I’ve been asked a few times why SMS spots have failed. Sometimes this is because the spot never made it to me. Sometimes it’s because the message was badly formed. To save me answering emails I’ve put up a status page so you can check for youself later on whether the spot was processed OK.
http://www.sotaforum.co.uk:8000/spotstatus/ is the URL. You replace with your callsign to get the status for your spots. Or you can use all to get the status for all users. Only the last 48hrs data is scanned.
http://www.sotaforum.co.uk:8000/spotstatus/all shows all spots in the database. There are few spots from me in there which failed and unrecognised/malformed fields show as “bad”. You can tell where the error was by how much of the spot appears in the status.
This is still work in progress so it’s subject to change, modification or withdrawal and it’s only working on the European server. It does seem stable enough to put to beta test.
Has anybody got it to work yet? Whenever I try, on and off since Andy’s announcement, the tab just shows the irritating “revolving circle” but it neither connects successfully nor fails with an error.
Intriguing that you are having issues but it’s exactly why beta-testing is so worthwhile. I can see lots of people getting the pages OK so maybe it’s because it’s on a non-standrard port (8000 not 80) and your ISP/router is blocking access.
I’ve got a few net connections out of the office, one is by the normal office net connection which goes from the office in Scotland to Munich via the office VPN and then onto the net. The other is through my own VPN in Zurich or my server at home. They’re all working fine. What I did see is that IE 7 doesn’t like you missing off the http:// at the start of the address. Without that it wont work. Firefox doesn’t mind.
Flush your browser cache and try again. If it still wont come up drop me a mail (mm0fmf_sota AT intermoose.com) and I can have a look further.
In reply to GM0AXY:
Well spotted Ken. I’ll poke that bit of the code to remove the timezone support when I get a chance.
This is obviously very much a work-in-progress. Today I note that Andy has significantly improved the layout of the data, making it much easier to understand.
The response time seemed much faster too, but perhaps that is merely serendipitous.
Thanks Les, it’s surprising what a few tags inserted into the data can achieve. You’re right about work in progress and I’m experimenting all the time. Or when time allows.
In reply to M0JLA:
It only displays spots placed via my SMS server not spots in general Rod. There haven’t been any spots for 48hrs so the data will be 48hrs old at least. Old spots are only dropped when a new spot arrives. I should probably update the display routine so it only shows recent spots but whilst I’m playing about the fact I can see some data is useful.