Recent Product Updates
A few months ago TroopTrack's text-message capability took a big hit - the free email-to-text service we were using stopped working and we had to disable free text messaging from TroopTrack. This has been discouraging to us at TroopTrack and to many of you and I have spent some time working on a plan to add text messaging support back.
And it's coming! On January 1, 2025, we will celebrate the new year by rolling out SMS support in TroopTrack. This will not be based on the email-to-text solution we used before, but will use true SMS. This offers lots of advantages over the email-to-text approach including faster delivery and better control of the message appearance. It will also make our "reply" feature easier to use and help us stay out of trouble with the new regulations regarding privacy and text messaging.
The only downside is that SMS delivery is not free, and compared to push notifications and emails, the per-message cost is pretty high. As a result, this new feature is going to be a TroopTrack add-on. It will cost $20/year and will provide up to 500/messages per month. If you don't use text-messaging, you don't need to purchase this and you TroopTrack costs will stay the same.
We've tried very hard over the years to keep TroopTrack inexpensive and to avoid "premium" features. Our preference is to make everything available to everyone and not nickel-and-dime our customers to death with add-ons that pile up over time. As a result, I've been really reluctant to do this and have dragged my feet on committing to it. In the meantime, you've been without text-messaging and that has stunk for you, so I want to apologize for taking so long to decide. Hopefully, we have priced this so that it is affordable for those who want to use it.
Thanks, as always, for your support of TroopTrack. We have the best customers in the world and appreciate all the feedback you give us.
Best wishes,
Dave
PermalinkHello TroopTrack friends!
Many of you have reported that loading the "achievements" tab on the user profile has been slow recently, particularly in Cub Scout packs. This morning I was able to resolve this problem and the page load times have improved dramatically such that nearly all user achievement pages will load in a second or less.
Have a great week!
Dave
PermalinkMany of you have reported problems delivering text messages to your members since early July. We have been investigating this issue as if it was a technical issue on the TroopTrack side and have been unable to find the root cause.
That's because there wasn't a root cause, at least not on the TroopTrack side.
TroopTrack text messaging uses an email-to-text service to send text messages. This is much less expensive than SMS messaging from a web application, and it's worked reasonably well over the years. For more than a decade, TroopTrack has relied on a service called Sendgrid to deliver emails to our users, and they have been a reliable and helpful service, albeit expensive.
Sendgrid was recently acquired by Twilio, a company whose largest product is SMS delivery. Effective July 1, they began blocking all email-to-sms email messages. They didn't inform us of this change - I figured it out by contacting their support desk.
They asked us to use their paid SMS service instead and clearly have no intention of allowing these emails.
As a result, we are no longer able to support text messaging from TroopTrack until we find another solution. We don't know how long that will take.
We encourage you to explore chatterboxes as an alternative way of communicating quickly over mobile devices. It is fast, reliable, and very inexpensive.
I will be disabling the text messaging feature in TroopTrack very soon.
Thank you for your understanding in this issue.
Best wishes,
Dave
Hi Everyone,
On Friday I attempted to improve the delivery time of text messages from TroopTrack. In the process, I inadvertently turned off email delivery. It was a simple mistake that was the result of me trying to do something quickly without thinking it completely through. I'm sorry for the disruption it caused.
I have fixed the problem and improved the speed of delivery for text messages. Email delivery has resumed, however there is a substantial backlog of emails to be sent and it may be a few hours before all pending emails have been delivered.
For your reference, email delivery resumed at 8:00 am MT on Sunday, August 18. I expect the service to be caught up with all pending emails by noon MT.
Thank you for your patience and please accept my apologies for this mistake.
Have a great week,
Dave
PermalinkHello Everyone,
We are happy to announce the release of an updated Android app that is compatible with modern Android devices. You can download it in the Google Play store here. If you are interested in the Apple version, you can download it here.
Rupert has been hard at work improving the bulk awards workflow. It's easier to use, especially on your phone. We hope you will check it out and let us know what you think. We've been focusing efforts on making it easier to find awards in our various award workflows because there are so many available for you to work on. One of the features we've recently added is the ability to specify what order the awards are listed in - so if you have a particular award type that is used more than others, please let us know by commenting in community.trooptrack.com.
Pushkaraj has been busy updating awards. He's been working from your feedback in the community - if you have other awards you'd like us to update, you can let us know about them here.
Finally, I've been working to make email addresses and phone numbers clickable on the site. If you click on a phone number in your browser, it will launch your phone application, making it easier than ever to reach members of your organization. This feature is currently not working on the mobile app, but I'm working on it.
Do you have anything you'd like to tell us about this product update? You can comment on it, ask questions, and make suggestions on the community here. We love feedback, positive and negative, and really appreciate your encouragment.
I hope you're having a great summer! Stay safe in this heat.
Dave
PermalinkHello 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
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