Change Calendar subscription weblink

Scoutbook New Scoutbook Feature Requests
1

This may seem trivial and easy to ignore, but it’s actually rather important (and extremely easy to fix!), so I hope this will be paid attention to.

Please change the calendar links you get from clicking “Subscribe” on Scoutbook from “http://” to “webcal://”.

Here’s why.

If a parent wants to subscribe to a troop (or patrol) calendar, here are the current procedures:

  1. Visit Scoutbook.
  2. Click “Subscribe.”
  3. Click the link.
  4. Find the file you just downloaded.
  5. Open it. This will import all of the current events in Scoutbook into your calendar program.
  6. Realize, possibly after several months, that new events are not being added to your personal calendar.
  7. Give up, probably.

Alternately, you can subscribe to the calendar in an ongoing fashion, through these steps:

  1. Visit Scoutbook.
  2. Click “Subscribe.”
  3. Copy the link—don’t click it!
  4. Open your calendar program.
  5. Choose “New Calendar Subscription…” or the equivalent command.
  6. Paste the provided link.

But there is a much easier way, with one small change in Scoutbook! If the provided calendar link in Scoutbook begins with “webcal://” instead of “http://”, the steps are

  1. Visit Scoutbook.
  2. Click “Subscribe.”
  3. Click the link.

That’s it! Your calendar program will open, and you will be asked if you want to subscribe to the calendar. Click “OK”, and you’re done!

This change would make it vastly easier for parents to subscribe to the troop calendar.

1 Like
2

Does that process work on both PC and mobile?

3

Well that would be awesome if parents and leaders actually did anything other then complain… just sayin… There are multiple providers that use the same convention of URL that Scoutbook uses and I guess all of them are wrong…

4

I don’t know. That’s an excellent question. It seems to work on both Mac and iOS.

5

It’s not about “wrong,” it’s about what you want to accomplish. The way it’s set up now, you have to remember to download the calendar file again every time there’s a change (which can be multiple times a month in my experience)…and if you always knew what changes were happening, you wouldn’t really need the calendar.

If you’re importing a static calendar that doesn’t change, and has all events scheduled far in advance, that works fine. Scouting units are not like that in my experience.

6

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