It was suggested that WriteLog should automatically pair a spot with a
"/BUST" suffix against the original, presumably broken,
spot... and remove both from the list of outstanding spots on the user's screen.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. But I recommend against it. If WL
does this automatically, than WL users can be
victimized by a little clever social engineering. Example:
Spot:
JT/K3NA 7003
... big cluster-driven pileup begins to form on a real station...
... clever operator, wanting to reduce the size of the pileup, puts out the
following spot:
JT/K3NA/BUST 7003
... JT/K3NA disappears from the list of spots on the screen of every operator
using WriteLog.
... Pileup stops growing as quickly.
This is an area which is not easily automated without unexpected
consequences. While the best answer is for stations to copy
callsigns correctly, and enter spots correctly, such perfection will not occur.
A real human (i.e., you, the operator) needs to
evaluate the quality of spotted data. This is one of the skills that an
operator at a single-op/assisted or multi-op station has to
develop.
One could envision an automatic test that examines a spotted call against
the database of calls worked/spotted to date in the
contest, and flags with a "?" calls which are similar to an existing call in
that database according to some simple rules of typos
and common copying errors (on CW only): O vs 0, transposed letters, B vs 6, Z
vs 7, etc.
But... I'd rather have Wayne work on some other features! So... it's up to
Wayne to decide if this would be fun to do.
-- Eric R3/K3NA
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