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Release 16.0 - Key Features
Scouts Canada National Licence
ScoutsTracker is now free for all members of Scouts Canada.
Switching to a National licence also had some impacts. Most notably, the “Master” login that was previously a feature of Group/Area/Council licences is now a feature of an official Group account. This means that you can create an Master login for any Group, that will grant access to any of the section accounts in that Group.
This “Master” login setting used to exist under “Account” | “Licence”, but can now be found directly under “Account” (since there is no more “Licence”).
For security reasons, you can no longer change the Group of an official account, nor create a new Group account where one already exists.
But with everything being licensed, there was the real risk that Groups that had legacy accounts. To illustrate, consider a Pack that had recorded lots of records for 2014-18, but then due to a turnover in Scouters, the old Pack account lapsed, and eventually a new one was started in 2020 that now contains the latest information. The old account was still accessible, and indeed some of the Scouters did occasional consult it for ideas about past events. And there was never any risk that a Scouter would start adding events or updating badge records in the old lapsed account, because expired accounts cannot be updated. However, now with all accounts being licensed by National, there is no such thing as an expired account, and it would be theoretically possible for scouters to update the lapsed account rather than the current account. Consequently there is now an account “Status” setting, that can be used to mark an account as inactive, thereby preventing inadvertent updates. For accounts that expired recently, any admin can change the Status back to “Active”. But for accounts that expired more than several months ago, marking them as active will require an email to support asking that the legacy account be re-activated.
Adventure Teams
For years, Patrols (a.k.a., Lairs, Lodges) have been the standard way of dividing up a section in small working groups.
However, there is frequently a need to create additional event- or project-specific collections of youth, typically centred around a single Adventure. E.g., you might want a grouping of those Scouts going to WJ'24, or a groupings of the two gaggles of Venturers heading down to the Adirondacks for the Feb 7th weekend (one team doing the “beginner” peak, and one doing the “advanced” peak).
These special purpose grouping of members are called “Adventure Teams”. You can go to “Account” | “Scouts” | “Manage list of Adventure Teams” and create as many as you want (e.g., “Adirondack 2021 - Beginner” and “Adirondack 2021 - Advanced”), and assign members to them. Additionally, when editing a member's details, you can choose which Adventure Team(s) they belong to, in a manner similar to picking which Patrol they belong to.
Indeed, Adventure Teams are pretty similar to Patrols, but they have a couple of key differences
You can belong to as many Adventure Teams as you want… whereas you can only belong to a single Patrol at a time
Scouters and Other Participants can belong to Adventure Teams, along with the youth! This means that you can define which Company Scouters will be accompanying the Venturers tackling the beginner summit vs. the advanced summit
One key use of Adventure Teams is that you can now filter most key lists and reports by an Adventure Team (you'll find a new “Filter by” option at the top of the page), which then hides all the members who aren't on the selected Adventure Team*. E.g., you can edit the signup for an pre-Jamboree camp, and filter it by just those youth in the “WJ'24” Adventure Team, making it trivial to set only the appropriate youth as eligible for the camp (indeed there is now an “All” button above the signup page's “Eligible” column which marks/unmarks all the visible members as Eligible).
Similarly, when sending out emails about the Adirondack hike, you can filter the recipient Quick Pick list down to just the “Adirondack 2021 - Beginner” and select all members, and send a message, then send a slightly different message to all the “Adirondack 2021 - Advanced” members.
Another use of Adventure Teams is to support the new COVID-19 policies, specifically that you can divide your section in to two sub-sections (each having fewer than 16 youth, as per policy) that will meet in different locations.
There is also now an easier way to manage the membership in an Adventure Team (or Patrol). I.e., when you click “Account” | “Scouts” | “Manage list of Adventure Teams” (or Patrols), you'll be able to click through to the members, and quickly add/remove people, or change their role in (e.g., “Member”, “Assistant Team Lead”, “Team Lead”).
*Filtering also works by Patrols
Per-Member Event Fee Overrides
A long-requested feature is now available! In addition to setting the default Youth, Scouter and Guest pricing, you can also specify individual pricing for different members.
E.g., you have a Scout who can only stay one night of a two-night camp, so you only charge her $25 for the camp, rather than $40. Or, you have an in-Group implementation of a NOLB program in which you are subsidizing the costs for a couple of struggling families.
You can also use this manage different costs based on optional activities… e.g., if you have some youth that want to do a canyon zip-line near to the camp. These youths' fees can be adjusted to include the cost of the optional zip-lining.
Per-member pricing can be specified when editing and event and going to “Signup & Fee Options” | “Per-member overrides”.
COVID-19 Enhancements
Mandatory Attendance (from now, until further notice) supported by reminding you of recent event that have no attendance recorded, and requiring a confirmation when trying to finalize a non-virtual event that has no attendees
You are presented with a dismissable tip about enabling signup for all events (to facilitate note-taking re attendance)
Updated Parent/Guardian Consent Form to include the “risk of disease” clause
Adventure Teams to help partition your section (see description above)
Miscellaneous Enhancements
Can record call-in details (zoom, google meet, etc) for “Virtual” events
Added ability to inactivate/reactivate accounts
Hide anything to do with licensing
Added tooltips to payment/attendance report explaining the reason behind each greyed-out cells
SIGNUP: Made “All” button above Attendance column toggle status
Added ani-placeholders to manage-patrol
SCHEMA: More migrations
COMMISSIONERS: Disabled ability to create “personal” events
COMMISSIONERS: Hide “Section Key” field for Sections that haven't accepted your invitation
HELLO: The Commissioner-defined display name for a section now supercedes the section's own group+subgroup name
Bug Fixes
SS-2415: SQL error meant you couldn't customize badge requirements
SS-2415: Bad SQL fetching badge requirements could mean some were being flagged as customized
Miscellaneous cleanup of SQL errors and ASSERTS
SS-2418: Payment checkbox in signup page was disabled if the cost was zero for youth, but non-zero for guests
SS-2414: PAB's completed without any notes were not showing up on the “Reports” | “Personal Achievement Badges”
Couldn't drill down to “Account” | “Inventory”
Diet/Allergy/Health Notes weren't being cleared before creating a new member
“Account” | “Advanced” | “Customize Badges” item has grey text on expired accounts
Signin “password” field is missing placeholder text
OAS's were annotated with “(Old Program)”
Check marks indicating number of stages completed for OAS's were vertically misaligned
SS-2434: “Personal” visibility option was incorrectly hidden, depending on where you clicked the mouse
SS-2443: Some events' signup/attendance couldn't be updated
SS-2241: Embedded calendar was showing “map” instead of the “Call-in details” label for Virtual events
SS-2447, SS-2449: Inventory appearing to not be saved
SS-2437: Clear default login when encountering a “no youth associated with this login” situation
Fixed a couple of bugs related to migration of master login from Licence to Group
SS-2463: Use of “license” rather than “licence”
Signup sheet was not showing the refund amounts for some people who paid but subsequently changed their signup to “NO”
Signup sheet “All” buttons under “payment” and “attendance” were not handling non-member participants
Fixed payment report to not exclude people who are completely up-to-date on events
Event signup notification recipients list is missing inter-glyph spacing
COMMISSIONERS: Remove incorrect message when trying to make Council/Area accounts official
Patch (2020-07-07)
New Login Permission
There is a new “Can see everyone's private information” that grants access to the Emergency List. Previously, this was lumped in with the old “Can see all records” (which has now been renamed “Can see everyone's basic information”).
Additionally, more explicit warnings and a confirmation has been added to any attempt to grant someone “Can administer account” permission or the new “Can see everyone's private info” permission, including the acceptance of liability for privacy breaches.
All existing non-scouter “can administer account” permissions have been revoked (but can be re-granted, if needed).
Bug Fixes
SS-2467: Needed to drop column Youth.patrol_id
Leaders weren't being saved if you *just* toggled the “participates in events” or “exclude from emails” settings
SS-2470, SS-2471: Parents weren't being shown/included in Commissioner emails
Blocked erroneous message about needing to belong to a multi-section licence
Quick Add invite names could show up as “undefined”
SS-2471: Fixed a number of issues relating to email quick pick with partial selections
SS-2480: Can't add new Scouters
SS-2482: Groups in old Area- or Council-licensed accounts couldn't change their own master
SS-2483: Could not create third-party accounts
SS-2484: SQL error during youth merging
Patch (2020-07-10)
Miscellaneous Enhancements
Bug Fixes
Just changing a scouter's status (and nothing else) was skipping the save
SS-2500, SS-2501, SS-2502: PAB's temporarily disappeared
SS-2469: List of Accounts in “Use a different login” wasn't including accounts you could access only as master
Changing an account's Group ID wasn't always the changing group_name field in the database
SS-2496: Delete Account button wasn't working
Accounts that hadn't been licensed prior to the national licence weren't being told of their Group's tech contact
Don't even look for a master account if the section's Group is not a recognized one
COMMISSIONER: SS-2478: Some sections missing from Group Commissioner account
COMMISSIONER: SS-2492: Typo in “Connect” button code when trying to connect via Commissioner
HELLO: SS-2489: Hello website wasn't available for new (not previously Group-licensed) accounts
HELLO: SS-2496: Inactive accounts showing up in Group website
HELLO: Wasn't skipping expiry check for national-licensed accounts
HELLO: Wasn't skipping collaborating sections from other Groups
Patch (2020-07-20)
Miscellaneous Enhancements
SS-2507: Worked around a Zoom bug in which Zoom is including the encoded password in the meeting invites
SCHEMA: Created product-specific amalgamated databases, migrated AccountProperties and EditionProperties
Bug Fixes
Invalid request when updating related sections
COMMISSIONER: Editing imported section event shows empty “Plan - Program” section
COMMISSIONER: Found bad SQL when updating MANDATORY_AUTO_COLLABORATION property
COMMISSIONER: Found bad SQL when deleting a section
Fixed an issue in which the perm-master login permissions were constantly being created/destroyed
Failing to specify an email template image would result in a broken image icon in the email
COMMISSIONER: Since you can't complete an AAF at the Group level, there should be no alert icons about unsubmitted forms
COMMISSIONER: If you had two imports into the current schedule from the same event, and then turned “Show other schedules” on, there would be two legend swatch for the imported event (which is okay) but they'd show different names (one with the current account's name, and one with the generic “Commissioners”)
Patch (2020-08-07)
Miscellaneous Enhancements
Implemented CacheManager to reduce accesses to comparatively-static tables
SCHEMA: Made all badge ID's unique across sections (except OAS's)
SCHEMA: Migrated badge catalog tables to product database
COMMISSIONERS: Hide “automatically share schedule” option for Group accounts, since this is implicit in being an official account
Bug Fixes
SS-2512: Badges were incorrectly being annotated with “Old Program”
DbCommonSession wasn't being closed after StaleStateException
SS-2520: COMMISSIONERS: Could not fetch other sections' schedules
QUADRANT: Company info wasn't being cleared when switching to an unassigned apprentice
We were passing up sectionid (rather that accountkey) when updating ScheduleLabel
SS-2521: Some core badges weren't being downloaded for some sections
Fixed SQL error using wrong DB session
SS-2524: Trying to track down source of bug
SS-2528: Couldn't transfer youth
Couldn't reset password for products with no commissioner editions