swilliams

AGAIN! The software is doing it again. I can’t even. I work 50+ hours a week. I don’t have time for this nonsense. On top of that, all of the merit badges listed in the file from our last COH have disappeared. I double- checked in June, after uploading the file, and everything seemed fine. I can only see which merit badges a scout has from the Scoutbook site. IA won’t load the scouts’ approved/pending/started info. So o now I can’t update flags in Troopmaster, and can’t manually enter the missing merit badges. What a mess (which is not what I really want to call it).

I'll have to ask our Committee Chair. A scout came to the last committee meeting to give us his Eagle proposal, and the CC brought it up then. It seemed to me like it was a new requirement, but I couldn't say for sure. We had always gone with two adults on Eagle projects, one with YPT, and one was always a parent.

Gave this some thought last night after my last post. This fee increase has the potential to be an enormous hardship for my family. I guess we'll explore financial aid first, but from what I've seen from both BSA and other financial aid programs, it doesn't usually help quite as much as we've needed. Still, we won't go anywhere. My kids like scouting too much, and I like what they gain from it. We'll just have to find a way to work it out. At the same time, I'm worried about our Troop. For the last five-ish years, we've had scouts from two towns. The second town now has it's own Tr

Yeah, I don't know what we'll do if it's that high. We're a family of five, and all of us are in scouting. Hubby just agreed to be an ASM for the troop, as nearly a quarter of our scouts - and therefore their dads - will age out after this year. Our troop pays for adults, or at least they have. I don't think our troop can absorb that cost if it tops $50. Maybe our crew and our troop can split my registration cost, lol. Then you have the new cash-grab requirement that all Eagle projects must have two registered adults present. Prior this, we were debating having the Eagle candidate's

Ordinarily, we upload all the advancement after the COH, but that's next week. His appointment at council is today, I think. The good news is, it was working at 7:00 this morning when I logged in to try again. The bad news is, the scout starts school earlier than that, so I don't know that he'll get my email in time to print this before heading up to council for his appointment. I'll call them today and let them know what happened, and will attach his Advancement History now that it's complete. I would hope that they'll accept it from me, if he doesn't have a physical copy. The Eagl

Yes. Not only that, but I'm trying to enter a handful of merit badges for a scout so he can finish his Eagle application, and can't enter any of them. I keep getting an error message, and the forum "help" has stopped replying to my request for help. In addition, NOTHING shows up when I try to view his current badges. Nothing under 'Started'. Nothing under 'Pending Approval' and nothing under 'Approved'. And that's after waiting 15 minutes for the page to load. I will be showing up at council tomorrow with a handful of blue cards and they're going to have to enter them. Edit: I

Thank you!! Part of the problem was the browser I was using. It didn't show the box next to the scout's name, so I had no idea what to do from there. It's done now!

Well, someone from the Scoutbook forum answered my question, but I can't try to follow heir instructions. I'm at work now, and Scoutbook has decided the version of Safari on my 2 year old iPhone is too old to work with their software. Ugh. Whatever happened to backward compatibility? Two years isn't that ancient. (Sorry for all the complaining. I'm on my 19th consecutive day of work, averaging 10.5 hours a day, with over 12 hours yesterday. I'm tired and grumpy, and don't have time for software that is over-engineered without being helpful.)

It only takes reports directly from Scoutbook, but all records have to be sent to council through the site. It's a PITA. The old site was fine. Bare bones, but really, do we need the ability to make sub-groups of leaders online, or have an activity calendar?

Does anyone have experience with the new Internet Advancement 2.0? Our troop uses Troopmaster for record keeping. So far I've been able to upload our court of honor report into Internet advancement with no trouble, but now I want to manually enter to merit badges for a scout who's working toward eagle. In searching for help, I've found plenty of sources that state you can enter information manually but nothing that shows you how to do it. The user interface is so horrible. Nothing is remotely intuitive.

Given the amount of griping from him last year about having to hand write... Sounds like I have to find a scout who knows more about mail merge than I do, lol.

I bought some of the perforated blue cards from the scout shop and figured I'd pre-print some with scouts' names for our Scoutmaster to take to camp. Well, the only template I can find anywhere is one that prints the entire text. The blue cards from the shop already have some of the text on them, so if I use the pdf I found online it will print over what's already there. Does anyone know whether a template exists that works with the cards from the scout shop? Why does BSA have to make everything so dang user UN-friendly?

It's been years since we got rid of the dumpster. I have no idea if that same bear is still around, or not. We do have a color-phase bear that circles around from time to time. I came face-to-face with him; within about 20 feet. (That's the second time I've been so close to one.) Because it was twilight, and at that point I didn't know black bear didn't have to be black, I actually thought this cinnamon colored yearling was our distant neighbor's Rhodesian Ridgeback at first. NOT!! The other time, the bear was right in the woods outside the garage. Again, under 30 feet. Feet, not yard

Okay, I can't help myself. What a poorly written article in the first link. It says the boy was injured, but then says that the bear scratched the tent. Which is it? Both? How/where/to what extent was the boy injured? Ugh. Now that I got that out of my system... we have black bear all around our place in PA, as we're in the middle of the woods. It doesn't take much for a black bear to acclimate to humans. When we first built the house, we used to have a dumpster that was picked up every-other week. We couldn't keep the bear out of it. One of them even broke the top. One e

Our Troop and Pack are both 368. I've never seen a leading number, but like others have said, you wouldn't necessarily see it anywhere. We also have a Troop 68 in town, and we used to have Packs 268 and 468. For the Venture Crew, which is in a different town (was the only active one in the area), we're Crew 28, and one of the two Troops in that town is also 28. The other is Troop 8. They use a single digit on their uniforms. It almost looks strange to me, lol. When the town started their girls' troop, they could've used 18 or 38, I suppose, but they chose to go with 280. Does y

Looks like we record our attendance a lot differently. None of our scouts keeps a log, and as much as it drives me crazy, the troop doesn't record any advancement in the scout handbooks. The scribe takes attendance, then gives it to a committee member who enters it into Troopmaster. To mark progress, the ASPL of advancement has access to Troopmaster, so he prints out sheets that show which requirements scouts still need. He marks any completed requirements on the sheets, then I review it and enter the info. The one exception was for my younger son, who crossed over from a different pa

Thanks. The question came up because we have one scout who is very anxious to rank up (which is a separate issue the SM will tackle). When he was talking to me about advancing, I let him know that he still needed a bunch of troop activities. Everything he's done lately has been a service project, which is awesome in that he's doing a lot of service, but he hasn't been on a single camping trip since last year's summer camp. Of course, this means he hasn't fulfilled the camping/tenting portion - unless he's counting every night as an activity, haha. But it raised questions for me, the SM a

I'm sure this has been asked before, but a quick search didn't turn up quite what I was looking for. Does BSA have any guidelines as for what constitutes "Troop Activity"? Obviously they spell out the requirement that the activity can't be a regular troop and patrol meetings. If there aren't any real rules, what does your troop consider an activity? In the thread about girls advancing quickly, one forum member posted a list of activities his troop as done since the beginning of the year, so that's helpful. It included some service projects. Our troop does service where the project is

Our pack meetings had about the same number each meeting - which was probably about 2/3 of the total membership. By having the crossing over at the same time as the Blue and Gold, it's the one time that we had near-total attendance because it was a special occasion. Parents (and scouts) tend to be so busy that having a single afternoon makes it a little easier on the schedule. One big difference between meetings and the crossing over/B&G - and this will vary with each pack as well - is that a lot of our parents let the younger Cubs run wild during the meetings, and our CubMaster pre

Thanks. That would be the CC. LOL, so much for not bothering him. At least by now he should be somewhat rested.

No problem with these directions up until the "Add New" part. There's no tab on the right - or either side, for that matter.

Our Committee Chair is our Troopmaster guru, and while I'm sure he could answer my question, our troop just came back from hiking the AT in less-than-perfect weather and with a 5:00am wake up time this morning. I don't want to bother him. What I need to do is probably very, very simple, but I can't figure it out, and I can't even find an answer with Google (or DuckDuckGo). All I need to do is add a new scout. His application has been processed by council, and I've updated our roster in the council's Internet Advancement, which gives me his BSA number. I don't see anything in either Tr

I missed the part about trying to get to Tenderfoot before camp when I first read this. This is the one thing that troubles me about the new girl troops. Understandably, there's a desire to be in that first Eagle group, but rushing through shortchanges the experience. I'm not saying your troop is doing that, mind you. My comment is coming from my own shortcomings. It's tempting to want to see my own sons make rank quickly, and I'm a little too focused on advancement sometimes, since that's my job with the troop. Many times, as I watch the scouts in our group, I have to remember that a hu

Human nature, I suppose, but it's frustrating. The schools in our district have a "Friday Folder": an email blast sent out to all parents with information about upcoming school and community events. I wanted to put a flyer for our town's Troop, plus the Venture Crew and girls' Troop - which are in a different town - in one of the Friday Folders to let parents know about the opportunities that are out there. The school district said yes, but our DE said no. The reason given was because the DE wanted to explore the possibility of adding a girls' Troop in our town. Well, that's nice, but tha

Well, this thread has put a bit of a damper on my feelings about having posted a link to a girls' troop taking 2nd place at Klondike. I'm hoping it was a true win. I do know the older scouts were practicing for the event even before the troop was fully formed. I think they were worried about having a poor showing, and that can be quite a motivator. They were competing in the 11-13 year old group, so it's not like they were up against senior scouts and still came away with a second-place win. I see how there is certainly a lot of hype right now, and see how it can be viewed in a s