Our Scoutbook account was setup incorrectly and I need help to fix it

We have users that were setup with dummy emails, duplicate accounts, and others with old email accounts they don’t have access to (work emails where they no longer work, changed ISP, etc…). Also the connections for Scouts are all over the place. We need a way to help fix all of our users, or to start over from scratch or we can’t use the tool. We have enough of an issue getting the parents that can log in to Scoutbook to log in and use the tool. The ones that I’ve talked to about calling tech support simply haven’t and probably won’t so we are broken. It is asinine that a Troop Leader that has access to the entire system can’t change the email address for the users or the scouts. None of my parents are going to sit on a tech support call to get it sorted out, and they shouldn’t have to.

Scoutbook has been a colossal nightmare for my unit and I’m not happy about the amount of time I have personally spent trying to get around things that should be available to me as a Troop Leader. I’m about to give up and go back to Troopmaster.

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Individuals can change their own emails easily under Edit Profile for themself. Roster > Connection manager can be used to clean up connections in one pleace

If they’ve never logged in, you can change the email of the parents. If they have logged in, they can change it for themselves. If they were setup with dummy emails, it seems likely they would have never logged in.

Jacob,
Why in God’s name is this a “secret” feature. I can’t communicate with my parents through Scoutbook or help them get it fixed, and telling me they can do it is worthless, because they won’t do it, or don’t know how. I read in another forum entry that this was done for security purposes, but that doesn’t make sense, because I have access to everything else so what is this keeping secure?

I also cannot see what email addresses my Scouts were setup with, so I can’t help them get logged into their accounts, either. How is this supposed to be helpful if no one can log in and use it? This is a massive failure in my book, because my Troop can’t use the tool without a serious amount of help. Is there someone at my Council Level that should be able to help us get this figured out? It has taken me too much time, and I’ve recommended staying on Troopmaster to my Committee.

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How can they do that when they forgot their password and the password change email is going to the old address?

How many parents do you have that are locked out of their accounts?

I know of 4 that can’t get in. I stopped checking after that. All of the parents that crossed over into our Troop are fine, but the parents we are trying to move over from Troopmaster were not imported correctly, so we have a huge mess exacerbated by the lack of admin controls at my disposal.

It looks like the only thing I can do is work with each parent individually. This is a huge headache and a waste of the little time I have as a volunteer.

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So, the four who can’t, what are you seeing that makes you think they can’t? It seems unlikely your entire troop would have this issue. So, I want to be very clear about what you are actually seeing.

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Their emails and phone calls telling me they can’t log in. In the case of the original post, the user doesn’t have access to the email any more that he originally signed up with. I can see what the email address his account is using, and he changed ISPs and is no longer with AT&T. I have not followed up with the others yet, because I have been busy, but it looks like a similar issue, because the addresses associated to those accounts are not the ones we used in Troopmaster, or in my Outlook Distro. I didn’t set this up so I do not know if that person created temporary email accounts or what, but it is a mess.

I stand by my assessment. Scoutbook is a hot mess from a Leader’s standpoint. I cannot do half of what I could do in Troopmaster, or for that matter Scout Track, and what I can do is backward and very time consuming. Looking at the forums, I’m not the only one that thinks that Scoutbook is nearly worthless in its current state. Unless the unit leaders, at least the Key 3, are given some additional Administrative control over our units accounts and records, and the navigation is improved to make management of accounts less cumbersome, I’m not going to be able to to continue using this product. So far from the support I’ve gotten, in this thread and other avenues, it sounds like I am wasting my time, because my inability to fix the mess I inherited is somehow my fault and not a design flaw from the onset.

SAAS products like Salesforce and JIRA give me the Administrative access to my company account so that I can setup up permissions and compliance as my company needs it. Scoutbook should work more like that. I should not have to call someone to get help changing an email address for one of my parents or other unit leaders, and neither should they.

This will be my last post on this topic, because the only answer seems to be to have the users reach out to Support.

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Scoutbook is not Salesforce. Salesforce does not have Youth Protection policies that must be followed. Unit leaders are not permitted to change e-mail addresses of those who have logged in as doing so opens up security and youth protection issues.

Your council support staff can fix most of the issues you have described. For issues they cannot fix, they have internal BSA contacts that can help get these resolved.

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Thomas I couldn’t agree more, matter of fact I am going to renew my Troopmaster. Even though it didn’t give the aprents access, which I like, there are way too many issues with Scoutbook and I don’t have time to wait on hold.

What?? Please explain to me what security or YPT issue could be violated? I already have their email, and access to everything in their account. I’m just trying to correct errors, and if I cannot do that then I’m not sure this is the software for my unit. Even if I were to log into the Scout’s account with their username and password to assist them, what policy would I be violating? I’m generally curious for an explanation now, because this does not meet the common sense test, and I must be missing something. You guys are begging people to share account credentials to get things done, instead of giving them a legitimate admin option. My guess is that is what is happening, because I have rejected the offer by a couple of my parents that just want this to work properly for them and their Scouts. You guys need to remember that most of our Volunteers are not IT wizards, and don’t know an Email address from an IP, so people are going to do the easiest thing. The two parents I met with last night were exasperated at the way this works, and recommended going back to Troopmaster. If I hadn’t spent so much time moving us over I would stop and do just that.

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@edavignon For the record, I did not say that Scoutbook should be Salesforce, but it should work like most other SAAS tools. I still would like to understand what YPT policy would be violated by the Key 3 having admin rights to the accounts of their units. You guys are climbing a greased rope with the current model, and the Forums show that I am not the only one that thinks so.

I’m probably wasting my breath at this level, but all of this work my units are being asked to do is not worth not having to use Internet Advancement. That was a breeze compared to how Scoutbook works for me and the Units I support.

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The hypothetical that was provided to me when I asked a similar question when BSA first took over Scoutbook from the prior private ownership was that a leader with nefarious intent could alter the parent email in Scoutbook to something other than the parent’s actual email, then contact a scout improperly without copying a parent or another adult, and reset the email so that it appeared no issues had occurred. I personally think this is a rather silly hypothetical issue, since any email that appears in the recipient list (e.g. messages sent without bcc) is recoverable, and many leaders have youth email/contact information through other means already. That said, this is the reasoning I have understood to be behind the limitation on editing parent emails. The youth email access may be something else (e.g. restrictions on soliciting youth information from anyone other than a parent), but as that’s not my field of expertise, I could easily be wrong about that.

I’m not fond of the system limitations, but they can be worked through without gratuitous extra effort most of the time. The lack of direct access to support staff has been a bigger headache for me than the inability to get parents to correctly handle inviting their own scouts to connect. Usually, I have the best success by explaining the process to the scout (who has a vested interest in getting it right) and then letting them walk the parent through the process, with me available in case they have an issue they can’t resolve. Keep in mind that SUAC is a group of volunteer leaders who can only share what they are permitted to share by BSA officialdom, both on rationale for decisions (assuming they’re even told) and on planned software development/deployment.

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I hear you. Going through the same types of issues. I can tell that my troops recharters have been processed because now Scoutbook is a mess. I even have an adult that has been added to our roster in Scoutbook that has absolutely no affiliation with our troop and never has. The whole system is such a mess and I am tired of having to have my leaders and me spend so much time working with a broken system. We are switching over to Troop Web Host and abandoning Scoutbook. We know we still have to use it to some extent, but the less interaction we have to have with Scoutbook, the better.

Sorry, but if I can be trusted by the BSA to be a committee chair and sign off on memberships and have access to the information in Scoutbook, then there is no reason I can not be trained and trusted on how to make some of these changes in Scoutbook without having to jump through hoops and waste valuable time that I could be dedicating to directly serving my scouts. And there are far too many issues with Scoutbook that keep creating issues for units and for council staff who could also be doing better things with their time then working to make fixes within a poorly designed and broken system.

What does Scoutbook have to do with recharter? How was it delayed? Scoutbook didn’t factor intro our recharter.

I know you may just be venting, but there isn’t anyone listening to this forum that a) made the policy and b) can change it.

The people in the forum can report bugs to get fixed and request features to add. Those, those, have to be articulated in a very precise manner and not just in general.

I know from my involvement with 3 units (2 troops and a pack) getting thing straight took some time. Once that happened, the tool works, works well, and is used by Scouts, Adults, and Parents daily or weekly.

So, like any problem, list out what needs to get fixed and go from there. I started with duplicate accounts.

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