TroopTrack Product Updates

Bug fixes 2017-01-09

We just released three changes:
1) We separated the payments column on the all payments page for an event into debits and credits columns.
2) Spencer fixed saving meeting schedules - the rails 5 upgrade had left it submitting twice.
3) We fixed a Trail Life USA specific bug preventing Point Men and Rants from registering.

API improvement and bug fix 2017-01-09

We just released two changes:

1) We added location to the event details API endpoint

2) We fixed a bug preventing you from updating levels at the user profile level

Goodnight!

Bug fixes 2016-12-22

Bug fixes 2016-12-22

Better summary progress report 2016-12-20

When you look at a progress report for a den/patrol/section/troop and you pick "All *s", the progress report was showing every requirement of every award. This was making the report really slow and totally useless. I knew about this last night when I was working on progress reports, but perhaps I was tired because I couldn't make sense of it. 

This morning I woke up with the answer in my head, and as a result the progress report by achievement type now only shows a summary view of every award of that type.

Have a great day,

~ Dave

Rails 5 is alive! 2016-12-20

Brainwaves come from the weirdest things. This morning, because of a minor error on my part, the drag-and-drop feature on the patrols/dens/sections page was broken in my development environment. Somehow, that gave me an idea about our Ruby on Rails upgrade we've been struggling with, that a simple configuration problem was the source of all our troubles.

I was right. Rails 5 is now live!

This is such a huge, huge relief to us. So many things have been stuck behind this upgrade and it is finally out of the way.

Thanks to everyone for being patient with the outages that occurred as we worked on the upgrade. We love you!!!

Rails 5 bug fixes and known issues 2016-12-20

We just released a number of bug fixes related to the rails 5 upgrade that went live this morning:

1) Badge books were crashing in some cases. Fixed.

2) Printing blue cards was crashing. Fixed.

3) Deleting user avatars was broken. Fixed.

4) Printing attendance sheets was broken. Fixed.

5) Trail Life renewal payments weren't working. Fixed.

There are a couple of know issues we are working on:

1) Uploading files in the page editors.

2) Trail Life Point Man Tools -> Leader books is broken.

3) User avatars are not working. If you upload a new image the images will work if you don't want to wait for us to fix this.

Thanks for everyone who alerted us to these issues.

~ Dave

Improved Progress Reports, Spelling, and fix for crashes 2016-12-19

Good evening! We just released several improvements.

1) The progress report now shows only the first word of each requirement to make room for more requirements, but the full requirement is displayed if you hover over it.

2) The progress report now includes the percent complete and completion date of achievements.

3) We have corrected the spelling of the word "receive" in quite a few places (i before e except after c, you know...).

4) In certain rare cases mailing lists were crashing. This is fixed.

Have a nice night!

~ Dave

Ruby on Rails Upgrade 2016-12-02

Good morning! Happy Friday!

Back in the early fall we attempted a major upgrade of Ruby on Rails, the application framework that we use to build TroopTrack. We are currently on version 4.2, but the latest stable version is now 5.0. That upgrade didn't go well and we had to back it out. We decided to wait until the super busy season (August - early November) was over before we tried it again.

This morning we are trying it again. We've spent a lot of time fixing the problems we saw back in September, and I hope it will go much better this time.

That said... this is a big deal and there is a big possibility we will see some problems throughout the day. We will resolve them as quickly as possible, so please bear with us today.

This upgrade is really important since it is delaying a lot of improvements we want to make to TroopTrack, like this one: https://community.trooptrack.com/t/the-future-of-magic-mailing-lists-custom-mailing-lists-and-mailboxes/2571

Have a great day and a better weekend!

~ Dave

Various minor bug fixes 2016-10-12

I just pushed a bunch of small bug fixes:

- Girl Scout troops can now record outside service hours

- I corrected some wording about PayPal support "coming soon" (we've had it for years...)

- You can add a title and a description to photos in the photo album, and now you can actually see them in the list view of a photo album

- Fixed the total column of the money book to be accurate - there were cases where it was over-counting certain transactions

- We were showing a balance due on the event "all payments" page for people who paid with a money account that was equal to the credit card fees that would have been incurred if they used a card. This balance due has been removed.

- Deactivated users can no longer log into their inactive troop account

- If you add a user as an adult and then change them to a scout, their ranks now initialize properly (BSA only)

- Fixed a bug that was causing the fundraiser feature to crash in certain situations

- The inbound email processor was crashing for certain types of spam that did not have a sender. We have fixed it to avoid crashing.

- Fixed a bug that was preventing you from recording miles in outside participation.

Phew! Sleep tight!

~ Dave

Rails 5 Upgrade Postponed 2016-09-26

It's official. We are going to hold off on the Rails 5 upgrade until November. It's just too busy right now to have another upgrade outage. This also delays the release of email aliases and the member resolver, which many of you have been anxious to get your hands on.

Other than the upgrade related issues we have had, I am pretty pleased with the performance of the system - our usage goes up substantially this time of year and our pages have managed to continue to respond reasonably well.

TurboNET bug and more 2016-09-21

This morning we released a few important changes:

1) TurboNET roster imports were failing for some Cub Scout Packs. This is now fixed.

2) Meeting schedules will now show the description of the event on the page where the recurrences are listed.

3) When recording payment for an event from the Event "All Payments" page, credit card fees were being applied even if payment was being made from an individual payment account. This is fixed.

That's it - have a great day!

~ Dave

Nextdoor.com spam block 2016-09-12

This morning we are deploying a fix that blocks all emails from nextdoor.com. Apparently people who join NextDoor.com give NextDoor.com access to the contacts on their device and then spams them, which results in emails being sent to your mailing lists. NextDoor.com does not get any access to TroopTrack, just to the contacts that users of ND.com give it access to.

Privilege book filtering and report menu improvements 2016-09-10

We just deployed a couple of smaller changes. Here they are:

1) A user can now filter by privileges and access level on the privileges book.

2) The menus for reports are cleaned up to make navigating easier. You can now get to "All Reports" from any individual report.

3) We fixed a bug that occurs when a user subscribes a calendar application to your main web site. This isn't actually supported (we have special URLs for calendar feeds) and it was generating lots of error reports, so now this will just return a 404 (Not Found).

Have a great weekend!

~ Dave

Inbound email processing 2016-09-09

IMPORTANT NOTE: This announcement only applies to emails sent from your email client (Outlook, Mail, Gmail Web, etc). It does not apply to messages sent from Communicate -> Send an Email, Newsletters, Event Invites, etc. It also does not apply to customers using subdomain emails.

Lately you may have noticed that emails sent to mailing lists from your email client didn't get delivered. Until this morning. Some of you have brought this to our attention. Thank you for your help debugging this problem.

At first we thought it was a problem with specific email addresses and focused our attentions researching individual complaints. That turned out to be a dead end.

This morning I double checked our process (we call him Mailman) that checks for new messages and then puts them in our email processing queue. Years ago we had problems with that guy, but for the past couple of years he's been rock solid. Additionally, he's monitored by another process, so when he crashes we get notified.

At first glance everything looked okay. Mailman was running and looked healthy. So then I checked the last time he processed a message and well... I wish I'd been wearing dark colored pants today. He hadn't processed a message since August 31.

So I killed him. And started a new one. And this Mailman started processing messages right away, clearing out all the messages we've been sitting on since August 31.

This is really embarrassing to me personally for two reasons.

First, we thought we had this critical part of TroopTrack well-monitored. We were wrong. I'm sorry we messed this up. We are going to figure out a better way of monitoring mailman so we can tell not only that he's alive, but that he's also doing his job.

Second, I should have checked mailman first. It only takes a few minutes to verify that he is processing messages and it was a critical mistake for me not to do that immediately. To not do that for nine days is a humiliating error in judgment.

Thank you to everyone who helped us debug this problem and a sincere apology to everyone impacted by this mistake.