As part of a strengthened multi-pronged approach to communicating with youth and parents, when you send an email to youth/parents, you can now have the option to have your email additionally posted to your section's Facebook Group or Page.

You can go to “Account” | “Advanced” | “Facebook Settings” to configure which Group/Page you'll post to.

If you do post an email about an event to your Facebook Group/Page, your post will have a link back to the event in ScoutsTracker. And, from within ScoutsTracker, you can click on a link to get to the post in Facebook.

A number of people had raised concerns that ScoutsTracker was communicating via HTTP instead of secure HTTPS, and thought that that meant that passwords could be intercepted. This wasn't actually possible, as authentication was done via asymmetric nonce-based encryption that protected users against possible “man-in-the-middle” attacks.

However, using HTTPS has the additional benefit of protecting regular data from being sniffed, so ScoutsTracker now automatically uses HTTPS.

This means that the old “Account” | “Advanced” | “Secure access only” that used to enforce HTTPS now only really impacts whether the “stay signed in” checkbox is adhered to for leaders.

The biggest impact of this change is if you have an HTTP bookmark to the off-line launchable version (e.g., “http://scoutstracker.ca/cubs/mobile”). This bookmark will no longer work, and you'll have to replace your “/mobile” bookmark with one that use HTTPS. If this impacts you, you'll see a message when you launch ScoutsTracker.

Finally, generated personal Troop/Pack record sheets now contain special headers that prevent them from being searchable via Google.

Youth and Parents can now opt in or out of Troop/Pack emails. While it's questionable value to be able to opt out of a troop email (e.g., sending out directions to camp), it is important that people be able to opt back in.

Under the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation, ScoutsTracker is obliged to provide an opt out method (which it does) which enables recipients to click an “unsubscribe” link in their mail reader (e.g., GMail, yahoo mail, outlook.com, etc.) However, when people did click on that link (outside of ScoutsTracker), they then discovered that they no longer received ANY emails sent via ScoutsTracker. Now they can click on “Account” | “Signed in as” and re-subscribe to Troop/Pack emails.

Additionally, users' “undeliverable” mail status is now show in the email quick picker and in the youth's list of contacts. In this manner, you can know before you send an email that it may not get to certain people (e.g., because it's a bad email address, or their inbox is full, or they unsubscribed).

Finally, clicking on “Emails” is now about 10x faster for sections with large numbers of emails.

If you have a login that matches a youth's name exactly, and you rename the youth, then the login is renamed, too.

When you try to sign in and get an “Unknown User” message, ScoutsTracker now offers an “are you signing into the right section?” hint.

Hitting “Enter” when in the “Sign In” and “Filter” text fields now causes the expected action to happen.

Improved the dire warning seen before you attempt to delete an account.

Some of the following had been rolled out as patches in the previous weeks, but are included here for posterity.

• Deleted logins who were “two-deep” contacts showed up as “Unknown” in the CC
• Extra check to prevent lingering “Unsynchronized” message
• Clip outing display_name to 250 chars
• Two-deep was being too aggressive when no leaders were being addressed, and you were one of only two “two-deep” contacts
• Work-around for the missing “HAS_CERTIFICATE” bug
• PACK: updated First Aider badge images
• Inventory could switch to OLD counts when viewing a badge with no new/old counts