. It was interesting to note that if the location was saved in a cookie, I have to wonder how it got set to Nevada. I don't know anyone in Nevada that's a member of the church and haven't viewed any maps from that area.

As I said, "It's a Beta".

techgy wrote:Yea, I noticed that. I had already cleared cookies just prior to going to the site (the browser dumps it all when it closes). It only happened once. Subsequent logins all provide me with the correct home ward map. It was interesting to note that if the location was saved in a cookie, I have to wonder how it got set to Nevada. I don't know anyone in Nevada that's a member of the church and haven't viewed any maps from that area.

As I said, "It's a Beta".

Two possibilities are that someone moved from Nevada to your ward and hadn't been re-geo-located yet, or moved out to Nevada and were re-geo-located to Nevada, but not yet removed from your ward's beta-maps list. (I've seen instances of both of these scenarios.)

rontilby wrote:Two possibilities are that someone moved from Nevada to your ward and hadn't been re-geo-located yet, or moved out to Nevada and were re-geo-located to Nevada, but not yet removed from your ward's beta-maps list. (I've seen instances of both of these scenarios.)

I suppose that's possible. I don't generally hear about where people move in from unless they're introduced in a PHD meeting. It's not a big deal - just something that caught my attention and since the site's still in Beta, I thought it worth mentioning. Thanks for the thoughts.

Is there a secret to getting the boundaries to show? They were fine yesterday but I haven't been able to get any boundaries today....

zaneclark wrote:Is there a secret to getting the boundaries to show? They were fine yesterday but I haven't been able to get any boundaries today....

Still can't get the boundaries to show and I need it to show to the stake presidency tomorrow morning....help!!

zaneclark wrote:Still can't get the boundaries to show and I need it to show to the stake presidency tomorrow morning....help!!

Have you clicked on Legend and made sure that Selected Boundary is checked? As long as that is checked I see ward and stake boundaries just fine. If it isn't checked they disappear.

eblood66 wrote:Have you clicked on Legend and made sure that Selected Boundary is checked? As long as that is checked I see ward and stake boundaries just fine. If it isn't checked they disappear.

That was it!! I knew it would be something simple but couldn't find it...THANK YOU!!!

It looks like the LDS.org team made another change on us...

They designed their own controls, instead of using the ones that come with Google or Bing maps...

My suggestion may be a bit late, but I "validate an address" using the USPS website
https://tools.usps.com/go/ZipLookupAction!input.action

The name of the website may seem misleading, but just plug in the supposed MLS Street 1, Street 2 (e.g. Apt #, Unit #), City, and State data, and the valid address -- by USPS standards -- will be returned, including the valid zip/postal code. An invalid address will also be identified, which should then be verified by contacting the household.