Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
Our troop is just getting started with Scoutbook. Apologies if this is a rookie mistake.
I am inviting parents to connect with their scouts:
To test it, I sent a connection invite to my wife, who is not an adult leader, to connect with our son. She received the email, clicked on the link, set a new password. Worked like a charm.
Feeling confident, I sent a connection invite to a second parent in the troop who is also not an adult leader. She received the email, but there’s no personal message or link. This is all she got (I’ve blanked out the parent and scout names):
Is this a known issue? Did I do something wrong? Should I send another connection invite and hope for a better result?
I don’t want to turn parents off by repeatedly failing at the very first step in the process. I can see Scoutbook has a lot of potential for our troop.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
-Frank.
Here is another data point: Today I sent a connection invite to a 3rd parent, who received the same short/confusing connection email (no link to Scoutbook, no hint of what to do next). This 3rd parent, I found out, already has an account at my.scouting.org, and was able to successfully login to scoutbook.com with this same username/password.
So could it be that:
Connection invites sent to parents WITHOUT any prior account information at scoutbook.com or my.scouting.org generate the long email (with a link to login to Scoutbook and a temporary password).
and
Connection invites sent to parents WITH prior account information at either website generate the shorter (and confusing, in my opinion) email without any login link?
It would be nice to know the situation so I can help the parents who are in situation (2) but don’t know or don’t remember they have a my.scouting.org login.
@FrankChance - are you searching for the adult first before you add them? If they are in scoutbook the will show up in a search and thus would not need to have login info. I would gather you are looking at the scout record during the add process so you would see the existing parent connection. For a totally new entry then the full email is sent. I do recall that the new temp password has a shelf life of 30 days but I could be wrong there.
@Stephen_Hornak - That must be the difference. With my wife, I had to search for her, and she received the full email (with my personal message, and the link to login). With the other two parents, they were already in Scoutbook as a pending connection for their scout, with a message like “This connection is pending. Last invitation email was sent 6 months ago.” We weren’t using Scoutbook six months ago so presumably when a scout is signed up, the parent gets an invite from Scoutbook but they’ve been ignoring those emails.
I was confused because when you click “send invite again” you get the option to type in a personal message… and I did that. But the personal message doesn’t get included in the emails to parents who already have an account setup.
It seems like I should just send personal emails directly to the adults who show as “Pending”, that way I can include a message about what login/password they should use, and how to retrieve their username & password if they cannot remember it. I’ll try that for the next few parents.
@JoeMcKinley - I agree - based on my sample size of 2, I have 100% confused parents. Because we don’t get copies of the emails that are sent, I didn’t realize until I had them both forward me the emails they received that they weren’t even seeing my personal message.
Is there a Scoutbook issues page where we can submit issues and upvote them? Just including the personal message that I typed in (so I could explain what username/password to use) and the link to Scoutbook would be a big help.
This may well be over the top for the user in question, but a wireshark trace run during mail sync if they are using a third party email app locally. If they are not using a 3rd party app and doing a web connect then the settings on the web client would also need to be examined.
@DonovanMcNeil - One of the parents is using hotmail, so presumably the hotmail web client or pulling it to her phone. The other parent is using gmail, and I know she uses her iPhone. I feel like it’s unlikely to be an email client issue (but I could be wrong) - the emails that are sent out just look very different (see snapshot below). I will see if I can find a parent who I can help get the raw message. I don’t know who is responsible for maintaining the code at this point - is it possible to get a programmer to look at that chunk of code and see if there’s a big IF surrounding the personal message & link section?
For comparison, here is the message that went to my wife, who I had to search for as part of the connect process:
Both messages end with “Your private is important to us”, which makes me think that the emails that are missing the personal message and link to login just don’t have it at all.
Again… I could be wrong about where the problem lies. I appreciate the quick responses and assistance.
And overall, this is still a great tool, and much better than what we were using before (scoutlander, and a paper system for advacement).
Here is a 4th data point - again, a parent who was listed as a pending connection, and I sent another connection invite, with a personal message. The parent forwarded me the email, and it does not contain either my personal message or a link to login:
So far, we have:
My wife, who I had to search for, and send the invite - she got the invite with my personal message and a link to login.
Parent #2 (hotmail), already showed as pending - she got the new invitation email but without personal message, and no link to login.
Parent #3 (gmail), already showed as pending - she got the new invitation email but without personal message, and no link to login.
Parent #4 (yahoo), already showed as pending - she got the new invitation email but without personal message, and no link to login.
It sure seems to me that any parent who is already listed as a pending connection, if you send them another connection invitation, they get the email without your personal message, and with no link to login…
