SOAR

Here are some guidelines for data that resides in your PackMaster database.

Scouts & Adults

• All names (scout, parent, and adult) should be unique. Use middle names and suffixes if necessary to ensure all names are unique.
• The website account username will be automatically generated in the format
  • <first initial><middle initial><last name><suffix>
• Do not use co-leaders for dens. Pick one as primary and one as assistant.
• Only current leadership (both scout and adult) should be recorded. If older positions are recorded, they may come through to the Troop Website.
  

The PackMaster 2008+ Import will save alot of typing time by pulling account, roster, and achievement data directly from your TroopMaster database to populate your website automatically.

Upon initial import this feature will

• Create a website account for each scout, parent, and adult
• Group scouts together into Dens
• Link scouts and parents in child/parent relationships
• Assign leadership positions to parents/adults
• Associate achievement information with individual scouts

When importing you can control

• If website accounts are Active or Blocked
  

You can select the number of events that will be shown in the Upcoming Events section of the Home Page.

This feature is accessible at Administration/Control Panel/Features.

The EBlast Now feature will immediately send out an EBlast. It can be found at Administration/Email/EBlast/EBlast Now.

This function can be used in the following ways.

• If you do not want to have weekly scheduled EBlasts, you can use this feature to manually determine when to send out an EBlast.
• If you have weekly EBlasts scheduled but want to send out a notice of new content on the website before the next scheduled EBlast. There are also options for how an EBlast Now will affect your next scheduled EBlast.

When we move our dedicated servers to a new hosting provider, we will become solely responsible for the “reputation” of our email servers and the email that passes through them. This has the advantage of removing the current random bouncing email problem that currently exists. The disadvantage is we have to put in place and maintain technology to block SPAM.

We have installed SPAM blocking filters on our corporate server and are refining the configuration to provide an adequate balance between blocking unsolicited emails while ensuring legitimate emails are passed through. This does not affect customers sites at this point in time.

We have added the column “Status” to all user selection lists (Email Lists, Global Senders, EBlast Exclude Members, etc.).

This column will display if an account is Active or Blocked.

We have added a configuration setting for Upcoming Events to allow you to select the number of events that will be shown in this section of the home page.

This can be found under Administration/Control Panel/Site Settings/Features.

In an effort to improve usability we filter email addresses to insure they are in a valid format. The intention is to catch any typing mistakes.

This filter incorrectly blocked email addresses that contains a dot “.” in the username, i.e. joe.example@yahoo.com.

This restriction has been removed.

Captcha is the term referring to the image challenge that appears on the Contact Us and Register New User forms for anonymous users. This technology prevents spammers from automating the creating of accounts or sending email to your website.

Customers found that the captcha image would be cached with some older browsers or based on proxy servers. This would cause an older image to be displayed and members would not be able to answer the captcha question. This would in effect block valid requests.

This issue has been resolved.

We have fixed two bugs with the Comments feature.

The first was that Comments were being “paged” to the bottom of the screen creating significant white space in certain browsers. Users would often miss that comments even existed given the spacing. This bug has been fixed.

When entering line breaks while creating a Comment, certain browsers would remove the line break and “crunch” all the text together. This bug has also been fixed.