SOAR

On Wednesday November 23rd early morning we have a planned service window from midnight to 4AM EST.

All of our dedicated servers are being moved from disparate racks within our provider’s data center into the same rack with the addition of a private backbone network. This is being done to accommodate future expansion and to support increased transaction load from features like Calendar Sync.

There is never a good time for a service interruption. At the same time we though just before the Thanksgiving holiday would be good since many will be doing things other than scouting.

Our service provider has given us this window of time when the physical servers will be moved. Once there are moved access should be restored quickly.

At the end of August one of our Database Servers experienced a hardware failure and the rebuild of the server was having intermittent connectivity issues. We minimized the downtime to 3 minutes by placing an automatic restart monitor while we looked for the root source of the issue.

We are pleased to report that in the second week of October we found the issue. There was a small amount of corrupt data in one of the indices for the primary database table. The corrupt data was in an area that was not accessed frequently and thus took us longer to find. It was also the reason the Database Server ran normally the majority of the time.

Over the last few weeks one of the primary backbones for the Internet, Level 3 communications, has been experiencing ongoing connectivity issues.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/11/internet-died-little-today/44644/

While the press is only reporting this as a single incident, our own monitoring shows this is still an ongoing issue, although not as frequent or severe as the event reported on 11/7/2011.

We are bringing this to your attention because you or your members may be affected by this. If you see a screen like the following when trying to access your SOAR website, you are probably experiencing this issue.

An export feature for event registrations has been added for event administrators on the ‘Attendee List’ page of an Event.

This Excel file contains three spreadsheets

• Attending
• Not Attending
• No Response

The information in the export can be used for a variety of purposes including collecting email addresses for emails specific to each group: Attending, Not Attending, No Response.

A basic Roster Export feature has been added at Admin/Members.

This will enable customers to use information from their Rosters in a variety of ways by exporting to Excel and manipulating information there.

We will expand the Roster Export feature after the Roster work in 2012.

This feature is primarily for users of TroopMaster and PackMaster.

This will allow you from preventing your members from updating their own contact information. This way they will have to forward contact information changes to the person who manages TroopMaster/PackMaster and contact information changes will not be lost upon subsequent imports.

The option is available at Admin/Control Panel/Features/Roster. The Edit Own feature is turned on by default. You may uncheck this box to prevent members from modifying their own contact information.

A feature to forward all contact information changes to a single email address will be included in the Roster work coming in 2012.

This document has been updated to include the new features as well as expanded to better describe the Even Signup features, options, and process.

It is also now conveniently available in the ‘signup admin’ tab of each Event ! It is also available at Admin/Online Help/Feature Guides.

Please take the time to read through it to better understand all of your options.

We have received issue reports from a number of customers that the Edit Own checkbox in not active in the new Consolidated Event Signup.

Please remember that Edit Own is ONLY available to customers that are using Individual Accounts for each member. If you are using Shared Accounts there is no way for the website to know who is logged in. Thus there is no way for them to just edit their own registration. They would have to access to edit ANY registration and you don’t want that.

If you are using Individual Accounts and you cannot access the Edit Own checkbox for Consolidated Event Signup, it means that you have not properly set the mode for your SOAR website. Go to Admin/Control Panel/Membership and change the mode to Individual Accounts. As soon as you do this the Edit Own checkbox will become available to you.

• Name/Type Report - The Name and Type reports have been combined into a single report under the Name report. You will now see sections for Attending Scouts, Attending Adults, Regrets Scouts, and Regrets Adults.
• Section Expand/Collapse – Each section of the Attendee list can now be collapsed or expanded to allow for more control in viewing and printing registration summaries. By default the Regrets Adult section for each report will be collapsed to remove confusion.
• Patrol Report – For Boy Scout Troops adults have been pulled out of the Patrol sections and added to their own Adults Attending section
  

Just as you, we are anxious to get to email lists for Events. An easy way to email those that ARE attending an event. An easy way to email those that have not registered at all for an event.

To achieve these new features we need to retool some of the underlying email system to handle more dynamic email lists. Right now email list membership changes in bulk a few times a year when new scouts are added and on occasion as members update their email address. Email Lists for Events means the “membership” of the email list will change daily, if not hourly. That is going to take some time.