Good ole Spencer. He was our very first intern, and he's awesome. Today we released an update, courtesy of Spencer, that is a big improvement to the Eagle Progress Report. I've attached a before and after picture for you to check out. This is going live even as we speak, so if you try it right away you might get one last glimpse at the old report.
Before
After
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Do you ever send a message to a TroopTrack Mailing List and wonder about any of the following:
- which members did it actually go to?
- what email addresses was it sent to?
- who didn't get it?
Yeah, me too. That's why, sometime in the next week, we are going to release an email confirmation feature. When you use a mailing list, we will shoot an email back to you, like the one show below. Now you will know who it was sent to, who it wasn't sent to, and why. Yay!
This morning we are pushing several technical bug fixes that improve performance and reliability, as well as an important change to the den progress report for Cub Scouts. The progress report was showing the old cub ranks by default, and we have updated it to show the new ranks instead.
Also, I get a lot of questions about how many photos you can upload to TroopTrack. When I respond with "as many as you want" people are surprised and say something like "that's so generous". I want to clarify something about that.
It's not generous. Storage is cheap. Charging you for space is stingy. Let me break down just how cheap it is for you.
We pay for the space we use to store photos, for the bandwidth required to upload and download them, and for the server capacity to post-process the photos. We currently store 280,000 photos for our customers. In October, you uploaded 18,627 new photos.
Our total bill for all of this for October? $120.
Yeah, so... unlimited photo storage isn't generous. It just appears that way because so many products charge for it.
PermalinkThis morning we deployed a bug fix for bulk transactions that are transfers. If you were transferring from many accounts to one, the bulk transfer was reversing the values and having the opposite effect. This bug is now fixed.
Also, coming soon... a new version of the mobile app that includes an easy user search, improvements to uploading avatars, and a placeholder image on the photo uploader page.
Have a great day!
PermalinkA couple of minor changes released this morning:
1) The proper date a youth joined a unit is now displayed on the summary and detailed member reports.
2) A person with the proper privileges can edit the items on a sign up sheet even if they didn't create it.
Have a great day!
~ Dave
PermalinkYesterday our latest update to TroopTrack Mobile for iOS was approved by Apple. This release includes:
- Better support of iOS 9
- We added 3D touch shortcuts for iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus (this is really cool - when you force touch the TroopTrack Mobile Icon a menu pops up that lets you go straight to certain actions, like sending a message)
- We fixed crashes that occur when you prepare for offline mode
- We fixed crashes related to RSVP'ing for an event
- We fixed assorted HTTP timeouts and errors
Please update TroopTrack Mobile as soon as the update is available to you in the app store as this release fixes several critical bugs.
Thanks!
Dave
PermalinkOur very first user-created contribution to the TroopTrack developer program is out: a perl library for making use of the TroopTrack API. From TroopTrack user Stephen Ludin, this library makes it easy for you to use Perl to interact with the TroopTrack API. You can check it out here:
https://github.com/sludin/trooptrack
Thanks Stephen!
~ Dave
This morning I was trying to figure out who in our troop is not receiving emails or texts for any reason and I quickly became frustrated, so I decided to make it easy to do. I didn't want it to just be a report - I also wanted to be able to fix any problems directly from the page. I also wanted it to be self-service, so that members with problems can see and fix them for themselves and their family members. So... without further ado I give you...
Communication Problems!
To get there, just go to Communicate -> Communication Problems. You will see a list of everyone available to you based on your access level (self, household, patrol, troop) who meets any of the following criteria:
1) They don't have an email address
2) They don't have a cell phone number
3) They don't have a cell phone carrier (we can't send them text messages without it)
4) They have reported TroopTrack email as spam
5) They have unsubscribed from all TroopTrack email
6) We have had trouble delivering email to their email address
Some of this information was previously listed on Manage -> Members -> User Accounts. We've removed it from there to avoid confusion.
Along with this new feature, we have also fixed a bug for AHG troops where all achievements were not being listed on the Achievement Overview.
Have a wonderful Sunday!
Dave
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We just released a few minor enhancements:
1) The "promote" feature on the Manage -> Dens/Patrols/Units/Troops page now separates the youth from the adults and includes "check all" boxes.
2) Importing from AHG Connect will not override the name of the household or the last or first names of your members if you have changed them to differ from AHG Connect.
3) AHG Connect imports now include the joined on date and will set the registered member value for users who are registered.
4) AHG service star calculations will now be performed if you delete service hours.
5) We fixed a bug in the AHG Connect import that was causing girls to not be placed in the appropriate unit for their level.
We also worked on improving our PayPal integration to be more reliable, but we aren't quite ready to release it.
Have a great weekend!
Dave
PermalinkThis morning we are introducing an important change to the PayPal payment integration. Previously, the PayPal payment happened as a "popup" window on TroopTrack. The idea was to make your payment seamless in the same way Stripe payments are seamless, but unfortunately it didn't work out well on many fronts - it caused user confusion, was unattractive, was unreliable, and most importantly, was not consistent with what most people expect PayPal payments to be like. When you pay with PayPal, you are used to going to PayPal.com to complete payment and then coming back.
So we ripped out the "embedded" payments this morning and replaced them with a more traditional workflow. We think this will be much less problematic.
Please note that it is still important that users click the "return" button after completing their transactions, at least for now. Over the weekend I will start working on removing this restriction.
We really appreciate everyone who provided feedback about the PayPal payment process. Thank you!
PermalinkOne of the bigger challenges we face as we work on TroopTrack is how we handle the variations between the different organizations we support. Sometimes it results in code that looks sort of like this:
if @troop.bsa_troop? OR @troop.bsa_crew?
DO SPECIAL STUFF
else if @troop.ahg_troop?
DO MORE SPECIAL STUFF
else if @troop.etc....
etc...
This has been a challenge to manage over the years, so we have invented ways of dealing with these differences without turning our code into a mess. For example, earlier this year we added the capability to completely customize the way a page looks based on the type of organization you belong to without introducing code similar to the example above. This has been a huge boon for us because it means we can easily roll out unique pages that meet the needs of each organization type we support.
We are now working on adding something similar for achievements. We want to be able to apply custom logic to awards like Boy Scout Ranks, AHG Level Awards, etc. For example, we want to be able to tell you when all the required merit badges have been completed, when leadership requirements have been met, etc. And we want to do this without turning our codebase into a complicated, soupy mess.
Yesterday I rolled out an experiment with an approach for doing this for AHG troops. All I wanted to accomplish was to display the level awards first on the user profiles. I know that doesn't sound much, but it goes a long way toward verifying the approach. Overall the experiment was a success and it paves the way for us to do much more interesting things going forward.
That said, I did mess up two things:
1) The level awards were listed twice.
2) Requirements for badges were listed on the profile view.
Both of these problems have since been fixed. I apologize for the errors, but I am confident that the results of the experiment will lead to significant improvements in the way TroopTrack handles special logic regarding achievements.
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