How to change call sign

Hi I just recently passed my Full license exam.
How can I change my login for SOTA from my old callsign to my new one .
Many thanks
Craig
M0XCG

1 Like

And just like that… changed.

On SSO you login and update your account and change the callsign field. Whatever you do, do not create a new account.

1 Like

That’s great, thanks for your help.

Hi again, on the sso site it now says account disabled?

Did you not read this…

You have three accounts which is two more than you need. To stop you putting QSOs into wrong account and making even more work for me later, all three have been locked. This evening when I finish work, I’ll merge them and clean up the cruft, delete the accounts you don’t need and re-enable one so you can continue.

1 Like

Very sorry, I created the account before I read the reply.
I do appreciate your help.

1 Like

You’re not the first. I’ve deleted 867 multiple accounts since last October and I have 280 more to do. Along with 147 who think their home is on Bouvet Island and 356 who don’t seem to know where they live :wink:

3 Likes

I was curious to see what the FAQ said.

In the SOTA Database, log-on as usual - your username will remain exactly the same. Go to Change User Details on the Logon/Logoff menu, and edit your callsign there. For SOTAwatch, simply register a new account under your new call and link it to your existing Database account.

Is this last sentence still true with SSO?

Has it ever been explored how much effort it would be to use an API (e.g. the clublog API) to query the registered callsign and ask prompt the user to check if the Callsign field DXCC doesn’t match the Home Association when registering? Does it take less than the time to delete 503 accounts to implement this?

1 Like

Yeah, I looked into it. The problem is that the callsign is an extended attribute, and we can’t do anything with extended attributes until immediately after the account is created. This is where the multiple accounts mainly come from.

The second problem is that the majority of signups come from NA and the home association is not correlated any more with callsigns. SMP did try this at one point, but it’s quite hit and miss. There’s a lot of people located right in the middle of the US as a result.

Do we actually need the concept of “home association”? What purpose does it serve?

Participants can activate in any association and can chase from anywhere. Why does it matter where they live?

Martyn

2 Likes

It can serve many purposes, for instance if you are interested in your progress relative to other participants in the same area the database will give you that information, unless the other locals are fantasising about living on Bouvet Is! Yes, I know SOTA isn’t competitive - but some people are, why deny them the pleasure? Similarly, I recently looked into the progress of the older Associations, finding a pattern of several years of rapid growth from the start until a plateau is reached. Without the idea of home Associations such investigations would become vastly more difficult.

Lets turn it about. What would be the point of allowing someone living in, say, Birmingham to register as living on Bouvet Island? If the data is going to be of any use it should not be corrupted.

2 Likes

The default view of the roll of honour is filtered to your home association.

Bouvet Island is probably a mistake but I think it should be possible for somebody to choose not to register a home association without the risk of eliciting snide comments about “not knowing where they live”.

Martyn

The option “1X - no Association” does exist and has been taken up by 50 participants. What Andy is eliminating is the nonsense entries like Bouvet Is. that corrupt the data. Personally I don’t think it is worth the effort but if Andy can spare the time, why not?

It is also good for AMs to be able to see, easily, who are their participants.

365 currently. Some are genuine such as Floridians and our chaser who lives in Peru. About 250 are people who didn’t select anything on signing up. New sign ups get an email reminder asking them to correct this and if they don’t they get their account disabled about 24-48hrs later. About 50% of them fix their home association almost immediately. Why didn’t they do it at registration? Who knows. Of those who get disabled, about 5% follow up with a “Hey I cannot login” message. That tells me a huge number of registrations are from people who have no interest in SOTA but want something from the websites and need an account to do that. Similarly, the 147 Bouvet accounts are now disabled and have been since mid-December. Of all of them, we have had 1 person ask why they can’t log in. They’re now registered to somewhere in the mid-West and happily active.

People who register multiple accounts get a mail saying why their duplicate account has been deleted. None have so far said “But the FAQ told me to do that” because nobody reads the FAQ voluntarily. Most dupes are created by people who can’t remember they created an account or cannot remember the details or say they never got a password mail. Looking at the logs, if you use gmail you will get the mail 100% if you use the form correctly. Many people stupidly trust the details to their browser and have no idea of the username . If you use gmail you may have to look for a password reset mail in your spam which is terribly labour intensive so they don’t and create another account. This is shortly followed by the email to the MT “hey all my QSOs have vanished”. Well they will because THEY’RE IN YOUR OTHER ACCOUNT!

The number of dupes and active incorrect registrations has been static since I got the number of dupe accounts where call and email are the same down to 0. The remaining dupes are people who changed email address and created a new account because they couldn’t log in to the old and thought creating a new account was easier than asking for help in recovering their old account.

Paraphrasing Clausius “The entropy of the database tends to a maximum” but I’m doing my a bit to try and keep it in check.

1 Like

I looked at the wrong note on my pad. The rolls of honour shows 26 activators and 50 chasers. I assume the rest have not been active or haven’t recorded their activity in the DB, so don’t appear on the rolls.

2 Likes