Release 19.0 - Key Features

ScoutsTracker now includes embedded self-training.

The purpose of adding training is to use gamification to introduce users to different areas of ScoutsTracker that they might not otherwise think to visit.

The training is modeled after the OAS requirements, with a basic competency (“I know…” or “I have…”), followed by details explaining why the functionality covered by a particular training skills is of interest, and possibly some important concepts to consider.

There are then some instructions that explain how to complete the training skill.

• For the “I know…” competency, usually the user can simply read the text, and tick a completion checkbox when they understand the concept being covered
• But most other training skills, the training skill is marked as complete when the user goes to particular page, or flips a switch, or presses a button

Consequently, most people will advance through a significant chuck of the training just through their normal day-to-day use of ScoutsTracker, e.g., if they've found a particular account settings page on their own, then the related training skill will be marked as complete without the user having to explicitly try to complete the training skill.

However, if a user is ever has questions about how to do something, the training does serve as a knowledge base… e.g., they can search the training for “consent” and find all the skills relating to the Parent/Guardian Consent Forms.

Training skills can be tackled in any order, i.e., although there are “next steps”, those serve as recommendations only.

The training is presented in two formats:

• A list. By default, the list shows the “recommended” skills that the user might want to tackle next. It consists of all the follow-on skills to the skills they've already completed (i.e., the logical next steps). However, if can be changed to show all skills, rather than just the recommended ones.
• A tree. This shows all the skills that the user can earn, displayed in a radial tree. Hovering the mouse over any node in the tree will show a tooltip with the basic competency, and clicking on the node will actually drilled down to the detailed view of the skill. The tree is best suited to desktops/laptops that have a big screen and a mouse.

As a user completes more and more training skills, they'll earn progressively higher stages of a virtual ScoutsTracker badge. This badge is just for bragging rights, and (currently) cannot be purchased. This is a gamification that will encourage some types of users to do more and more training.

There's also a leaderboard, which shows how all of the Scouters (and youth with special login permissions) stack up against each other. Again, this is gamification that will encourage people who don't want to be last, or have a competitive nature.

• Minor tweaks to the display of account creation page (hiding Area, for example)
• SS-5555: Tweaks to visibility of items under “Account”, for non-admins
• SS-5679: Inactive members with no entry/exit dates and no event participation (ever!) are now culled from the Attendance report
• SS-5615: More consistent used of “parent/guardian” rather than “parent”
• IMPORT: Strip underscores out of column names to compensate for Excel quirk
• IMPORT: Update the instructions to include just 2023 members or 2023+2024 members
• COMMITTEE: Better presentation of custom names when creating section accounts
• Improved the display of Scouters with the “Other” position when looking at “Other Scouting Roles”
• When other participants who are default ineligible to attend events are marked as attending an event that has signup disabled, the divider has an annoying habit of constantly collapsing
• SS-5645: Support colon-less event start/end times like “215” and “1415”

• SS-5473: Pre-existing unverified email addresses could be used as delegate emails, but then the user got a cryptic message about being unable to verified “undefined” email address
• SS-5474: Could not attach documents to non-Scouting events
• SS-5474: Risk Management controls were visible for virtual events, leading to confusion
• SS-5527: Can't give credit on a Personal Event
• Remove hard-coded reference to edition name
• SS-5568: Possible use of old signup deadline logic?
• WIKI: SS-5595: Update the Member Type documentionation to align with the code
• COMMITTEE: SS-5594: Couldn't sign AAF's from within Committee edition
• SS-5684: Active members with exit dates should be in the attendance report, because they are actually active
• Recover from the “OMG all my data disappeared bug” by always setting the sync timestamp to zero if no records exist
• SIGNUP: SS-5628: Couple of annoyances with members who are default ineligible to attend events
• SIGNUP: SS-5609: Couldn't take attendance in the first few hours of all-day events
• SS-5636: Math error meant “Auto-assign by age” wasn't working for some end-of-December youth
• SS-5643: Saving a login was clearing the reply-to address
• SS-5650: Better job of handling of malformed MessageTemplate records
• RSVP: SS-5658: Need to do a check to make sure that a corrupted email that contains *|HTML:RSVP|* still gets cleaned up before mergevars are applied
• RSVP: SS-5664: Signup was ending a few hours too soon
• SS-5661: Printing signup/attendance sheets wasn't handling collapsed/expanded sections of ineligible members correctly
• SS-5662: Other Participants weren't being included in “Reports” | “Member qualifications” report
• ADMIN: When connecting to a specific account after attaching a support login, you were asked to sign in, every time
• When other participants who are default ineligible to attend events are marked as attending an event that has signup disabled and a non-zero event fee for other participants, then you couldn't record payments
• COMMITTEE: SS-5682: When creating a new committee account, the preview was incorrectly saying it would display as “- Cubs”
• HELLO: SS-5686: News Feed should only ever contain posts with “Everyone” visibility
• SS-5688: The isEmailAddressVerified check was being done on the fromEmail address rather than the senderEmailAddress (which takes into account delegates)
• Removed a red-herring “problem sending your email” message when composing a draft

• SS-5705: Use access annotations for logins, even if a display name is provided
• SS-5705: Be smarter about culling redundant usage of last names in logins' access annotations
• SS-5501: Members with “Can see private” can now drill down to members (but still can't edit fields)
• Nicer display of “Use a different login”
• Message telling user's they don't have perm-superuser or perm-private now lets them contact the account admins, easily
• Improvements to the “Email Addresses & Communication” report
• TRAINING: Improved creole formatting of instructions
• TRAINING: SS-5726: Topic wjoiq937 is automatically marked as complete if you're a parent/youth login who only accesses a single member

• SS-5701: Rare conflict between event IDs could result in AAF approval notifications going to the wrong event contacts
• WIKI: SS-5694: Updated the Import Format documentation
• SS-5706: Tweaked wording of the creating a new member dialog, so that it wasn't making assumptions about the person being imported
• SS-5684: Multi-section Master/Overview events were showing up in the attendance report
• Clicking “Attendance” on the “Seasonal Assessments” report didn't do anything
• Members with perm-private but not perm-email couldn't see quals
• Two 'Send Email'/'Delete' links in the custom recipient list action menu
• SS-5673: Custom quals with an equivalent (e.g., RFA grants WFA) that didn't a category were being ignored
• SS-5700: Duplicate quals were being shown

• Improved change detection when editing away from a partially-editing AAF
• If a member's status is “active”, we can hide the “Left the Troop” field because it always just shows “unknown” for all active members
• SS-5560: show opted-out notifications people in lists of outing contacts, signup notifications, but annotate them and show a message if admin tries to select them
• TRAINING: Add training score to ADMIN:lookupLogin
• Removing “is a two-deep contact person” should also remove them from “pref-welcometwodeep”.
• Prevent being an account contact if you've opted out of receiving notifications
• Don't complete any training skills unless signed in
• NEWSFEED: Don't bother trying to display the news feed until initialization is complete
• ADMIN: Welcome Message to new admins should include link for initial sign in
• COLONY: SS-5740: Add Progression (brown/blue/white tails) to auto-filled Pond Map
• ADMIN: Added a cullBlacklist method

• SS-5732: Signup notifications could go to multiple sections if they both had events with the same ID
• “Account” | “Other Participants” wasn't visually highlighting inactive members
• SS-5734: The toReversed array function wasn't supported by most browsers until recently, so added a wrapper to implement it in a safe way
• SS-5744: SQL error in signup notification recipients generation
• Going to Signup/Attendance/QuickPick “Filter By” shows blank groupings if there are no Patrols or Adventure Teams

The ScoutsTracker “Bucket List” is an alternative way you can view and tackle the Outdoor Adventure Skills.

Rather than bundling requirements into rigid pre-defined Stages, this Continuous Learning approach allows you to focus on and build up expertise in specific areas, as befits your needs and your interests. In other words, it lets you chart your own path through the “bucket list” of OAS competencies you'll want to complete before leaving Scouting!

While the badge requirements shown below are all chained together into sequences, that's mostly just a way to suggest logical next steps for you to consider. There's actually nothing to stop you from tackling any skill at any time, although you'll typically find that you'll end up working your way out from the centre.

• SS-5578: Add “signup yes and unpaid” to Add Recipients
• SS-5523: If an event is Personal, and it’s in a previous Scouting year, and there are no attendees, then put up a message saying that you need to add at least one attendee, rather than saving
• Add prompt when cancelling a subscription to a multi-section event that is hosted by your account… e.g., “do you want to cancel for all sections, or just your own?”
• COMMITTEE: Can now “Add Recipients” by signup status (as could Section accounts)
• SS-5760: Parents/Youth can now edit their own login names
• SS-5760: Logins that accessed absolutely *no* progression records in that section's badges (or OAS) could repeatedly see a sync progress bar if there was non-OAS progress (e.g., PAB) in another section

• “Report” | “Attendance” | “In Bulk” allows you to sign youth up for scouter-only events, or anyone to cancelled events, or if they're inelegible, etc.
• Editing a cancelled event uncancels it
• MULTIACCOUNT: Enabling “multi-section” when initially creating an event was not doing the push to the selected sections
• MULTIACCOUNT: Deleting a master event and the Group subscriber leaves the Troop events, but they still say that they are subscribed to the Group event (which no longer exists)
• Picking PAB as Related Requirement shows really wonky column alignment for the requirements
• SS-5761: Clicking next/prev while picking related requirements incorrectly changes some wrong headers
• SS-5766: Gallery headers for Other Participants are wrong
• TRAINING: SS-5764: Tweaked wording of topic rtuqm801