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.
So, I don’t know about other units, but we have a steady trickle of Scouts signing up in our Pack over the course of the year.
My problem is that when a new Scout signs up, they are not invited to all the events in the calendar that they should be invited to. For example, a Wolf Scout signs up and gets added to the Wolf Den. They should automatically be added to the Invite list for all the events for the Wolf Den, and all the Pack-wide events. I have to go in and individually edit every single event in the calendar every time a new Scout signs up.
This creates a LOT of extra work on my end for something that should be automatic. So what I end up doing is not creating events in advance. I’d like to be able to input most of the year’s events into the calendar before the program year starts, but I can’t because then half the Pack won’t get notifications unless I go through and edit them one event at a time.
This is bad enough I’m pretty close to abandoning Scoutbook as a scheduling tool all together.,
Except the programming logic to make it automatic isn’t as simple as everyone assumes. What about a calendar event that had a real-world sign-up deadline prior to when the scout joined? The calendar doesn’t have a way to set deadlines, so the logic can’t accommodate that. Events that are less than a day away? Less than a week away? Maybe unit or den meetings, but campouts? Field trips?
The issue is balancing the automation of inviting folks to things they can attend against the automation of inviting them to things they can’t.
As has been noted before in many similar discussions, the Feature Assistant Extension has the ability to semi-automate this process for folks with calendar access. It’s not perfect, as it requires manual triggering, but it also provides the user the ability to control which events the scouts are automatically added to.
The extension is a user-written and supported add on for Chrome and Firefox that can help automate some tasks and add features (within limits) to the “basic” Scoutbook.
