SOAR

While we have been quiet for most of the year, we have been very busy !

As we progressed on our way toward our 2011 goals we had to stop and work on a number of issues that came up with the release of Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 5. While working on those it became very clear that getting the new Event Signup in place as early as possible was a customer priority. To accomplish this, we put the Roster work on hold in the spring and moved right into Event Signup enhancements.

We are pleased to announce that on Wednesday September 8th you will receive the following updates.

Event Signup V2

Boy Scout Troops,

On Monday March 28, 2011 TroopMaster released an update that included an error in the SOAR.xfr file created by the File -> Export -> SOAR function within TroopMaster.

The column headers inside the file did not match the data columns. If you updated to this release of TroopMaster and you imported the file into your SOAR website on Monday it corrupted your website Roster. This was due to the mismatched data columns within the SOAR.xfr file. This also resulted in most parent/leader accounts being recreated with invalid data and thus causing login issues.

On Monday evening, thanks to customer reports, we noted the problem and turned off the TroopMaster Import function to prevent additional customers from running into the issue. We also contacted TroopMaster Support to resolve the issue. We identified those customers that showed signs of issues in the Roster from this issue and contacted them directly.

SOAR Customers,

I wanted to take the opportunity to personally update you on our plans for 2011 and to provide a review of 2010.

2010 – A year in review

I look back on 2010 with mixed emotions. While a number of very important tasks/updates were completed and the business had good growth, the list of updates/features I hoped SOAR would accomplish during the year never came to fruition.

SOAR started 2010 strong coming off the release of (1) all new Site Themes with lots of new options (2) the Splash Page option for those desiring more privacy. Given the popularity of the SOAR EBlast feature we then spent a lot of time adding options and updating the underlying HTML to guarantee consistent viewing across the varying email platforms that your members use. This was released in April 2010. This release also included upgrades to the Rich Text Editor and a temporary fix for “after registration” payments.

SOAR Customers,

As SOAR has grown over the last four years, we have added dedicated servers as needed to handle the large number of customers signing up and to ensure good performance for all customers.

All of our servers are dedicated servers – meaning that SOAR, and only SOAR, has access to the entire server. We are very pleased with our current hosting provider ServerBeach (www.serverbeach.com). They are one of the largest providers of dedicated servers in the market and their backbone network provided by their parent company Peer1 (www.peer1.com) is one of the most reliable in the industry.

The EBlast feature continues to be one of the most used features of the SOAR website service. Many scouting units rely heavily on this feature to easily distribute information automatically to unit members on a weekly basis. Based on this priority we have introduced the following enhancements.

After using any of these options, you can immediately view the results using the EBlast Test feature at Admin/Email.

Better Email Client Support

The overall format of the new EBlast may not look that different to you. Under the hood though, the coding used to display the EBlast in the various email clients has been completely redone. Each email reader (Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, Comcast, Roadrunner, etc…) interprets things differently. We have accounted for these variances to insure a uniform EBlast display independent of where the email is viewed. This feature alone took quite a lot of time in tracking down the email client variances and testing of each.

The biggest limitation of the current Event Signup/Online Payment combination is the inability to pay for an event AFTER registration is completed. We have introduced a temporary fix for this until we get back to a number of Event Signup/Online Payment enhancements later this year.

A smaller Add To Cart icon is now available to members on the Attendee List to pay for their registration. This icon will show up in the Paid column under the following circumstances

• If the Online Payments feature is turned on at Admin/Control Panel/PayPal
  

A number of customers have run into the issue of copying content from Microsoft Word into the Rich Text Editor and having extra “stuff” come along that produces display issues in Internet Explorer. You will know if this has occurred to you because in some version of Internet Explorer you can no longer see the Announcement or Event – but it can be viewed in other browsers.

What is happening is that a lot of non standard HTML code gets copied an stored on your website. The ironic part is that all non Microsoft browsers seem to ignore it well – its just Microsoft’s own browser that has the issue.

The cursor is now placed into the Username field of the Login Form when initially loading the home page.

We have disabled the Forgot Password link for sites that are using the Simple Membership/Shared Accounts mode.

This feature is not useful because the email address associated with the shared accounts is the site administrator. Thus all it does is create unusable email messages to the site administrator.

We have added the member’s Full Name to all account emails that are generated by the system. This is in addition to the Username.

This will help those families with usernames that are very close to distinguish between their accounts.