As most of you know, new anti-spam legislation was recently introduced that changed the way that services that generate email have to behave. While the email service I used already supported unsubscribes, the legislation introduced a fundamental change in that recipients of emails now have to explicitly opt-in. Previously, it was assumed that anyone with whom you had a legitimate relationship (e.g., based on the fact that you were using your ScoutsTracker account) had implicitly opted-in.

So now under “Account” | “Signed in as” you can see your “Opt-In Email Permissions”. When you next sign in, you'll be told that you must decide whether you want to opt-in or opt-out of a couple of email types.

Furthermore, if you opt out of receiving notifications (e.g., pushed events, migrated youth, event signups, etc.) this has an impact on other functionality that I now need to accommodate (e.g., if you try to add yourself to the list of people who get notified when youths signup for an event, but you've previously opted out of receiving notifications)

Note: direct scouter-to-youth/parent emails is not affected, nor covered by CASL, as those are non-commercial messages written by you, to a set of recipients chosen by you, and triggered by you. In this regard, ScoutsTracker operates no differently than gmail or yahoo or hotmail… i.e., ScoutsTracker simply acts as the delivery mechanism.

I'll skip all the boring technical descriptions, and just say that the upshot is that with a database managed remotely, it allows for faster recovery after a server crash.

• Show birthdays in current scouting year AND any upcoming birthdays

• New accounts were not being given 'active' status
• GGC guides edition was throwing an exception on connection
• Expired accounts could still send emails
• All leader signups were showing names in inactive style
• Leader join dates weren't being displayed
• Off-line editing of event says you can't add attachments, even though you haven't tried to
• Relicensing group license creates a new license, but the user has no way to apply it. It should just extend the current volume.
• Input placeholder stylings are now consistent across browsers

• Added “Patrol Points” pseudo-badge. If you want it, ask me.
• Add a dialog when 'secure access only“ mode redirecting to https
• Tweaked myscouts/spreadsheet import to be more flexible when parsing the “member number” column
• Annual Report sorts events from oldest to newest
• Preserve the “Show Other Schedules” choices between sessions
• If an event is set to “leaders only” then the attendance should default to leaders, not youth
• Support “birth_date” column in spreadsheet import
• Better text in message when you have too many active youth
• Uses “og” tags so that link previews in FB show the actual logo, instead of random images (e.g., the “Thanks” badge)

• Emails from senders with yahoo.com or aol.com domains weren't being delivered (due to recent DMARC changes)
• Emails archive showed messages from inactive leaders as being sent by the current login
• “Reply” to an event email didn't re-use the recipients
• Couldn't re-edit draft email, if “other emails” contained ill-formatted email addresses

• Embedded calendars in websites didn't always show other sections
• Re-sharing a section's event didn't work
• When a section clicked “join” for an association which was already was collaborating with it (as an “other section”), the section wouldn't be listed as association invitee
• You could re-share/push an event to the originating section
• Better feedback for users who attempt to enter their own section key

• Errors during outing sync would notify the user, but not actually retain the unsynced change
• Re-launching a “secure mode” account, after making off-line changes, was discarding the unsynced changes
• Syncs that were skipped to avoid re-insertion of the same event, now return an confirmation ID so they correctly get stripped from the list of queued updates
• When auto-freeing up space, refuse to scrub other section if there are off-line changes
• Better reminders/alerts about unsynced changes when working off line

• CHROME: embedding http://scoutstracker.ca/scouts/embed no longer works, now must reference “embed.html”
• Youth were being challenged for opt in/out when connecting via https
• Positive opt-in's weren't being checked for
• Cancelled events still show up on “Amounts Owing” if a person RSVP'd before cancellation. If it is cancelled, no funds should be owing.
• Can't delete attachments from within servicecanada.gc.ca (doesn't permit anything other than http GET/POST)
• After saving changes to a youth, the list is regenerated with all inactive youth shown, regardless of the state of the hide/show toggle
• Couldn't create a new account with the same login email address, immediately after logging out.