YuanPlummer The message you see is a standard message and not specific to the issue going on right now.
The standard message should have been replaced with an outage warning by now. Many people donāt know about the outage and are still using it to send messages or relying on it for automatic reminders for events, not realizing itās not working. A lot of things being communicated are time sensitive. āNot instantaneousā means a few minutes or a few hours of delay at most, by current standards, not days or weeks. By not disclosing the outage, Trooptrack risks losing its credibility and customers.
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YuanPlummer To be clear, I was just letting you know the message youāre seeing wasnāt something set recently to mislead anyone - Iāve seen it come up in the past and isnāt related to this outage at all. However, I agree with you your point on not putting a banner up - there should be some kind of system wide message as our other troop leaders were pretty confused until I happened to find this thread.
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How much longer we have messages that need to be sent out ?
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Unfortunately we do not know, they have a ticket open with the e-mail provider and are working with them to get this resolved. They understand this is a huge burden on their users and are doing everyting they can to get this resolved.
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This outage has crippled my troopās communication. We also had no idea until today when I logged in. Not happy at all for a paid product.
Glad we almost have this behind us.
That said, didnāt this happen a while back when SendGrid was our email provider?
Seems like we could have foreseen that just changing email vendors wasnāt enough to fix the issue.
Given the duration of the outage, Iām starting to get questions about if trooptrack is the right option for us.
Please let us know what we can do to help move this along.
Pretty sure that if itās a money issue (ie hiring more SW engineers), you could probably just make a proposal to the community and we could help move the needle for you.
Thanks
John
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@JohnGrundy, There were security measures put into place from the last time something similar happened, this seems to be a different vulnerability.
Money is always an issue, TT fees have not been raised in the almost 10 years I have been using it, however costs have gone up and membership has gone down.
What would you all be willing to pay for this system if it meant better and more responsive support and an ability to get back to developing new features?
@AaronStorey
Business Model is always a fun topic. Have you ever looked at the parts of the application and investigated offering it by Topic (Comms, Calendar, Advancement, Training, etc.). My guess is that the Comms and Calendar are the most used aspect of the platform. It would be good to keep track of what the scouting.org team is doing and stay ahead of them. Net Net: I could easily see us paying 5x or more our current fee structure (If it worked and was demonstratable better than the national scouting offer). Note: Advancement would be a lot more attractive if we could work with National to get API access to push changes to them.
Hope that helps.
If you increase prices, but are able to have more features, its an easy sell. Raise prices and no new functionality people get mad. Troop web host I believe charges 20 dollars more a year for similar functionality. Troop track is easier to pick up and work without training for new scouts and parents. $20 in the course of a year likely does not matter much to most units, as you are basically competing with $free (scoutbook plus) vs the 3 pay people. But the email not working as designed since may is a real turn off to a price increase.
@JohnGrundy,
Wow 5x I highly doubt most units would be good with that, especially when SB+ is free and the other couple software packages are not nearly that expensive. It would be amazing if National created an API to be able to do that, and it will never happen. They were not even going to make a way for anyone to track advancements elsewhere and import them into SB+, they got push back and implemented the current workflow. Unless someone has a very powerful National ear that they can put a bug in I donāt see that ever happenening.
@tkramer, I would certainly suggest to TT leadership that no increase be implemented until all of the current issues are resolved. While I agree that new functionallity would be great but with a $20 per year subscription increase I am not sure that would be enough to bring about a major increase in development to add new functionallity.
@AaronStorey True, that 5x may be steep for some Units, but I think the point is that if there is superior UI and functionality it has value. I could see that in the future, some troops might use the Advancement and Training capabilities of SB+, but use something simpler, easier to use for comms and calendar. Many of our younger scouts donāt know what email is (or donāt care) and are focused on faster turn communications like text and IM. I think continuing to build that capability (yes for an added charge) would be good.
Is there an estimate as to when email will be restored? Weāve stayed with TroopTrack even though TrailLife and AHG have their own systems because we like yours better for email and money accountability/oversight capabilities. If this continues much longer the pressure to switch may become too great. As far as cost goes, I wouldnāt be upset with a 33 - 50% increase if fully working. It has been 10 years, and we all know costs have increased. The top cost we could justify absorbing in one shot is probably $150 a year for the capabilities we are using.
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Go to one of the old email you sent via Trooptrack and find the delivery notification email. You will see the email list in that email. Just copy and paste to use outside Trooptrack.
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Asking about fee increases in the middle of a weeklong outageā¦ thatās a bold strategy. Should be talking about refunds for a paid service that isnāt deliveringā¦ If TroopTrack canāt support its product we can just move everything over to the GoogleSphere
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Hi Aaron - what is the vulnerability causing the spoofing to be allowed? I see there is some work that could still be done on the public facing DNS records for the domain that would further secure the domain. (hard fail SPF, dmarc reject policyā¦) However, there doesnāt seem to be any active blacklisting on the domain. Mind telling us what the holdup is with sendgrid?
@MichaelLane3, the fee increase came up in the discussion organically and I in no way speak for TT staff, I have been a long time user and have a great relationship with the TT staff behind the scenes but I am a user like all of you. I help when I can and bring feedback to the staff.
@JoeWertz, I have no specifics, I was just told that some fixes were put in place and they were working with AWS to re-instate e-mail service.
OK ā this is seriously getting ridiculous now. More than 2 weeks to fix the most critical component of this system. Why have we not heard from TroopTrack leadership directly on this situation? The product is, for all intents and purposes, not working. I cannot sign up new members. I cannot send out invites or messages to invitees/attendees. I cannot send out our weekly newsletter.
Why is this situation not being taken seriously?
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Exactly! Iām okay paying what we pay but I expect a product that works. At this point we should all be issued a partial refund for whatever length of time email does not work.
Lucky for me I already have a domain and email set up on it so I could easily switch back to a more manual email system but I really like TT for the advancement tracking and calendar, and email of course. But if TT is not able to deliver a functional product I could easily switch to SB+ and Google Email and Calendar. Will consider soon if this is not resolved.
Very frustrating. I feel like I am paying for my troop to be confused at this point.