Recent Product Updates
Hello friends!
We have released the updates to the Cub Scout ranks that became effective on June 1, 2024. In the process we became painfully aware of how long the award list can be when adding awards. To help with this, we have made two improvements.
First, we have made it easy for us to configure the order the awards appear in when adding them. As a result, the Cub Scout ranks are now at the top. If you have suggestions for how to order the rest of the awards, in Cub Scouts or in other unit types, please let us know by posting comments in the community forums here and we will make adjustments.
Second, we have also made it easy for us to configure whether award groups start out as "expanded" or "closed". You can see this in the screenshot below. This makes it a lot easier to scroll to the award type you are looking for. If you have suggestions about which award types should be "expanded", please let us know in the community forums here. Right now, this change is only present on the "Record Individual Progress" workflow but we will add it to the other award workflows soon.
We hope you like these improvements.
Have a great weekend!
Dave
PermalinkDue to popular demand, we have added the ability to organize your documents into folders! Please take a minute and go to Share -> Documents to get started.
Have a great weekend!
Dave
PermalinkHi Everyone,
Starting today, if you are using TroopTrack to collect event fees, RSVPs will now expire two hours after being placed in a cart if they are not purchased. We have added a timer to the cart buttons to make this easy to see.
This feature will allow you to better drive members to "check out" and secure their spot in your events.
Have a great week!
Dave
PermalinkHello TroopTrack Users!
Thank you for being TroopTrack customers. We hope you are thriving, looking forward to a great summer, and full of hope for the upcoming academic year.
Many organizations are releasing changes to their requirements over the next few months and we are working hard to keep up with them. Please understand that national organizations do not reach out to us proactively when they change their requirements and that we don't make changes unless we are able to confirm them through documentation from the national organizations. We would love it if they would keep us in the loop, but this is out of our control.
Because of this, we rely on you to let us know about these changes. To make it easier, I have added a new topic in the TroopTrack Community for you to report requirement changes to. You can access it here:
https://community.trooptrack.com/t/requirement-changes-for-achievements/13866?u=dave
We are currently aware of the upcoming overhaul of cub scouts by BSA. Unfortunately, they have not released detailed requirements for the adventures, so we are waiting on those to be announced before we can release the updated ranks.
We are also aware of one AHG change that we have already added support for, the "Woven" patch.
We have also had reports of BSA changes for older scouters but haven't been able to confirm them yet.
Please post any requirement changes you are aware of to the community topic mentioned above. We will also be adding a link to this topic to the support menu very soon.
My son and I recently went on a nice mountain hike. I've included a picture below for your viewing pleasure.
Get outside with kids. It's good for you and for them.
Best wishes,
Dave
Not everyone likes the new ability for members to reply to text messages from TroopTrack, so we're releasing the ability to turn it off. Starting September 26, you will be able to turn text message replies off by editing your TroopTrack settings.
Have a great week!
PermalinkTroopTrack has a very powerful, very flexible approach to privileges. You can control in great detail what users can do. But, with so many privileges, it can get confusing.
Which is why I've made a simple change to group privileges based on what they do. Now when you edit privileges, either for a single person or in bulk, they are grouped, like this:
And you can select a group of privileges or just a few, to suit your needs.
As long as I was in there, I also decided to add the ability to set access levels in bulk. Just click "Set Access Levels" from Manage -> Members -> Privileges and have at it.
Finally, I learned that some phones still limit text messages sent by email to 128 characters, and the new "reply" feature in text messages was using up those characters. So I split the reply into a separate text so it doesn't eat up your characters.
Oh, two more things I almost forgot about.
1) For BSA units, I have fixed a performance problem in Internet Advancement Reports. Sorry it took so long to figure out.
2) I also added a "notes" field to locations, so you can record information about your favorite camping spot!
Have a great weekend!
~ Dave
PermalinkI love June. School's out. Flowers are blooming. I can walk the dogs any time during the day and I don't get sweaty. It's awesome.
But you know what else makes it awesome?
Major improvements to TroopTrack's texting feature!
Until now, TroopTrack text messages have been one way communications. This is nice for getting messages out quickly, but it doesn't work great if you want to have a conversation. Now, every text message sent using Communicate -> Send a Text Message has a link that recipients can use to reply to the message.
I've made two other improvements to go with this. Every text message now includes the name of the sender in the message, as well as the name of the list it was sent to.
I hope you like this feature. Please let us know by commenting on the TroopTrack community page linked below!
Have a great weekend,
Dave
P.S. You might be wondering why you can't just reply to text messages and have that work. The reason is because we use an email-to-text feature that lets us send texts for free. If we were to use actual SMS, we would have to pay for those text messages, and sending texts from software is still pretty expensive. Hopefully that will change in the future.
PermalinkHello TroopTrack Friends,
This morning we released a few changes that may interest you.
First, we added a "Remember Me" checkbox to log in. If you're on a private computer, you can check this box and you won't have to log in again for 90 days. Don't check this box if you're on a shared computer!
Second, we fixed a problem many of you have mentioned. Have you ever spent a long time writing the perfect email in TroopTrack, or making a complicated custom award, only to hit save and be redirected to the login page?
Yeah, me too. That stinks.
Well, it's fixed! The inactivity timeout now counts typing on your keyboard as activity, so it will prevent you from being automatically when you are in a long-running activity.
Finally, we did some work on custom domains to make them more stable, including more monitoring and automatic restarting the proxy server if it fails. We also added better logging so we can understand the root cause when it crashes.
Have a great long weekend!
Dave
PermalinkHello Everyone!
We've recently had an influx of new customers, which has resulted in a new round of feedback about TroopTrack. One of the common complaints was that the newsletter didn't work well on phones and was unattractive.
So I redesigned the newsletter template. I didn't make any changes to the content yet - I just ported it to a template that looks much better on a mobile phone. I'd like to take some time to collect feedback on how to make the newsletter content better next - in an upcoming product update I'll include a survey to collect feedback about the newsletter.
In the meantime, please check out the new format!
Dave
PermalinkToday we released two improvements to recording attendance. These are minor changes, but they should help with the attendance flow, especially for large groups.
First, we changed the way "check all" interacts with the filter. If you filter the attendance page to a patrol or role, and then use "check all", it will only check members of the groups that are visible in the current filter.
Second, we have sorted the attendance records by last name.
I'm still working on re-designing the newsletter. It's taking a lot of effort, so please bear with me.
Have a great week,
Dave
PermalinkAre you using google analytics to monitor activity on your TroopTrack site? If so, you might be aware that Universal Analytics (also known as GA3) is going to be retired in July. To upgrade to GA4, just go to the Webmaster Settings page and hit the "Upgrade to GA4" button, then provide your Google Measurement ID.
What's coming up next? Newsletter. I am redesigning the newsletter template to work better on all devices. This is a fairly big effort and requires a lot of testing, so it may be a few weeks.
Have a great week!
Dave
PermalinkThis morning we released new branding features. With them, you can customize the logo, favicon, tab title, and footer of your TroopTrack powered web site, like this:
Not shown in this screenshot is the new "slim" footer option. If you select this option, instead of the large TroopTrack footer you are used to, you will get a tiny one liner that is barely noticeable.
I'm planning on adding the ability to add your own footer image in the near future.
I hope you like this improvement. Thank you to the many users who asked for this great feature!
Dave
PermalinkToday we released an improvement a lot of people have been asking for lately - easier assignment of users to patrols/dens! As of this moment, if you go to Manage -> Patrols (or Dens or Troops or Groups, etc) there is a new "List View" option.
If you click that, you will get a view that looks like this:
The table is sortable and searchable, and all you have to do to change an adult's subunit is check the box (adults can be in more than one subunit). To change a youth's just pick a subunit from the list. Your changes are saved automatically and will be reflected immediately.
I hope you like this feature! Thank you to the various users who suggested it!
Have a great week,
Dave
PermalinkThis evening we released a number of bug fixes, including:
Also, in case you missed it, we recently added support for custom domains. You can learn more about it by clicking Support -> Custom Domain Settings.
Finally, I updated the gallery view of photo albums so you can see the labels added to each photo by our photo analyzer. In pictures that only have one "face", you can now tag the person in that photo and then view all photos of that person. You can then filter those photos by labels, which means it's now possible to do things like "find all photos of Johnny with a horse".
I hope you like this update.
Dave
PermalinkHave you ever wanted to use your own domain name for your TroopTrack site? Now you can! If you have the manage troop settings privilege, just go to Support -> Custom Domain Settings to get started.
There is a $25 setup fee to offset the cost of acquiring a SSL certificate and updating our server configurations.
Have a great week!
Dave
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