I have a number of members (well over 100) in my council that are multi-registrations (meaning they are registered in more than once position, e.g. Committee Member in 2 units, or Unit Commissioner and Assistant District Commissioner, or Scoutmaster & Committee member) but they have different registration expiration dates for each position. And before you ask, yes, they have the same member ID.
This becomes a major issue with the new goofy $25 fee for merit badge counselors. Of the 700-ish MBCs I have, about 620 are multi-registrations. Of those, about 70 have this mismatched expiration date issue. This is a major problem because as their MBC registration expiry comes up they get dumped from Scoutbook without notice. Then after the 60 day window expires, they have to reapply to be an MBC even though they literally never expired.
I see no legitimate reason that they would reasonably have different expiration dates in different positions when they are paying a single fee to be registered for a revolving 12 months.
How do we get all these corrected so they have the same expiry dates on all their positions? More to the point, how do they go about “reregistering” for a position without a fee (a multi-registration as some other paid position and Merit Badge Counselor) when the expiry doesn’t coincide with their paid position(s)?
And, how do we get the IT systems to not create these situations in the future?
@JamesBrown13
This needs to be reported by your council staff via internal channels. There is nothing anyone on the forums can do about it.
Good to know. My council can’t do anything about it either.
So, like most issues, no one will address it and we will continue to lose members.
It’s clearly a bug in the backend at national. And according to my council they can’t do anything other than have my MBCs who are dual registered pay the ridiculous $25 fee ON TOP of their already paid registration fee.
I would send email or talk to council showing all instances - ask them to send in a National Membercare Ticket to get the memberships aligned.
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I’ll give it a try (I’ve already reported it to the council, BTW) but in my experience that’s a massive black hole and nothing ever comes of it.
In the meantime as we wait for months, I continue to lose MBCs from my list because they literally can’t renew.
Yep the renew system is something of a joke - just telling you the process to report in the terms council SHOULD know
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I would argue that all of nationals backend systems are a bit of a joke. I have constant inconsistencies that should never occur and, as far as I can tell, never get corrected.
I was just hoping against hope that maybe someone here could correct them.
I guess the take aways are:
- How did national allow these databases to get so messed up?
- Why am I the only one detecting and reporting these anomalies?
- Why doesn’t national have data consistency processes in place to detect these errors and either correct them or at least surface them to a human?
- But, most importantly, why doesn’t anyone at national care?
@JamesBrown13
Except for Scoutbook and Scoutbook Plus, the development teams only work from tickets submitted by councils.
You are not the only one noticing bad renewal dates but the only way to get them fixed is for councils to send tickets in to national member care.
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If I’m not the only one noticing this (I see no other reports of this on the discussion forums; a search for “registration expiry” returns 6 other hits, none of which talk about this problem, all of which have the “it’s your fault, talk to your council” answer), and other councils have sent tickets in, then why hasn’t it been fixed? I would assert that sending tickets in demonstrably does nothing to fix problems like this. That or no one else is actually reporting it.
An amazingly simple daily cron process would immediately solve this problem, literally overnight. It’s probably a total of 10 lines of SQL, if that. A first year DBA student could write and test this in less than 30 minutes. That simple “hot fix” would hold us over until a proper fix could be implemented across all the spaghetti code in the system(s).
I love that, as an organization, our default answer to every issue is to punish volunteers when paid “professionals” screw something up. Happens without fail. If there’s an option that makes more work (or increases costs) for the volunteers, that’s the one we choose, Every. Single. Time. “Oh hey, we just deleted your position without warning because a) we can’t manage to keep two database records in sync, b) we have no clue what database normalization might be, and c) we can’t manage to send out an email to warn you that we screwed up; so spend an hour filling out the same forms we already have on file for you and send them in again (thereby increasing your risk of PII breaches).”
Try and report a complex, highly technical issue via a totally non-technical person at your council who has no idea what you are talking about, nor how to report it in an intelligible way, nor why it matters; and who has zero interest or motivation to get it fixed because it doesn’t impact them, just the volunteers. What could possibly go wrong?
Not amazing that BSA is suffering the lowest membership since 1939. We continuously, and intentionally shoot ourselves in the foot on a regular basis. I’m fully convinced there is a group inside BSA that is intentionally trying to destroy the organization from the inside. I keep seeing more an more evidence supporting this all the time.
@JamesBrown13
If you disagree with the process of reporting issues or how issues are prioritized you need to work through your Council staff to get the process changed.
For highly technical issues that are hard to explain to a Council staffer to open a ticket, I recommend writing the text you want in the ticket and ask them to paste it in the description field.
I am closing this thread as there is nothing that can be done via the forums to solve your issue.
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