SOAR

Today we are excited to announce a major SOAR update: Mobile-friendly themes.

Desktop views of MyPack and MyTroop sites should be largely unchanged going forward. When you view those same pages on phones or tablets, however, layouts and sizing will adapt automatically. This should make your sites more usable on small devices, with much less zooming and panning.

Mobile and tablet views display a popup menu to make your menus easy to reach without a lot of scrolling.

This update has been a major effort for a couple reasons. Existing themes were designed with desktop resolutions in mind. Adjusting for smaller screens required surgery not just on the styles but also the organization of the pages themselves. On top of that, SOAR sites are full of user-generated content. It's a wonderful aspect of the service, but it also leads to challenges presenting content on different devices. We can't know in advance what some creative author might cook up in the rich text editor. We can only do our best to display it in a way that makes sense.

Today we're happy to introduce a new feature: Automated "parents" email lists. This is a frequently requested feature, and we hope it saves all the webmasters out there some time and effort.

This automated email list is similar to the "announce" and "leaders" email lists that have existed for some time. To enable these automated lists, including the new parents list, visit Email > Auto Lists, click the enable checkbox, and save your settings. The parents email list will be available immediately. If your account already has automated lists enabled, we recommend you disable and then reenable the auto lists feature. That will ensure the parents list is initialized.

Today we added an enhancement to the Scoutbook and TroopMaster import features: While importing your roster, the site now shows an activity indicator. This addresses a concern that it was difficult to tell when an import process completes.

Please keep the usability feedback coming!

Following the server upgrade, we saw an increase in email spam. We discovered that the CAPTCHA on the Contact Us form had become disabled. We re-enabled it, and over time we have monitored the spam rate and adjusted the CAPTCHA difficulty. We have also taken other measures to prevent spam from reaching SOAR customers. As a result of these efforts, we no longer see spam flowing through the system via the contact form.

Dear SOAR Customers:

We hope you had a great Fourth of July!

This weekend’s planned SOAR upgrades are complete, and all services are restored. Your website is back online, and emails are flowing normally. EBlasts scheduled for this morning did not go out automatically, but we sent them manually a bit later in the day. We are not aware of any open issues at this time.

You should see no changes in functionality as a result of this server update. But if you find any problems, please send an email to support@soarol.com and we’ll investigate immediately.

Thank you for your patience as we updated the server and operating system to a more modern solution. This positions us well for future SOAR improvements!

Dear SOAR Customers:

We want to let you know that all SOAR sites and email will be unavailable for 24 hours starting at 8:00 am PDT on Saturday, July 5. We plan to have all functionality restored by the morning of Sunday, July 6, and will send follow-up email when everything is back online.

This downtime is planned so that we can migrate the SOAR infrastructure to a new server with a more modern operating system. This is a key part of our efforts to bring SOAR up-to-date with the latest hardware and software to ensure a robust, dependable platform for our customers. There will be no change in customer-visible features as a result of this migration.

Tracking drivers for events has proven popular, and we've enhanced that capability with the latest SOAR release. You can now track drivers to and from the event separately, and a member no longer needs to sign up to attend the event to register as a driver.

In addition, we added an Age column to the Event Registration Excel Export document. This allows leaders to see the ages of their Scouts, which is handy when it comes to things like tent assignments.

In our ongoing efforts to improve event management within SOAR, we've added driver tracking for events. Event attendees can indicate whether they can drive (adults only) and how many additional passengers they can carry. Event coordinators can see the driver and passenger count (listed as D+P) in the attendee lists.

Administrators can enable driver tracking for an event by first enabling the Signup feature for the event, and then checking the "Track Drivers" box.

We made two updates to automated event mailing lists.

Adults are now automatically included in the email list when their youth(s) sign up for the event.

In addition, we resolved an issue related to duplicate mailing list names. This popped up whenever you tried to update the signup settings for an event. Now you can modify event signup settings at any time with no issues.

With certain settings, printed rosters for event attendees had incorrect phone numbers. This happened specifically when grouping by den/patrol and then listing by family within them. Phone numbers would be misaligned with the corresponding members.

We've fixed this bug and the printed rosters for events are now correct in all formats.