[Dxspider-support] DXSpider and Web Clusters

[Lee Sawkins]

Some time ago both DXSpider and CC Cluster node software starting including the IP addresses of spotters along with the DX spots.  This was a big step forward in helping to clean up bad spots.  The IP addresses helped identified the spotters even when they used bogus call signs.  As a minimum, even if the spotter's real call sign could not be determined, at least the spots could be identified and dropped.  

Recent hundreds if not thousands of spam spots advertising a commercial web site were recently seen in the system.  These spots all had identical comments and all came from the same IP address of 217.61.58.23.  This can be solved by dropping all PC61 spots from this IP address.  Some still get through as they are converted to PC11 spots which do not include the bad address.  These can be filtered out by the bad comments.   

There are several Web Clusters that are running DXSpider software to interface to the DX Cluster system.  One of these is F5LEN-5.  Recently I have seen bad spots trashing Bolsonaro from PY calls using this node.  These spots included IP addresses of 51.68.11.211.  These spots could also be filtered by the IP address.  Unfortunately it appears this IP address is the IP address where the web cluster.  All spots originating at the F5LEN-3 node end up with the same IP address.  Since not all web clusters do this I can only assume that it is caused by badly written web cluster software.  Perhaps the F5LEN-3 software could be changed to include the correct addresses of spotters so we could drop just the bad spots.  Otherwise we will be blocking all spots from this web cluster.

Lee VE7CC