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Since they closed the topic. I am creating a new one. I also created a jira ticket and asked for it to be escalated. It is not acceptable to just close tickets and thread conversations because you do not like the feedback. We need the delete function on our events enabled.
I am sure almost every den leader that logged into the den leader website now is unable to use scoutbook to do scheduling without a lot of work. We are in charge of the den meetings, not scoutbook, not allowing us to delete these meetings has made it confusing for everyone and simply a mess.
Having to tell our families to ignore scout book because we did not schedule these meetings is not a good solution. We are ramping up our meetings for the school year and not being able to schedule our meetings as we see fit is a huge problem. Please enable the event removal function ASAP.
It really is unhelpful. Getting even leaders to use Scoutbook is hard, and now with one innocent mistake the calendar is messed up, and even a pack admin for Scoutbook can’t fix it.
Ordinarily I would not complain about a “beta” feature but this one is particularly nasty.
Also, I’m all for helping den leaders. But I don’t know about you, but here we only have about 2 months before we lose the sun for our den meetings, so we have to schedule outdoors stuff earlier in the year. The “beta” den leader experience needs to be A LOT more flexible to move out of “beta”…
In looking at this more, you can’t even change the list of invitees. What if I want to invite someone to the meeting that wasn’t in the Den when the event was created, or isn’t in the Den now. Maybe there is another member of the Pack that is going to help teach something, or perhaps another Scout in another Den of the same rank that missed their meeting, but can make it to ours. The complete lack of flexibility for these meetings make them incredibly useless. I have moved all of them to Aug 1 of 2020 in hopes that a solution may be found by then.
Honestly, these are our dens and our programs. I understand the programming limitations of trying to sync the two websites, but there is no reason that we shouldn’t be able to delete the events. We run the programs not scoutbook. If we have already done something we should be able to delete it, likewise with all the steps in the den leader individual meeting planner. We will never be using a candle in our meeting because we meet outside most of the time. I would like to be able to edit those steps. We also require Duty to God to be done at home not at a meeting, so I would like that deleted too.
I see the potential in this app, it just is not helpful, the response we are getting is not kind, we need to be able to depend on this app to make changes that save us time not consume it. It took me most of yesterday to edit all the dates of all the mettings that were automatically added and fix our schedule. Basically what I needed to do was move the auto created calendar entries to the dates of our meetings, create a new calendar entry for the meeting with the reminder and the information I wanted sent out, then left the auto created one with no reminders. Yes it is a mess but it is the only way I can see around it for now.
I hope that this topic will stay open in the hopes that a solution can be found from the constructive criticism. I really am hopeful that in the future this will be very beneficial to all leaders, at this time I can not recommend its use.
@WilliamNelson Once the event is created by the Den Leader Experience, you can not go into the event in Scoutbook and edit the list of invitees. I am requesting the ability to add or delete invitees as necessary.
Here are some scenarios:
I am having a “guest instructor” come to teach something at the meeting. This individual is another Den Leader or the Cubmaster or one of the Assistant Cubmaster. Normally, I would add them to the invite list so that it appears on their calendar and they have the information for the meeting.
We have multiple dens for the same rank. A Scout misses a meeting when his den was working on a particular adventure requirement. He is going to attend a meeting with one of the other dens to complete the requirement. I would like to add him to the event to make sure it is on his calendar. I would also like to have him added so that I can mark him as having attended and have the requirements marked as completed.
For meetings that aren’t being held (i.e. Bobcat in a Wolf den with no new Scouts), I’d like to remove all of the Scouts from the invite list so that it doesn’t impact their participation levels.
These are just three examples off the top of my head. The event is so locked down, that you can’t change anything.
The hack solution for this is to move the date to sometime in the past, for example a year ago. That effectively makes it go away. You can’t do this in the Den Leader Experience, you have to go back to regular Scoutbook. You have have to do this one-by-one for all 12 meetings. Unquestionably, the delete option should be included, but this hack will get you out of a pickle.
I found a very messy way to delete the calendar events. I did this for my Tiger girls den which only has 2 members. I ended up having to completely delete the den from Scoutbook. Once the den disappeared, I still had to open each calendar event (still showed Den 12 events even though Den 12 no longer existed), click edit, then close again. This made the event disappear. I then recreated my Tiger den.
I, like others mentioned, wanted to delete the Duty to God requirement (we ask families to do it on their own), and I also noticed it has the new Protect Yourself Rules listed as required. My understanding is that is currently optional as a replacement to the Cyber Chip.
The Cub Scout requirements are still officially to do the Cyber Chip, but National has said the Protect Yourself Rules adventure can be done in place of Cuber Chip.
“Earn the Cyber Chip award for your age. (The Cyber Chip portion of this requirement may be waived by your parent or guardian if you do not have access to the internet.) OR Earn the Protect Yourself Rules Preview Adventure for Tiger”
The issue I see with moving the events to the past is that when parents log-in to see their scout’s advancement, they will get a very confusing message that they have missed a ton of meetings and that their scout is behind. I know because I did this for my Den and then logged in using the app to see what my son’s account looked like so that I could see what the parents would see. I see this causing concern and a lot of questions from parents. So, I moved the meetings to the future, but all the events show up in the list of activities. To make it even better, I set up the Den before “advancing” my Den in Scoutbook, so I have a Wolf Den that has a year’s worth of Den meetings planned for a Tiger Den.
I really want Scoutbook to be the one stop shop for all of our Scouts advancement needs but ive seen the folly that is Scoutbook and have heard several people say. “be patient, give it a chance.” I’ve given it a chance for three years and has it improved? No! When will these silly, unnecessary oversights ever end. Yes I get that this is developed by what I’m told are volunteers but c’mon. These sort of things need to be taken seriously instead of pawned off for another millennia. It shouldn’t take years to implement a simple solution and this one is simple. If it’s too hard to implement then it was deaigned wrong to begin with and not enough effort was put into it in the first place. This tool is sorely in need of an enema and rethought and re-written. There are way too many shortcomings to consider this a useful solution. This is yet another nail in the coffin.
