[Dxspider-support] FTx autogenerated spots

[Dirk Koopman]

Which is the place that I am coming from. Maybe, in this case, on somewhat specious grounds but is precisely in the light of the recent uptick in 
attacks on the network that caused me to do this. 

Please bear in mind that the network was recently used to promote and facilitate someone’s commercial activity by sending genuine (looking) spots by irregular means. But ignoring the whys and wherefores of the circumstances: consider the nature of the generation. The majority of those spots were automatically generated by design. Just like these spots AND they too were then modified by some people to get around the filters - just like the spots causing the recent flooding. 

They were designed to affirm rather than inform the user. The system generated them rather than the user. As sysops and I struggled to contain the flood, and the resulting vendetta that ensued, caused even more problems and has led me to conclude that any automated spots are to be discouraged or removed.

Some years ago I had a similar spat with an author about automated FTx spots. Which went nowhere. The volume may not be the same but these spots annoy many, many users when they appear in large runs as they did (for a time) this afternoon. Hence this little  experiment. 

Users are not literate enough to (force their user programs to) create filters for themselves*. Either I have to provide a mechanism or sysops have to each create a local command / filter to do it for them. 

Anyway I shall be merging the test branch tomorrow (with this feature switched off) and I’ll do something about a user version as well (maybe disable/ftx) with a sysops function to allow or disable Ftx spots for users as well. Maybe that will mean that the nodes running very old software offering this as a selling point might upgrade. Sigh. 

73 Dirk G1TLH

* In the last couple of days I have had a request from a user to fix his filters for Hamclock.

> On 17 Mar 2025, at 19:19, Christopher Schlegel <sutehk.cs at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Flooding, providing false info, or other abuses to the cluster is our domain as it directly relates to the above sysop responsibilities.