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.
Please merge these two users (and please copy the merit badges across).
my.scouting BSA ID 4704816 (no badges)
Scoutbook BSA ID 137269611 (with badges)
[rant = on]
I still can’t fathom how this happens in the first place and why it hasn’t been fixed in YEARS. So annoying and trivially simple to detect (and fix)! There should be ONE canonical system of record and everyone else should copy from that system. This isn’t rocket science. Council registrars were promised the ability to do this (merges) and they still don’t have it.
You’d think we’d get better systems for $145 per kid per year. I am absolutely convinced that someone inside national is actively trying to destroy the organization.
[rant = off]
This happens because the individual is registered in 2 Councils and thus has 2 BSA Member IDs. Because the FN, MN and LN match, each time the registration where the adult is registered as Camp staff changes, the BSA Member ID (MID) on the Scoutbook account changes. I have restored the 4704816 MID to the Scoutbook account and marked it Do Not Merge so that the MID is not replaced when the 611 MID record is touched.
This is a result of the BSA long ago deciding each Council should have its own BSA Member IDs and that Councils can only see their own. Whenever someone registers in a new Council, they get a new MID.
Scouting America is not Apple nor Microsoft. They do not have the funding to do all the IT changes needed quickly. They are working through the backlog it does take time. If some deep pocketed donor wanted to give the $ necessary to fund more developers, I suspect Scouting America would accept it.
First, thank you for making the changes to fix this user.
Second, this problem has nothing to do with BSA’s poor judgement in distributing the allocation of member IDs to councils. It is 100% because they fail (nay, “actively refuse”) to do even the simplest, most remedial data cleansing and sanity checks.
Third, there is absolutely no reason that someone from another council should appear in my council’s download of merit badge counselors from scoutbook. Only people that my council has registered as MBCs should ever be in that list.
Fourth, it’s unfortunate that they are unwilling to accept the donations of time and talent that have been offered, repeatedly. BSA could simultaneously cut their costs and increase their development many orders of magnitude by simply operating in the same way as numerous other organizations. Linux doesn’t have a “deep pocketed donor” nor do numerous other open source projects (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Perl, etc.).
BSA has actively stated, numerous times, that they have no interest in operating efficiently. They actively avoid using the massive resource of volunteer developers who could step in and fix these systems in a few months under appropriate guidance from a few paid architects at national.
Throwing money at this problem would be a massive waste of resources. I would strongly advise anyone against such folly. The IT people demonstrably waste the resources they currently have doing useless (and in fact problematic) actions rather than doing real work. For example, it took someone FAR longer to pointlessly change all the report field names a few weeks ago than it would to right the simple SQL query that would permanently prevent the problem you just fixed.
I’m sorry if my statements seem harsh but the first point of the Scout law tasks us with being Trustworthy. Part of being trustworthy is being honest and sometimes the truth hurts.
The issue is that literally no one on these boards can effect the changes that you’re advocating for. The SUAC folks have brought many of these ideas to the folks they can talk to (who aren’t the ones who can effect the change ever), and it’s not resulted in any changes.
The only way to effectively advocate for these changes is to get your council professionals to advocate for it via their channels to national. Educate them about why it is important and how it would benefit both the the program at large and the council in particular. That’s the only way to create the “business case” for them to
All that happens when you vent here is that folks become exasperated or non-responsive. It’s the functional equivalent of fussing at the customer service rep about the company they work for being unreasonable. They can’t change the corporate behavior any more than the SUAC can. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating for the users or the folks willing to volunteer to help, of course, but it’s what we’re stuck with.
