Tech Forum

So recently I have had to do a lot of travel for work, I'm currently stationed in Italy with doesn't have YSA wards, but I prefer to attend them when I'm in the States.

I've recently become frustrated with the difficulty with finding YSA wards in the areas that I'm visiting. I have found that just typing in YSA doesn't always work, because since it's not in the official name of many wards it doesn't populate the search engine.

In order to find YSA wards to attend I've had to email friends and do Google searches to find them.

I've heard this sentiment expressed by my other friends that are transient as well and we think that it would be a great feature.

Have you tried maps.lds.org? I found that when I put a "pin" in a location and select "Find LDS places nearby", you'll get a list of wards that cover that area - including the specialty wars (like language or YSA) that cover that location.

Maybe generalizing this request would make more sense (russellhltn started to mention some things). If you could search for wards by specialty, such as YSA, SA, language, deaf, student, etc., that could be helpful for many people trying to locate wards.

The language issue might be tricky. At one time in our stake, we had one ward where 4 languages were spoken. I've also seen a case where an English-speaking ward provided Spanish translation for sacrament meeting only for some members who wanted to be in a mostly English-speaking ward, even though we have Spanish-speaking wards in the area. Some places in the world it's common to speak multiple languages, so I don't know what the wards do there.

Still, it would be nice to know if a ward is a "specialty" unit. One time my wife and I were out of town and ended up in a singles ward. Fortunately, we didn't have children yet, so the lack of Primary wasn't a problem. However, if I'm out of town now with the family, I'd sure value knowing which wards are singles wards for a different reason...so I don't wind up without Primary. And it would be good to know what language they're speaking.

The listings are a lot better for this information than they used to be, but there is room for improvement.

I think the maps page covers that fairly well. By default it will list the "family" ward. You have to scroll down to get to any of the specificity wards - provided there are any that cover that area. I think the only weakness is that you can't see all the wards in the area so you can pick which time to attend. In that case I think you have to locate the building and then you can see what wards attend there.

Language is a bit tricky. There's a whole range of support within a ward for a second language.

I played with this a bit. It's a lot better than it used to be. I can certainly find out more about going to church services at places around the world than I used to be able to. I could even find out that there's an English-speaking ward in a country I previously visited. When I visited there a few years back, I didn't know there was an English-speaking ward. I found out about it when I was there. The locator service has certainly improved.

Still, if you were looking for something specific, it's going to be difficult to find. You're going to have to do a lot of searching if it doesn't happen to be near where you are.

The church is better about listing something of the ward's specialty in the name, but it's not consistent. You might find something and you might not. It would be great if there were search filters to help people.