Yuliy Gerchikov wrote:
I'd like to point out one self-contradiction and one outright outrageous
assumption in this post.

"Doug Haluza" wrote in message
oups.com...
The OLC is intended to be a public forum. One of the main
purposes of the OLC is for pilots to be able to share their flight
experiences with the entire worldwide soaring community (and anyone
else who may be interested).

This contradicts the following:

I suspect that there are a lot of competition pilots who have received
penalties in contests that they didn't think were fair.
[confronting people] is not intended to be a punitive action to punish the
individual, it is
intended to protect the integrity of the competition.

So is OLC a public forum, or a competition? If former, you will do the
public a huge favour if you quit "protecting" forum's integrity. If latter,
then yes, it should be controlled more strictly, but then don't call it
"public" anymore -- only a fraction of pilots are interested in real
contests.

I believe the Online Contest is a contest, which is the same as a
competition in my dictionary (if not it was misnamed by the
organizers). The competitors post their flight logs to a public forum
as part of the competition. There is no contradiction.

FWIW, I have no interest in organized contests either (except as a
spectator). My total contest experience conists of one day as seat
ballast in the Sport's Class Nationals last year. I prefer to use my
limited vacation days to fly in the best conditions possible, and I am
fortunate enough to be able to do this.

This is why I am such a big supporter of the OLC format. I was one of
the few participants in the old r.a.s. League organized by Guenther
Eichhorn, which never really took off. It was eventually surpassed by
the OLC, in part because OLC used an automatic scoring algorithm based
on IGC files. This was a major improvement in the decentralized
competition format, and has won worldwide acceptance (except in Britan,
where the BGC league was already well established).

But posting IGC files to the public forum of the OLC requires
responsible behavior with reasonable limits, not unlike those imposed
on otherwise "free speech" in a public forum. Yes, we have had to
confront less than 1% of the SSA-OLC participants to deliver this
message. Fortunately, most of them were reasonable, and did not try to
confuse the issue by playing attack the messenger, at least not for
this long anyway.