I love June. School's out. Flowers are blooming. I can walk the dogs any time during the day and I don't get sweaty. It's awesome.
But you know what else makes it awesome?
Major improvements to TroopTrack's texting feature!
Until now, TroopTrack text messages have been one way communications. This is nice for getting messages out quickly, but it doesn't work great if you want to have a conversation. Now, every text message sent using Communicate -> Send a Text Message has a link that recipients can use to reply to the message.
I've made two other improvements to go with this. Every text message now includes the name of the sender in the message, as well as the name of the list it was sent to.
I hope you like this feature. Please let us know by commenting on the TroopTrack community page linked below!
Have a great weekend,
Dave
P.S. You might be wondering why you can't just reply to text messages and have that work. The reason is because we use an email-to-text feature that lets us send texts for free. If we were to use actual SMS, we would have to pay for those text messages, and sending texts from software is still pretty expensive. Hopefully that will change in the future.
@dave This was a great idea, but the text content gets truncated due to the number of characters in the header ( to ), and the link either doesn’t send at all if the message is too long, or in my case, gets cut off and doesn’t work because it’s incomplete. Any way to allow longer messages to send, or have TT send the message in multiple parts?
That’s exactly what I was going to say. The text cuts off. This time it was just a regular meeting reminder so I’m sure that caregivers will assume I meant “wear uniforms!” but it came out as “wear unifo” (So I guess it cuts off the last four characters of a message.
Thanks everyone. I separated the text with the link and the sender’s name into a separate text, which should fix the issue, but now you will get two texts for each message.
I didn’t realize this when I made this change, but different phones support different length messages. On my iPhone, I can make the message as long as I want, but I guess other phones do different things.
The fix did not resolve the issue for me. Using Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra (Android). Text is way too long, wraps around and breaking the links, so any part of the URL that is “clickable” returns “page not found” message.
In the attached example you can see that I sent a simple message “Reminder: no meeting tonight”. It was delivered in two SMS’ and here are pics of what it looks like.
I updated the text feature to 1) shorten the url of the “reply” link and 2) remove the paragraph about unsubscribing. I just pushed it at 8:00 AM (June 23), so it will take about an hour or so to go live, just in case you are an overachiever and want to try it right away.
Can this be turned off? It’s great for some uses but the way we use the text feature we want it to be one-way communication. Can this be an option for the mailbox?
