In the first moment I was tempted to find myself in a bad dream. After that, I was looking very careful to my tea cup, believing that someone puts me something illegal in my drink. Nope, nothing wrong.
Try to judge yourself these two images below, made 5 minutes ago. Same page on SOTAwatch, same summit, same height, even same operator, but different points for the same summit.
Now: Are you hallucinating too?
Good morning.
Coincident but correct I guess.
Most likey because there are quite some with the same Summit name:
| SOTA Reference | Summit Name | Summit Info. |
|---|---|---|
| W0C/SC-041 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
| W4V/LX-058 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
| W5N/AI-012 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
| W5N/EL-006 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
| W5O/OU-014 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
| W7A/CO-031 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
| W7A/CO-052 | Rough Mountain 2 | Summit Info |
| W7I/SR-075 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
| W7N/EN-132 | Rough Mountain | Summit Info |
73 JOe
I’ve heard it’s a new safety initiative Bizzu. The idea is that the score gets progressively less with time. The benefits are:
Good to know, Andy! I will try to hurry on my future activations, even using Pedestrian Mobile once entered in the activation area.
That’s the RBN hole charge! / Get spotted via RBN and 2 points are deducted from the summit 
Just joking - but is is the RBN entries which are showing 6 points and the manually spotted ones that are showing 8 points (and it’s still there at the moment).
As always The database is the place to go …
So in fact I’d say SOTAWatch is using an old file with out of date summit entries (which accounts for some summits that are valid but shown as not recognised in SOTAWatch) - the spots coming in via RBN are using valid data.
6 points for this summit since June 2017.
73 Ed.
So, if I understand well Ed, I could have 2 hidden bonus points for manually spotting? Is this valid even during the summer, or only a second winter bonus?
A much better explanation Ed. Only right that those using an automatic spotting service should get less points than the “traditionalists”. 
Hi Sorin, I realise your post was “tongue in cheek” but in any case the database is KING and it says only 6 points for this summit since last year. It’s SOTAWatch that needs its Summits reference file re-loading with a current one.
73 Ed.
PS Rough Mountain has no winter bonus.
Sorin, It’s to do with a difference between how the database works and SOTAwatch.
The summits info is held in two places on the database. One table holds the summit name, heights locations etc. and another table holds the points and bonus points for each summit. We have the facility to change the points on a summit, say it is remeasured and turns out higher, then it gets a higher score. The points table lists the score for each summit for a set of dates.
When a summit is scored, the code finds all the points values and matches the points for the date in question. There is quite a lot of code to handle the fact he data returned is not in any specific order. If a summit has been rescored 5 times, there is no guarantee the last points value returned is the latest one. Hence the code to find the correct score. SOTAwatch needs to do the same lookups to find the current score.
SOTAwatch used to have it’s own cache of data for summits but that leads to problems keeping the data in sync. So now it uses the DB for data. But we do have times when the DB is unavailable. I’m guessing that for one spot the DB failed to respond in time and the old cache was used. The next spot came and the DB responded. Although this is guessing.
Hi Andy,
I have seen over the last few weeks, where SOTAWatch has reported “Summit not recognised” on an alert (such as those for the S2S event recently) and when I have checked the database, the summit has been there, so I think the problems we are seeing are not database availability related.
I wonder if SOTAWatch could still be using an old data cache file rather than accessing the database?
73 Ed.
Tnx Andy for explanations, it is quite what I have imagined from the beginning. I know that you are doing a lot of work to keep everything updated and sometimes is not possible to have the perfection among so many softwares.
But it was so funny to see two scores for the same summit in the same moment, that I want to share with you all that moment.
All the best Andy and keep on doing the magic!