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.
Greetings! Our troop calendar has stopped syncing to those subscribed through the URL. We’ve done some testing to rule out old calendar links, stale cookies/cache, etc. Here’s the details:
When a scout/parent subscribes to our calendar REMOVED BY ADMIN, events will start populating their device/calendar program, but it is an old version of the troop calendar. I believe the timeline is somewhere around mid January (any edits after that date appear on scoutbook+ but not in any synced devices). For those already subscribed to the troop calendar, it has stopped syncing for them. The URL above is for the new calendar from ScoutBook (advancements.scouting.org).
I have tried subscribing directly to the calendar in my google calendar (I usually use an iCal program on my laptop) in my google account. I see the same issue. My calendar only shows events that existed on the calendar prior to mid January (any edits to existing events or new events do no show up).
There may be on related point of information. At recharter time in December 2025, our troop had some technical issues and we were temporarily dropped (not chartered) until about mid January.
To be clear, we can edit our troop calendar. New events show up in ScoutBook+, notices/reminders will go out via email. We are just having a problem with users subscribed through the ScoutBook+ calendar URL - they are seeing and old version of our troop calendar.
Appreciate any help/guidance that you can provide. Thank you! -mike
@MichaelJochen even if you download the ICS (which I just did for yours and erased the link) - open the ICS with a Textedit program - you will see it is current events. I would try an Unscubscribe the subscribe new
Thanks for the responses. I finally figured it out.
TL;DR: calendar programs apparently don’t like the windows ^M control character.
We had tried delete-&-resubscribe numerous times. This affected iOS & Android users and basically everyone in the troop. Even subscribing directly to a google calendar (in a new account that never subscribed to the troop calendar) via google’s web app calendar yielded the same results
It came down to an entry where someone copy-pasted the description from a word doc. The description had a bunch of windows carriage-returns (^M), some single, some double. While manually scrolling through the ICS file, I saw that every event listed after the entry with ^Ms would not appear when imported or subscribed. I’m not sure if it was the single ^M or double ^M^M that did it.
After I deleted the carriage returns from the ICS file, it imported fine into my calendar program. Editing the entry in ScoutBook+ to remove the offending ^Ms allowed the recently added events to finally appear on subscribed calendars.
One interesting side note, the open-source Thunderbird email/calendar program was the only application that ate the ^Ms and still showed the full calendar.
We’re going to implement a new TTP for our troop’s calendar maintainer: no copy-paste from Word docs…
Yes, that’s what everyone was using – the URL for the calendar subscription provided for the troop calendar on advancements.scouting.org (subscribed via their individual devices/calendar apps). We couldn’t figure out why everyone’s calendar stopped syncing new events (not just a few, everyone). Aside: I’m a strong advocate for scouts/families to subscribe via that URL so they stay “in the know” – we use the calendar heavily in our troop.
The problem was a calendar entry that contained windows-style carriage return characters that client calendar apps did not like, so they stopped processing any calendar entries that were added or edited after the “bad” entry (any entry occurring later in the file after the carriage-return characters would not display in their calendar app).
I manually downloaded the ICS file to test and figure out what was going on offline. After I removed the carriage-return characters from the offending calendar entry on advancements.scouting, everyone’s subscribed calendars started showing the newer/recently-added events (well, the folks that I have asked thus far indicate that their calendar is syncing again, so I’ll assume everyone at this point!). Tnx again, -m
Shouldn’t Scoutbook be stripping carriage returns or, better, encoding CRLF or a lone LF as the literal string \n (that is, backslash followed by ‘n’)? That’s the specification as I understand it. That’d be robust and convenient handling for many Windows users.
A quick internet search confirms that CRs break a lot of ICAL clients (e.g., here).
