[WT-support] WinTest/Other Progs

[Tom Taormina]

Larry;

I fully understand your position on log modules and contest rules. I submit
to you, however, that most of your "target customers" in the US participate
in the major QSO parties and many of your "potential customers" are
newcomers who get their exposure to contesting in the QSO parties. You need
to understand your demographic targets from a non-EU perspective. Perhaps a
collaboration with W4TV and MicroHam would be beneficial for WT. 

Tom Taormina, K5RC
CQ Contest Hall of Fame

-----Original Message-----
From: support-bounces at win-test.com [mailto:support-bounces at win-test.com] On
Behalf Of Laurent HAAS - F6FVY
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 8:48 AM
To: support at win-test.com
Subject: Re: [WT-support] WinTest/Other Progs

Hi Peter and all

Peter Bowyer a écrit :

> Well, Larry will have to answer that. The contest base is reguarly
> expanded. I merely expressed my appreciation for the stance they have
> taken to date, I wouldn't like to guess what their future poilcy might
> be.

Preamble : Olivier is the lead programmer of Win-Test. I just express my 
own opinions on this topic, being a bit more involved in "new" contests 
additions.

1/ Win-Test has *not* being designed to allow users or third-party 
programmers to write their own contest "modules", or to modify the 
existing ones. Many contests have so specific rules that it is currently 
impossible to manage them is a generic way in the program core. We have 
to adapt the core code for them, when possible. Sometimes it would 
require a major rewrite, we don't want to do. For example, this is a 
reason why we can't add contests with several "sessions". People found 
workarounds (like ES5TV found for the EU HF contest). Good for them.

2/ Our goal is CLEARLY not to add support for every contest of the 
planet. According to several sources, there are today more than 1000 
contests per year... Today, we support most of the national and 
international contests (abt 100), which represent the vast majority of 
entrants in the contesting community. Apart from very few exceptions, we 
  don't intend to add every QSO party today, mostly because there are 
very numerous and rules are pretty hard to include in our current core 
(ex : Rovers with multiple Q depending on his location, etc.). For sure, 
we could do a "light" version by eliminating those "exotic" rules and 
classes, but it is not our philosophy (at least, not mine). In short, 
the TX QP has been written by accident (and is not so well supported, 
for the reasons expressed few lines above).

3/ Our choice to add such or such contest, is today much more oriented 
by its nature (how many entrants, history, rules modifications along the 
years, published format of the Cabrillo log file and rules, etc.) and 
the easiness to do so, and the assurance it will not require major 
modification of the code, to ensure it will not affect stability (in the 
large sense of this term : points, operating etc. ) of the 100+ 
supported contests (and especially the major international ones : CQWW 
DX, ARRL DX, CQWW WPX, etc. with all their variants). The more contests 
we add, the longer (and numerous) are the regression tests.

We know that the lack of supported QP is currently a major bump for US 
users (at least, the "casual" contesters) to adopt Win-Test. On the 
other hand, we always claimed we wanted to favor WT features to help 
users to seriously compete, rather than the number of supported 
contests, or - more generally - the number of users. The lists of users 
in the top 10 boxes of the major contests results confirm our choices.

73

Larry - F6FVY
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