ScouterJoe

I hate to nag but... If there are no plans to get this fixed let everyone know so that we can move our sites elsewhere.

It's been three weeks now (six weeks total, at least) and hosting is still not working. By the way, Netroster and Compass are still not working either.

For the last three weeks I have not been able to connect to my troop's web site at http://troops.scouter.com. Also I cannot Connect to update my troop's site at http://www.scouter.com/hosting/logon.asp. Anyone else having this problem?

The domain troops.scouter.com seems to be down for over a week now. Has anyone else tried to visit their troop website at this domain? Several test sites such as http://www.upordown.net/ confirm that the site is down. I get an Error 400 message. Terry can you help us with this? Joe

I am having trouble with the http://troops.scouter.com domain. The message that I get while trying to view my troop's web site is: Bad Request - Invalid Hostname HTTP Error 400. The request hostname is invalid. Others in my troop have reported this to me too so it is from multiple users on various computers. It is not just my troop web site. Every troop from around the country that uses this domain gives the same message. Joe

83Eagle, Here is what I did a few years ago that worked very well; though it was all male elementary youth at that time. I showed up in full uniform with a backpack on and a spirit stick in hand. I removed the pack and mentioned that camping was a part of scouting. Then I explained the spirit stick, how it worked and let everyone yell for a bit using the stick to return to silence. I then passed out 20 or 30 pictures of cubs having fun at various events. I had written down the subjects found on the pictures and asked "who has the BB gun pictures?", etc. Towards the end of my time I passed out a flyer to all the boys detailing the roundup and made a big deal about folding it up and putting it into their pockets to take home to their parents. After that I passed out tyvek wristbands (like this http://tinyurl.com/4y2h5hc), and had the boys put them on. The wristbands serve two purposes; a reminder to talk to mom about the roundup and when they get to the roundup the wristbands were cut off, the boys name was written on it and placed into a box to use to select raffle winners. The raffle prizes were extra patches from past camporees and that sort of thing. Everyone got something. In this way I had a great turn out to the roundup and signed up a bunch of boys! Good luck, Joe Henry

Thank You! so much for fixing that problem! Joe

I am still unable to upload to my troop web site after a month! Is anyone else having this problem? Is anyone at Scouter.com looking at this issue?? Is there another free web hosting site I can use? Very Frustrated, ScouterJoe

Scouter Terry, I have been unable to log in to my SCOUTER hosting account all this week. Upon trying to login, the username and password are accepted then the page flashes and returns back to the original login page. Could you please check into this for me? I really need to update my troop's website. Thanks!

Scouter Terry, I have been unable to log in to my SCOUTER hosting account all this week. Upon trying to login, the username and password are accepted then the page flashes and returns back to the original login page. Could you please check into this for me? I really need to update my troop's website. Thanks!

Below is a portion of a long article which goes into detail about the ArrowCorp5 project and puts Scouting and the Order of the Arrow in a good light. It's too bad that some disruptive back-to-nature types were so disorderly that the OA project was cancelled in order to keep the Scouts safe. National Forest Service officials, surrounded and attacked yesterday in Wyoming with sticks and stones by 400 members of the Rainbow Family, were given reason to regret their decision to cancel a long-planned national service project by the Boy Scouts of America in favor of the unorganized annual gathering of hippies, anarchists and "free spirits" who commune with nature and each other. According to a statement released by the Forest Service's Incident Command Team in Rock Springs, Wyo., officers patrolling the main meadow of the seven-day event held near Sandy Springs made contact with a man who fled and was later apprehended. A second Rainbow attendee was detained for interfering in the arrest. As 10 officers began to leave the area with their suspects, they were surrounded by an estimated 400 members of the Rainbow Family. A request for additional officers was made. "The mob began to advance, throwing sticks and rocks at the officers. Crowd-control tactics were used to keep moving through the group of Rainbows," the news release said. When back-up support arrived, officers made five arrests. A government vehicle was damaged and one officer was treated for injuries at a local hospital and released. "This lawless behavior is unacceptable and we will not tolerate it," said John Twiss, Forest Service director of law enforcement. "The safety of our employees, public and Rainbow participants is our number one priority, and we will continue to protect everyone on the national forest." Full article at World Net Daily: http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=68868 So who is Rainbow Family anyway? Their website: http://welcomehere.org/gathering_of_the_tribes/annual/

Over the last several years there have been books and studies declaring that American boys are in a crisis. ie. "contemporary boys are "scared and disconnected," "severely lagging" behind girls in both achievement and self-confidence." "society treats "boyhood as toxic, as a pathology,"" The current issue of Time Magazine contends in a long article that this crisis is a myth. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1647452-1,00.html (You may need to be a suscriber to access this article). The end of the article printed below offers a solution to the "boy crisis" which any Scout will recognize. In fact Scouting has been offering this to boys for nearly 100 years! A TRIP TO BOY HEAVEN If The Dangerous Book were a place, it would look like the Falling Creek Camp for Boys in North Carolina--a rustic paradise complete with a rifle range, nearby mountains to climb and a lake complete with swimming dock and rope swing. The choice of activities at the camp is dizzying, from soccer to blacksmithing, from kayaking to watercolors, but no pastime is more popular than building forts of fallen tree limbs and poking at turtles in the creek. Leave your cell phones, laptops and iPods at home. There I met Margaret Anderson, a pediatric nurse from Nashville and a member of the faculty at Vanderbilt University. She works in the infirmary while her 11-year-old son Gage discovers the woods on multi-day pack trips. "I call this place Boy Heaven," she says. Falling Creek subscribes to a philosophy of "structured freedom," which is essentially the same philosophy paying dividends among boys at the opposite end of the economic ladder at the Frederick Douglass Academy. It works across the board, says Anderson, and she wishes more of the boys she sees in her busy Nashville practice lived lives of structured freedom too. "Whether it's urban kids who can't go outside because it's too dangerous or the overscheduled, overparented kids at the other end of the spectrum--I'm worried that boys have lost the chance to play and to explore," Anderson told me. Our society takes a dim view of idle time and casts a skeptical eye on free play--play driven by a boy's curiosity rather than the league schedule or the folks at Nintendo. But listen to Anderson as she lists the virtues of letting boys run themselves occasionally. "When no one's looming over them, they begin making choices of their own," she says. "They discover consequences and learn to take responsibility for themselves and their emotions. They start learning self-discipline, self-confidence, team building. If we don't let kids work through their own problems, we get a generation of whiners." That made sense to me. As I watched the boys at Falling Creek do things that would scare me to death if my own son were doing them--hammering white-hot pieces of metal, clinging to a zip line two stories above a lake, examining native rattlesnakes--I didn't notice many whining boys. Yates Pharr, director of Falling Creek, seemed to read my mind. "It's the parents who have the anxieties nowadays, far more than the boys," he said. "We've started posting photographs of each day's activity on our website, and still I'll get complaints if we don't have a picture of every camper every day." Worrying about our boys--reading and writing books about them, wringing our hands over dire trends and especially taking more time to parent them--is paying off. The next step is to let them really blossom, and for that we have to trust them, give them room. The time for fearing our sons, or fearing for their futures, is behind us. The challenge now is to believe in them. Yours in Scouting, ScouterJoe

The Southern Region 2 - Section Conclave 2006 will be held March 31 thru April 2 at the Lost Pines Scout Reservation in Bastrop, Texas. Here is the SR-2 Section Conclave web page: http://www.sr-2.org/ I am in the Tatanka District of the Sam Houston Area Council and many youth and adults from the district will be attending. It promises to be a great event! Yours in Scouting, Joe Henry

Many thanks to all that have responded. There are some great ideas for me to use! ScouterJoe

I am interested in learning what traditional activities, especially outdoors, that other troops have. I am looking for those activities that are so exciting to the boys that it is considered a "do not miss" opportunity, from the newest Scout to the older Scout with irregular attendance. An example might be a Klondike derby. Thanks in advance for any suggestions. ScouterJoe