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.
I have multiple ID’s in my.scouting.org… three show currently, although it’s been as many as four. I’ve sent my old ID along every time we’ve moved and still been given a new ID each new pack/troop we’ve joined. I currently have boys in a troop in Palmetto Council and a girl in a troop in Mecklenburg County Council. I’m an ASM and Merit Badge Counselor in both troops, with separate ID’s for both. I am having a host of issues, including apparently having my MBC status dropped in both councils, my status as an ASM in Mecklenburg not being visible in ScoutBook and just a bunch of weirdness whenever I try to update records using either ScoutBook or my.scouting.org.
Is there some way to fix this, ideally reducing my ID count to one as part of the process? Failing that, is there some way to reduce the amount of time I’m perplexing troop, district and council folks with my issues?
Why would I need different ID’s for myself? I am multiple entities in a database, which would be considered a serious design flaw in any development environment I’ve worked in.
Switching ID’s doesn’t fix any of the actual issues I’m experiencing in any case, but if multiple ID’s for a single entity is considered normal for ScoutBook, I suppose I’ll have to be grateful it works at all.
First, it is best to only be a registered Merit Badge Counselor (MBC) in a single Council and to set your listing preference to Worldwide. The Guide to Advancement allows a Scout to work with any MBC so there is no need to be registered in multiple councils.
BSA systems restrict visibility of Council staff to only those BSA Member IDs registered to their Council and the legacy systems did not permit a Member ID to span councils. There is work in progress to change this but as of today, you get assigned a new ID every time you change councils.
You have 2 options.
Maintain 2 my.scouting.org IDs, one for Palmetto Council and one for Mecklenburg County Council then use the ID that corresponds to the council of the child you want to work with in Scoutbook when logging in.
Maintain a single my.scouting.org ID, log in to it and switch your primary member ID each time you want to log in to the “other” Scoutbook ID.
We can merge additional Scoutbook IDs you may have, but because you are registered in 2 councils, you will have 2 Scoutbook IDs.
I am not interested in being available worldwide as an MBC. The troops have different needs for counselors and I believe this to be a poor solution to that particular issue, since neither council wants me to have more than a certain number of badges listed. The rest of your comment is professionally interesting to me, but since it’s also bonkers, I’ll just let that go. I need to have multiple ID’s, fair enough.
As an example of exactly what’s going wrong, I no longer am listed as a current MBC in either troop, when I absolutely should be. Under past positions, there’s no record of me ever having been a MBC for the Mecklenburg troop and while there is a listing for the Palmetto troop, it shows dates from November, 2021 to May, 2022. In the optional notes, it says membership ended by me, twice. I didn’t do that once, much less twice. I’ve now put in three MBC applications for Mecklenburg, had the badges/position show up after the first two applications and I’m back to not being a MBC. There are Eagle required badges I’m signing blue cards for that are going to Eagle Boards and it is, obviously, unacceptable any Scout is going to have the validity of the badge questioned because I do not appear to have been a merit badge counselor when I signed them.
Of course, maybe this isn’t a ScoutBook issue at all. Since no one I’ve talked to at either district/council has been able to fix the ongoing issues and suggested it was, in fact, ScoutBook, here I am. I need a fix, more for the Scouts than my sanity, but I’d like to hang on to what’s left of that as well.
Just in case it’s relevant, MBC is a council-approved position, not a unit-approved position, so the MBC role would only be visible from Scoutbook → My Dashboard → Administration → My Account → My Positions. It should show there as “Approved by ”. BSA revised Scoutbook quite a while ago to only permit council-approved and uploaded MBC lists, rather than individual positions entered via the unit-level interface. I can’t find the specific changelog item, but I remember it hitting, because my council mistakenly uploaded only the new MBCs, which dropped a ton of us off the rolls while they tried to straighten things out.
When I log in at my.scouting, I see my MBC registration on my account. Does yours show up there? If not, that might indicate an issue with one or the other (or both!) of the councils actually having you registered in the position (or at least having you registered in the position with the BSA ID you think is correct).
I have a friend on my district who had multiple BSA IDs and Scoutbook accounts, such that his MBC positions didn’t show up when you connected him. Everyone from the individual to council level thought things were correct on their ends, until they finally compared notes on BSA IDs and figured out what the underlying issue was.
There is no such thing as an MBC registered with a troop. MBC is a council or district position.
Your MBC registration in Palmetto Council ended 2/28/22.
Your MBC registration in Mecklenburg County Council ended 12/31/21.
You will need to contact the Councils to get re-registered as an MBC. Because these registrations lapsed months ago, you will probably need to complete a new application.
I’ll send you a private message so we can gather the information we need to unravel the rest of the issues. Look for a green circle with white number on top of your avatar in the upper right forum window.
