I guess it depends on who’s trying to do what, and what you’re counting (or not) as an improvement.
There are a lot of us who were seeing information added to Scoutbook by parents and/or scouts that made it difficult to use the tools in Scoutbook to assess things for rank advancement or other purposes. For example, family camping was being added to camping logs which made it very difficult to assess who was (and who wasn’t) eligible for OA without having to go into individual scouts’ logs to check it all. If I’m doing that, why bother having an OA eligibility report at all? I can pull the camping logs (by hand!) and pull the ranks (by hand!), then figure it all out that way. With the camping log approvals (and deletions, BSA-IT?), I’m hopeful that we will be more able to rely on what’s in the logs for evaluating advancement and other items.
For Camping MB, non-scout camping doesn’t count, so if it’s in the logs and a leader is looking at the total count, that makes it difficult to evaluate. If the person who entered it didn’t mark it (or the reviewer doesn’t know for sure that we’ve never been there as unit), then screening becomes difficult.
I recognize that a lot of these items aren’t as relevant at the pack level, although unscreened activity at the pack level (e.g. family camping not with the unit) could impact apparent eligibility for future awards (e.g. National Outdoor Award for Camping)
As I’ve said before: I’m not a fan of the new log interface. At the same time, some features (like the ability to approve log enties) are good. Others (like the inability to delete errors or items that don’t belong and the current limitations on who can add events to the logs) are not good.
Some of this is actively being updated like read/write log access per May 15, 2020 Scoutbook Updates - Activity Log.
Some of it appears to be more complicated that was probably originally contemplated, like adding ASMs, DLs, and other adult leaders to the read/write aspect of the logs. I suspect that’s because the permissions structure in IA2 isn’t as flexible as it needed to be, but it’s pure speculation on my part.
Some of it appears to be intentional UI design based on object-oriented thinking (select the individuals to operate on first) rather than process-oriented thinking (select the task to be done first), which I think is pretty counter-intuitive to most users. I’m not sure how successful I will be in convincing the BSA to offer a different route to achieve the same tasks in IA2 that currently require “pick the scouts first”, but I aim to try. If everyone on my roster fit on a single screen, picking people first might make sense. Since I (and many other units) have to go through several screens to pick scouts and leaders, the process seems pretty ridiculous to me.
IA2 is like a dish of mixed nuts IMHO. Some I like. Some I leave in the bowl. Some I want to toss in the trash because nobody should have to eat them. :^)
