RossEvans wrote:[...] from your initial post, I don't understand your use of this feature. [...]
But the concept of verification within the maps.lds.org application is supposed to refer to whether that address is plotted correctly at that location, not whether the member actually lives at the address. Verification is essentially just a manual geocoding step.
So let me try to explain how we have been using it once more.
Yes, we use the verification status to identify whether the location is plotted correctly, but what would be the point of verifying an address at the correct location when we have discovered that the person doesn't live there at all? When we started we had a list of member households (over 100) that nobody in the ward leadership knew anything about, and we started with all households unverified. We quickly were able to verify those who come to church and those who were receiving their home and visiting teachers regularly, but we needed an organized way to keep track of, and sort through, those who were left.
The verification status of the maps worked great for this purpose, as we were able to change the status of those households where we knew that the members of that household were either there or not. The list of unverified locations were households that we still needed to address, those who no longer live in the ward were unmapped and put on the list of households that the clerk needed to deal with. Almost everyone else was verified as being where they were mapped, whether we see them regularly or not.
The point I made about the use of the filter feature is the fact that it would carry forward (in the previous version) to printing, allowing us to filter on the statuses when printing a map and unit list associated with that map. When the missionaries or quorums printed the map, they could filter on those who were verified, or those who were unverified (depending on their goals for the map) and sort them according to map number, which is a rough North-South/West-East filtering of the addresses, so the households would be generally grouped based on their neighborhoods, allowing those who were going to visit an easy way to consider a nearby household to their current location after a dinner appointment or some other visit. In areas where the units take up more than four city blocks this tends to be particularly useful.
I am aware that it is possible to download the list into a .csv file, but this doesn't address the point I just made about being able to use that filtered list when applying it to the map when printing and using a map-number sorting.
The download doesn't work correctly for some other languages, either, and gives unreadable characters when downloading the file, instead of household names. This is currently a problem in units where their language is based on Cyrillic characters. Not really a workaround for those whose language wasn't considered (or if it was, the fix hasn't been a priority) when the feature was implemented.
So, if the concept of the verification status was only meant to whether the address was plotted correctly and I am using it incorrectly, then I guess I didn't quite understand correctly
but I figured it's a forgivable offense, since it really met the need that we had in our ward and I am advocating for it, with this explanation, as a way to accomplish the same things we did where the lists had gotten stale and we needed to sort them out.
I was hoping, by bringing it up when the new version first entered Beta, to avoid the situation where this feature was missed in the new version when it 'officially' replaced the old one. I am hoping, as I said, that this feature is still on the list and will be implemented.