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.
What should I be asking them to do? The reason I ask is because both accounts point to the same IA2 profile with the same BSA ID. Can the council merge/delete Scoutbook accounts? I hadn’t realized that was something they could do.
Yeah all of these parents actually predate the BSA purchase of Scoutbook, so they were created when the old-fashioned way was the only way. I’ll see what council can do to fix them,
I’ll chase the other parent issues down with council. Thanks again!
ETA:
I recognize that. I guess my position is that, if folks know what the issues are, we can participate in the process. Even if it’s only a small blip in the global picture for each unit that does it, it eventually adds up. To me, it’s the same philosophy behind “Do a Good Turn Daily”, no? A little good deed (like opening a door for someone carrying bags) often pays off dividends (e.g. happier people who are more willing to help out other folks) far larger than the direct effect of the one act.
What might work best is to ask the parent to work with the Scout and have them create a my.scouting account. They will want to try to connect to the Scout’s already existing BSA member ID number: 132379077.
They should be able to specify an e-mail address when they create the my.scouting account and get rid of the default one.
Yes, councils can merge Scoutbook accounts with their Volunteer Support Tools (VST). VST is different from Registrar Tools.
Right we aren’t BSA admins It seems like a simple API on the enter your email addrsss field to check if the address is valid or not would be best. Tons of websites already do it for user registration. We pay a lot of money for registration to BSA. And BSA execs make 400k plus……so making this tool efficient and reliable is key. I’m already getting frustrated parents who aren’t pleased. As a volunteer, there is only so much we can do. Our local troop is still not a scoutbook family except for advancements and honestly I think we may go that this way. I say that as a key person in the one of the largest and most progressive packs in our district out of our local council.
I understand there is an issue but if it’s not getting solved it needs escalated and outside help needs brought in to consult this problem.
We have eliminated over 300,000 e-mail addresses that were in category of spam trap, undeliverable and more from the paid service, not to mention malformed, ‘fake’ and other suspicious ones. We continue curating e-mail addresses through additional 3rd party services but recommendation from the entity which blacklisted us is conducting confirmed opt-in. It is essentially an e-mail with a link confirming validity of the recipient’s e-mail address. That can be a tricky as we currently can’t reach everyone due to being blacklisted and we don’t know how many users will actually respond to this campaign.
I understand everyone’s frustration. We are frustrated too as it is taking so long to resolve but I feel we have a plan and we execute it one step at the time in close partnership with group of volunteers on this Forum.
If we (the unit scouters) can get a heads-up that this has gone out via these forums, that could be helpful in us carrying water to our units and unit parents to push this over the finish line.
I assume we’ll receive our own. However, just in case we’re not receiving it for some reason (e.g. I know our SM is on one of the affected email providers), having a warning that we should be looking for it and reminding our scouts and parents about it will be very beneficial all around.
Thanks again for all of the work y’all are putting into this behind the scenes (and particularly for getting on here and sharing info with us so we can help with resolution where we can from the unit end).
I understand completely. After how long I’ve seen y’all on the boards, I know that y’all will default to sharing the maximum amount permitted. If you’re not sharing info, it’s because you can’t (for whatever reason).
That’s why I aimed the request at @NorbertHarasimiuk. Since more detailed info had been disclosed, I was hoping that indicated more authority to disclose (or at least a more direct line to getting that authority).
I was talking to a good friend last night and he reminded me of another use case that could be the issue or at least contributes to the problem aside from bad domains entered or expired mailboxes at domains.
When a scout is added at charter time they are put in and then it syncs to scoutbook. What happens now is that kid decides scouts is not for them. We have no way to disable their account in scoutbook so every time someone sends an all pack message they select all and inadvertently do not de-select the scouts and parents who left.
Now they are receiving emails for events they are not involved with. They mark it as spam.
We believe that part of the reason scouts cannot be disabled is because of national reporting numbers of enrollment. Now I have no truth to it but we have asked for awhile on how to remove people from scoutbook and told it’s not possible. And sometimes when a change is done, when the system syncs to scouting.org it brings the problems right back. We generally lose 10% of scouts to attend then leave. If that 10% is marking the messages as spam, I’m sure their service providers like in my case Xfinity are marking that domain as a spam domain, thus resulting in the blacklist to whatever spam filter provider they are using at that time.
You have total control in scoutbook. All you need to do is end date that scouts membership. They will still be on your my scouting roster but out of scoutbook and the email system
Scouts do not drop off the official roster until recharter or they transfer to another unit because they are still members, even if they are not participating.
We do not believe the issue is families marking scout email as spam.
We need an export option for email addresses. Both Roster, internet Advancement; neither have the option to export the email addresses. This issue has been going on for two months, and spamhaus provides the exact reason why you are blocked.
Like @jacobfetzer said, both have the option to create a report to export email addresses. I then use the csv option, bring them into excel, then append a semi colon and space and paste into outlook.
