Auto-purging Scout accounts is not helpful

I’m finding over the past few weeks that a large number of active scouts in our unit have been removed from Scoutbook. No warning, just gone. No connections active for any of them, for any of our leaders - we used to be able to see them in “My Connections” but no longer.

We have kids who earned Merit badges in August, and now they are missing from roster so we can’t award them the badges in September? The purge messages I have seen in past were 90 day timeouts, it has not been 90 days since August when they showed as registered and active.

I have to say that I am NOT happy with the auto-purge process. I don’t care if Scoutbook flags kids in our view as not registered, but removing them from the list and all connections is just a huge pain. When they re-register, we have to go back and re-assign patrols, positions, etc. - it is NOT at all helpful. Our unit leadership know better than Council who is or is not active, who may be having trouble registering, etc. - taking away our ability to manage members is utterly ridiculous. It is adding a huge amount of work on our end.

Please change this to FLAG SCOUTS ONLY, not remove them, and allow our units to manage the connections on our own again. We are fully capable of removing connections for scouts who are truly inactive!!

Scouts that are inactive aren’t being removed, it is a Scout who is not registered or their registration is messed up to the point of the system not thinking they are registered. Inactive is not known by the system.

I would propose that that Scouts who are not registered (or the system thinks they are not registered) and they 90 day clock has started should have the yellow triangle. Basically this would say “you have 90 days to get this scout either registered or their account fix to reflect that they are registered, but the system thinks they are not”. Too many units would just keep kicking the can down the road if it is indefinite, but a visual 90 day warning seems reasonable.

Joshua,

Northern Star Council announced in late August that any Scouts that did not re-register would be removed from Scoutbook 24 hours after your unit’s recharter was posted by the Council. There are 15 Scouts that re-registered for 2021-22. I suspect the missing Scouts did not re-register. Check your roster at my.scouting.org to confirm.

Once these Scouts re-register, they will appear in Scoutbook again.

Also any person who is not registered with the BSA cannot earn advancement. So it make sense to me to remove those that are not registered as they can not any awards and/or advancement.

1 Like

BSA has been removing scouts from our troop that are registered and paid in pull through December 2021. I don’t know who is making these decisions, but it is ridiculous. These are scouts that want to be active, but they are randomly removed and we (and their parents) get no notice, so they suddenly have no idea that they don’t know what is going on in the troop. This whole process is flawed at the district/national level.

1 Like

@HerbertHerrmann If you post a couple bsa member numbers (no names), we can look into them.

132995587 - removed from our troop and my.scouting.org says there is no scout in existence that matches his number/name/birthdate, despite the fact that we took a screenshot with that information from my.scouting back in June.

128603997 - pulled out of advancement sync in the last week or two, despite the fact that he has been in the same troop for around 5 years and his Eagle paperwork is in process right now. That is going to foul some things up if it isn’t syncing.

131820609 - has been pulled from our troop 5 times since Jan. 22, 2021

I’m going to send you a private message.

I agree - Scoutbook as a whole is a freaking disaster. We’ve got several that were paid through December (our next recharter) disappear, and had our local folks tell us there’s no record of them ever existing. Further, we put scouts into scoutbook as soon as they express interest, so they get notice of events - and they’re being purged within days.

I think Scoutbook is so broken, I’m inclined to stop using it. I know National wants it to be mandatory, but they need to make a product that isn’t hopelessly broken. The cost of national dues has literally increased 6x-9x in the last 10 years, depending on how you count it, and the service is MUCH MUCH worse.

1 Like

@JamesWest3

A Scout that is not registered has 60 days to become registered before dropping from the Scoutbook roster.

Are the Scouts who you say are paid through December but dropped from Scoutbook on your roster at my.scouting.org? If they are not, then they are not registered in your unit and you will need to contact your registrar.

2 Likes

This is generally an issue of the council not having processed the registration paperwork.

I’m surprised by that, since we have only had scouts stripped 60 days after the “start” date on the membership, and only if their paperwork wasn’t processed by council or they ended up as a mismatch for some reason (e.g. typo on our side or council’s) and a second account was created.

1 Like

I totally get your frustration, but Scoutbook isn’t broken in these cases; it’s following the rules outlined by National, and being affected by your local Council perhaps not processing the documents and payments you’ve made in a timely manner.

1 Like

Scoutbook is broken substantially and in many important ways.

(1) I know that some of the unpaid scouts have only been in the system 30 days or less when purged. I know this for sure because we only had roundup August 24, which is when I put in a bunch of “interested”, so they’d get messages. A random selection of those have been deleted. Many that were entered in early September have also been deleted.

(2) I have a number that were paid in summer, who started camp then, who’ve been deleted. These are registered, paid scouts, who’ve been deleted.

(3) I have transfer scouts who keep getting transferred back out of my pack to their old pack. Their old pack is defunct, so it’s nothing to do with them.

(4) Other paid scouts, included in our recharter last year, occasionally disappear.

No - scoutbook is completely broken. Council blames national, apparently national blames council - but before it existed I had -ZERO- problems with roster. Now it’s constant. It’s a disaster, and it’s going to drive people out of scouting, because they stop getting messages, which is a high cause for dropout.

There’s NO REASON AT ALL to purge scouts, anyway. I want people outside my pack to NEVER EVER EVER NOT ONCE NOT EVER remove scouts from my GOSH DARNED ROSTER!!!

If you think they’re not paid up, flag 'em, and we’ll look into it. You can even stop us giving them advancements until we clear it up (although THAT is broken as heck as well). But removing them MEANS THAT THEY STOP GETTING MESSAGES!

Scoutbook is an abomination.

If you like to provide a couple bsa member numbers (no names), we could look into why they dropped.

Do you think that Scouts that do not register should exist on the roster indefinitely? How would that be a good idea?

1 Like

@Matt.Johnson I am so glad you know the details - you need to back off now

I think they should stay on the roster until troop manually removes them. Or at least create a setting that allows troop to turn on/off automatic removal.

1 Like

@DonovanMcNeil has asked me to not respond.

Scouts remaining on the roster will NOT happen. The BSA has already stated that a Scout not on the official roster has the ability to remain on the Scoutbook roster for 90 days without being registered. This gives the unit plenty of time to register the Scout.

For Scouts that leave the unit, except for those that have turned 18 and may be waiting on an Eagle Board of Review, Scoutbook will drop the Scout when they fall off the official roster.

This is BSA policy. Arguing here does no good as BSA staff do not monitor the forums. If you want to try to change the policy, you need to work through your council.

2 Likes

I apologize for the rant, but national makes me furious. I appreciate your offer to provide constructive solutions.

Unfortunately, one of the things that goes away when Scoutbook randomly deletes registered scouts is my record of their BSA numbers. I wasn’t keeping backup records, because I foolishly didn’t realize quite how bad scoutbook is.