On Friday, 23 October 2015 16:55:08 UTC-6, Andrzej Kobus wrote:
On Friday, October 23, 2015 at 8:58:16 AM UTC-4, Dave Nadler wrote:
On Thursday, October 22, 2015 at 9:17:08 PM UTC-4, Karl Striedieck wrote:
The unsung, self-effacing, gift to contest soaring who handles the PRL,
also manages the colossal World Wide Turnpoint Exchange. And colossal
is no exaggeration considering the number of countries covered with
all the turnpoints and landing points to keep up to date.

He has been doing this quietly for decades and we are all in his debt..

If you are curious about his "day job" Google John Leibacher.

And, while you're at it, send him an atta boy. His e-mail is his name
with a dot between the two names at gmail.

KS

Another voice of thanks to John Leibacher for his tireless work supporting
Soaring. We should not take for granted his contributions!

Calculating the PRL seems like a 2-minute exercise, until one realizes
that the quality of the input data is, um, variable. Name mis-matches,
missing SAA numbers, missing data, trying to keep this consistent over
a 3-year interval... are among the things that have made this a gnarly
business.

Thanks again John for all your contributions!
Best Regards, Dave

This is a good point. There is no reason these days to have poor quality of data. It looks like we have systems integration problem that should be dealt with. We need to stop being cheap. I don't have a problem to pay more for membership if money is used for good purpose. We already collect all the required data for contest sign up. We should use it for scoring and reporting and not ask people to enter it over and over causing issues.

Andzrej, most of what you mentioned is available. When a pilot registers for competition they can use their membership information for the data fields (see http://www.ssa.org/ContestCommittee?show=blog&id=3108 for the first page of the registration process) but it is not required and non-SSA members have to fill it in manually.

The scoring program WINSCORE does import directly from the SSA, however there are situations when participants are entered manually, such as onsite registration and nuances within WINSCORE where it is easier to delete await a pilot and re-enter them manually etc.

IMO the data is as consistent as possible but errors will be introduced.