Some time ago there was an identifier on (all?) SOTA spot comments, that the spotter used Polo for spotting:
I had seen that on merely any spot on SOTA, where the spotter used Polo, and this (very long) tag could evidently not be turned off.
Some time later, this tag disappeared.
On the other side, I can see on the SOTA spotting page that other logger software insert a short tag in brackets to display the originating software, see examplary snippet:
PoLo was asked nicely by POTA Administrators to remove it. It had the connotation of “commercial advertising”. Since it is the intention for PoLo to, at some point in the future, offer pay for services, the request to remove the tag was obeyed.
Alan
Like Alan said, we removed it because some programs don’t like that kind of “promotion”, and even if PoLo was not the worst offender, us doing could be seen as permission for others to do worse.
(and as to the discussion about “pay for services”, I left a comment in a separate thread)
We’re working on making the entire spotting system more customizable, including the ability to use templates to define what goes in the notes.
I can well imagine that the former tag “QRV with Ham2K PoLo” is considered more commercial than a short one like “[PoLo]” only. The SOTA spot comment tags mentioned as an example are not considered commercial within SOTA and have a technical background. However, it is currently not mandatory for SOTA to set these tags when submitting a spot via a third party software.
POTA is certainly an important source of opinion, but it’s not the only one. Other programs have different views on the same topic, hi.
