Since the original topic has been locked out, I’m asking once again…
Our troop is looking to begin using the new Discourse forums, and we’re curious when they can be activated? It’s now been several months since the new forums have been available to those units that were using the previous forums. When do troops or packs that never had them be able to get their private forums created?
It is available now. To enable, from the Scoutbook home page click Internet Advancement > hamburger (three horizontal lines) > settings > settings > enable private unit forum.
I believe you have to be a key 3, key 3 delegate, or advancement coordinator to enable it.
Thanks for the answer.
I guess I must have missed the memo on this. This activation is less than intuitive, and I never explored the Internet Advancement system given that I seem to recall another memo stating that if a pack or troop uses scoutbook, we should stay out of the Internet Advancement link. 
Oh well, it’s activated for our troop now. Thanks again.
The help page on this was never updated. We’ll get that updated.
I agree that it’s not obvious a Scoutbook unit would need to go into IA. The reasoning is that the IA UX is the future for Scoutbook, once all the functionality of SB can be included. So, from a long term strategy perspective, it didn’t make sense to add it to the current SB UX.
Now that’s a scary thought. Did I understand that correctly, @jacobfetzer? My user experience with even IA2 has been less than satisfactory (forget the old IA, which was utilitarian at best). If the BSA is seriously planning to abandon the Scoutbook UX (which admittedly has its own idiosyncrasies) in favor of the IA2 UX, I suspect there may be a revolt in the wind.
I saw that too… yikes! Admittedly, I have not play around with the new IA2 yet, but it can’t be worse that the original IA, can it? Right now all that I really see is IA revamped a bit with IA2. It will be interesting to see how it shakes out when the starting porting SB over to it.
It’ll probably have to change a lot to support all the functionality of Scoutbook. I did say “long term.”
Yeah, I saw the long-term, but that didn’t reassure me very much, since that suggests that there are still long-term parallel programming efforts trying to support/extend Scoutbook and trying to turn IA2 into sorta-Scoutbook.
It just seemed odd that it would be so difficult to add the functionality to create the forum into the Scoutbook UI. From a non-programmer’s perspective, it seems like adding a button that fires the same back-end processes to create a discourse forum (assuming it’s fully-automated) using the provided SSO credentials, and is only available on the menu for Key 3 or Key 3 delegates. I guess the Discourse control interface is less tied-in to Scoutbook and more tied in to IA2/my.scouting.
I’m not going to complain too loudly about having the ability to create the unit forum, even if getting there is more roundabout than it seemed. At least I didn’t have to code it myself. I’d probably have tried to do it in LabVIEW. 
It is not that it is difficult to add, it is that the Scoutbook development team is fully booked with higher priority items. Since there is a path for units to enable the unit forum (a one time function) the decision was made not to spend resources on duplicate work.
This topic was automatically closed 24 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
© 2019 Boy Scouts of America - All Rights Reserved
