Calendar Events showing wrong time

Scoutbook Scoutbook Bugs
1

Our troop is experiencing some problems with the time of events in our Scoutbook calendar. It seems to have started last fall, and it may have something to do with the change to Daylight Savings Time in October, or maybe the introduction of Time Zone support in Scoutbook. (November 11 update)

We are in northern Indiana and are in Eastern Standard Time now (UTC-05:00). We observe Daylight Savings Time in the summer. We have the troop time zone set to (UTC-05:00) Indiana East in Scoutbook Edit Troop.

Most troop events are added to the calendar by our Committee Chair who uses a Windows laptop with Chrome browser:

499Ă—645 9.42 KB

Troop meetings, for example, are entered as starting at 7:00 pm. However, these events are now displaying on the website in the Scoutbook calendar as 6:00, although reminders and subscribed iCal calendars in Google, Mac or iOS calendars display correctly as 7:00 Eastern, as well as event times in the Scouting app (iOS):

Scoutbook event:

950Ă—468 37.7 KB

Reminder email:
842Ă—610 53.7 KB

Google Calendar subscription:
1600Ă—1010 71.1 KB

iCal subscription:
1002Ă—596 115 KB

Scouting app:
936Ă—1600 136 KB

(Note selection of following day in month cal)

We checked with other leaders who use Android phones, and for some reason their view of Scoutbook events display the time correctly (7:00).

Test Events
To test if the platform settings of the user that create the event had any effect, I created test events using the following: Mac Safari, Mac Chrome, Win10 Edge, Win10 Chrome, iPhone Safari, and iPhone Chrome. All were set to be on Eastern Time zone.

These events are displaying differently than the ones mentioned above. All events were set to begin at 7:00, and these events display 7:00 in Scoutbook, 7:00 Central (?) in reminders, but 8:00 Eastern in all other views.

Scoutbook event:

974Ă—470 36.9 KB

Reminder email: (Note Central Time!)
874Ă—384 35.4 KB

Google Calendar subscription:
1600Ă—849 72.4 KB

iCal subscription:
990Ă—588 109 KB

Scouting app:
739Ă—1600 112 KB

Is Scoutbook somehow trying to adjust displayed time to Central or Standard time and thus making it off one hour in certain views? I have read other threads of users with the same problem; most seeming to be in Indiana and Michigan, thus Eastern time zone but somewhat close to Central time zone.

It is certainly broken and we would love to be back to relying on Scoutbook for scheduling troop events!

1 Like
2

I talked to someone recently who successfully got it to display correctly by manually setting your timezone in your device settings rather than letting it automatically detect. Could you give that a try?

For background, Scoutbook displays in the timezone that your device is set to. Then, it converts it to central time to save it in the database. Then, converts it back when you pull it back up on your device.

3

I went into time settings on our Macs, Windows desktop and iPhone, and set them all to not automatically detect, using Eastern (Indianapolis or Indiana East). The Mac running Big Sur now sees Scoutbook displaying the time correctly (7:00) and it is correct in reminders and subscription calendars for Google Calendar and iCal. New events seem to be okay.

However, changing the time setting made no change in the display for the Windows desktop, the Mac running an earlier OS and the iOS devices: They still show the events in Scoutbook calendar an hour earlier (6:00).

I am wondering if it is related to DST changing back to Standard Time last fall.

Update: On my iPhone I manually set the time zone to Eastern (New York NY) and restarted, and it now displays correctly in Scoutbook! There must be a problem with the time zone conversion if it thinks Indiana is in CST.

4

Thanks for that update. It’s a clue for sure.

5

For the ICS subscriptions to be showing the wrong time in any client calendar for which the client has the correct timezone set has to be a server-side problem because the ICS format includes the timezone by definition, and your client calendar will convert it to local time to display on your calendar. It would mean the server is either serving the file with the wrong timezone, or converting it wrong somewhere on the server side.

In my case, I’m a member of two units, and am subscribed to both units’ calendars in a few different places (one of which is our troop website, which displays the calendar on the site by reading that ICS subscription). One unit has the correct times on everything, and the other does not, and this is consistent across every device I’m subscribed from. This tells me it’s probably a per-unit setting which isn’t set correctly on that unit.

6

@DavidMiller If you go to the edit unit page in scoutbook for both, do they show the same TZ? Which one?

7

On the one that’s off by an hour, it says “(UTC-05:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada)” which is correct. On the one that’s correct, I have no idea, because I don’t have admin access on that unit.

8

@DavidMiller It’s also depends on the TZ of the device that’s entering them. Which state are you in?

9

@DavidMiller what TZ is shown in the event reminders of each?

10

My Troop meeting this next week shows “8pm EST” in the iCal feed, but 7pm when viewed on the Scoutbook website, and 7pm EST is the correct time. I entered the event into Scoutbook myself and I’m in Michigan. My computer’s timezone is set to “Eastern Standard Time (Detroit MI, US)” and the clock is automatically set from the network.

8pm EST is the time the event would be if the time in Scoutbook were 7pm CST. But my computer isn’t set to CST and it still says 7pm when I view it.

11

I don’t have any recent event reminders to look at, we stopped using them after they started showing the wrong time on them.

12

@DavidMiller If you manually set your device to New York and create an event, could you tell me how it looks?

13

Done. Event still shows up at 8pm EST in the iCal feed when I have it set to 7pm in Scoutbook.

14

Oooh, take that back. I restarted my browser, and now it shows as 8pm in Scoutbook as well. So Scoutbook is misreading Detroit as Central Time, even though it’s Eastern?

15

That’s what I was getting at. I think it’s misreading Indianapolis, too. I had asked the developers for the offsets that use yesterday, but it’s a weekend. Hopefully, we are on the path to getting this right.

16

I’m having this same issue with my pack. We are all in Michigan and my co-leader and I both tried adding events into the system. We are both in the same pack, we both have admin right, we are both in Michigan. Both of our computers are set to Easter Standard time, and we have both checked scoutbook under edit pack to make sure the packs site is showing as Eastern time. All of that is correct.

When I entered our February pack meeting onto the calendar as 7:00 pm, it shows as 7:00 to Doni but 8:00 pm on my computer. We are accessing the exact same pack and can’t find any settings in either laptop, as far as the time zone, that are different. WHY?? Please help!

17

It reads your device time zone. Is your device set to “Detroit”? There is currently a bug in reading that. We expect a fix soon. In the meantime, try setting it to New York, and log out and back in.

18

What fixed it for us (in Indiana) was to turn off the setting to automatically set time zone based on location and then manually set it to New York Eastern Time plus a browser restart. Hope it helps you too!

19

My question, as someone who does web development myself, is why the app isn’t using the standard timezone mappings that are baked into pretty much every operating system, including the server OSes, which would already be correct, and most application platforms automatically use those. It’s like someone went out of their way to set up a manual mapping on their own from the list of “America/*” timezone names instead of using the built-in stuff, and guessed that America/Detroit and America/Indianapolis were central time without actually looking them up.

20

I don’t know the exact details of how it’s built, but my guess is Indianapolis and Detroit were not mapped at all and therefore default to central time as all of scoutbook used to.