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.
Long story short, our Council did not process our renewals in some system (I won’t pretend I know where) in time last fall and we temporarily lost all access to Scoutbook for several weeks. At no time was our unit not truly registered/renewed - the Council was just really behind on the papework.
Not that we have access to Scoutbook back, I am now realizing that all of our adult leaders have seemingly lost their history of Positions and Roles prior to their current positions, both with our current troop and any previous units where applicable. Furthermore, the positions were all ended by “AkelaSBDeltaSync as Expired with Lapse” on 10/30/2023 and then all of our positions were started back up again on 12/16/2023.
For our youth, it appears that their memberships from their Packs were retained, but like the adults, had their patrol memberships terminaed on 10/30/2023 and then a generic membership with the Troop that starts on 12/16/2023.
I’m wondering what can be done, if anything, to clean all of this up. Perhaps none of this really matters in the grand thing of schemes, but I think its really nice to be able to see one’s history in various aspsects of their scouting career and be accurate.
I’ve toyed around with trying to manually adjusting the dates on some of the memberships to get rid of the gap, but not only is it a very manual process, but I get warnings and errors from Scoutbook while doing so and then I end up with a whole bunch of 0 day memberhips that I don’t see a way to delete.
Before I muck anything else up, any guidance from the Scoutbook User Advisory Council (looking to you @edavignon since its our Council) on how to best correct this?
I looked in the DB and every one of your leaders has previous positions listed. We need more information to look into this issue. BSA Member IDs or Scoutbook UserIDs (no names) are needed. Both can be found by clicking on the leader’s name on your roster.
After further investigation, I realized that when going to Roster > Adult, it only shows the positions and roles with the unit logged into. I haven’t gone back to look through all the change logs for Scoutbook, but I thought we could see the past positions and roles here for all units. Using my own profile as an example, I’m now realizing the past positions/roles only display for adults when they goto their My Dashboard > My Account > My Positions. Was this always the case?
Either way, the gaps/clunky breaks in what should otherwise be continuous memberships and positions is still present. A few examples, all with SB User IDs: Adults
1832630 - I attempted to clean up the positions, but left with a bunch of ‘0 days’
6402238 - Committee Chairman & Troop Admin should be one continuous time from 1/1/18 to 1/17/24.
9365535 - Scoutmaster should be continuous from 10/28/22 to present. ASM should be 7/4/19 to 10/28/22
8275475 - COR should be 5/21/23 to present Youth
1832617 - I attempted to clean up the positions, but left with a bunch of ‘0 days’
6507425 - Membership in Big Kahuna Patrol should not have ended on 10/30/23 and should still be present.
12863539 - Membership in Chunky Monkeys Patrol should not have ended on 10/30/23 and should still be present.
3607058 - Membership in Big Kahuna Patrol should not have ended on 10/30/23 and should still be present.
5256659 - Membership in Big Kahuna Patrol should not have ended on 10/30/23 and should still be present.
8599163 - Membership in Big Kahuna Patrol should not have ended on 10/30/23 and should still be present. Position of ASPL should not have ended on 10/30/23 and should still be present.
Literally there is an issue of some sort with membership and/or position with every single adult and youth on our roster because of things “ending” on 10/30/23 and then a gap until the Council did whatever they did to finally renew us.
Let me know if you need more information or if we can/should connect offline.
I’m wiling to accept that there is no way to remove the extra entries of zero days as it current sits on the user side as I was already assuming that, but hoping I was missing something. That being said, data can always be revised/adjusted/deleted in the backend, just a matter of how accessible it is to either Admins or the developer.
What would I need to do to request a feature to make removal of this data possible in the future, whether is needs to be only on the Admin side, or user side? (And when i say I admin, I’m referring to the SUAC group, not the Unit Admin.)
We used to be able to delete extra entries, but that functionality had to be removed when the systems started synching membership data. The removal of the positions/membership was causing too many issues. I’m not sure what the issues were.
Having old positions with 0 days is not an issue. Your official membership records are stored in another DB.
For the “gap” due to your recharter not processing in time, you could go to each membership, restart the “old” one by clearing the end date and approving then ending the “:current” one. Make sure you restart the old one first or you might lose your connection to the Scouts.
The delay in processing recharters was a Council issue, not a BSA IT issue.
I hope I didn’t give the impression that I was pointing at BSA IT for the cause of all this - I absolutely know it was Council related. All I was trying to do was find the easiest way to clean up the mess that their delay caused our unit and I have to imagine quite a few more.
Ed, am I understanding that I’m basically left with a lot of manual effort to fix everything up and close the gap in memberships/positions lengths?
I asked earlier and didn’t get a direct response from Jacob - what would I need to do to request a feature to make removal of this data possible in the future, whether is needs to be only on the Admin side, or user side? (And when i say I admin, I’m referring to the SUAC group, not the Unit Admin.)
Yes, you will have to manually edit each membership to remove the “gap” in Scoutbook. Scoutbook does not contain the official membership record so it doesn’t really matter if it shows a gap. The official membership data is kept in Akela which is the BSA person database.
The BSA will not entertain a request to remove old membership from Scoutbook. As we have previously stated, Scoutbook used to allow old membership to be deleted but this caused unintended consequences so the BSA decided it was best to allow these positions to be ended but not deleted.
How do I do this? I tried to clear the end date of the old membership but it said I still had one active and wouldn’t let me save. So I then made the mistake, even with being warned, of ending the current membership and sure enough, I lost contact with that scout. I initially did the same thing with my own son, but in hindsight,
@BrianBinkley I setup a sync to bring him back - or you can go to account and just add the membership - honestly the SB memberships are trivial and have little to no effect - you will probably cause more issues or stress to self trying to fix them
You can change the start date on the active membership to match the start date of the old one then set the old so the start and end dates match.
As we have tried to explain several times, Scoutbook membership dates do not matter. The official membership records are in Akela which is a different database.
Thank you Donovan for doing a sync to bring him back.
I hear you and @edavignon that the official membership records are in Akela. Unfortunately, when Scoutbooks chooses to make the membership information available to everyone see, they want to see correct membership information. Telling everyone in a unit that it doesn’t matter won’t do any good. So even though its not official, its still important to the scouts and their families. Short of Scoutbook removing this information, I feel obligated to my unit to do everything in my power to get it as accurate as possible which is what I’m trying to do.
@BrianBinkley - this seems more like a you issue than something that an entire unit of scout parents would concern themselves about. My experience has been with them more concerned about rank, service and leadership
The way Scoutbook is architected, it must contain membership data. Keep in mind, when Scoutbook was first developed, it was not owned by the BSA and had no way to import membership data. Everything had to be manually entered by the unit.
At this point, there will not be any changes made to how Scoutbook displays membership. We have provided instructions on how you can “fix” your memberships in Scoutbook if this is a big concern to you. In all my years of supporting Scoutbook, this is the first time this issue has come up, so I do not think it is a widespread concern.
