Managing users — overview

In MyTroop, every adult who needs access — parents, leaders, committee members — is a user. Every user belongs to a family. Every user has a role that determines what they can do.

Kids never have accounts. Scouts are records under a family, not standalone users.

The pieces

• Adding a user — admin creates the account; the user receives a welcome email and sets their own password on first login. There's no separate "invite" — the welcome email is the invitation.
• Roles — Admin, Leader, Committee, Parent. Each level grants a strict superset of the previous level's permissions.
• Editing or deleting users — change someone's role, fix their info, or remove them. Includes the safeguards that prevent footguns (you can't delete yourself; deleting the last adult in a family cascades to scouts).
• Families — how the family unit works, how to merge or move users, and how the data model affects what parents see.
• Seeing who has logged in — who is actually using the site, who has never signed in, and how to re-send them a link in one click.

Where everything lives

Page	Purpose
/admin/users	List all users, add new users, send welcome emails
/admin/users/[id]	Edit a single user, change role, delete
/admin/families	List families, add/remove members, view scouts
/admin/scouts	Cross-family roster of every scout

How people get access

There are two ways an adult joins your troop, and both require an admin:

• Admin adds them (Adding a user) — the account is active immediately and the person gets a welcome email to set a password. This is the normal path.
• They request to join — anyone who visits your troop's site can create an account and request to join. This does not grant access. They must first confirm their email address by clicking a link we send them; only then does the request reach you. Until an admin approves, the requester sees a waiting screen and can read no troop data. Approving grants access (and emails them); declining keeps them out.

Pending requests are shown separately from your active roster. A banner at the top of /admin/users flags how many are waiting, and the Status filter (Active / Pending / Declined) lets you focus on them.

Declining isn't permanent: switch the Status filter to Declined and click Reinstate to reverse a decision and grant the person access.

Why you won't see junk requests

Signup forms on the open internet attract bots. A request whose email address has never been confirmed is not counted in your review banner and doesn't appear in your list, it can't be approved, and it's deleted automatically after 7 days — so you don't have to do anything about it.

If you ever want to look at them, tick Unconfirmed requests in the filters. Those rows offer Remove, which deletes the request outright and sends no email.

Decline vs. Remove. Declining emails the person to say their request wasn't approved — right for someone you know. Remove deletes the request silently — right for something that's obviously not a real family.

Choosing their family

When you approve someone, you pick the family they join:

• Create a new family (the default) — pre-filled with the name they typed when they signed up. This is the usual case.
• Add to an existing family — search your family list and pick one. Use this when a second parent from a household that's already in your troop signs up; it keeps them in one family instead of creating a duplicate.

Nothing is added to your family list until you approve, so a request you decline or remove leaves nothing behind.

What about kids?

Scouts don't log in. They appear in their family's profile and on event rosters, but everything they "do" (RSVP, payment, photos) happens via a parent's account. This is a deliberate choice — Scouting America's youth-protection guidance is much simpler when minors don't have credentials at all.