Many thanks Jon the recent changes have greatly enhanced my user experience 
73 de Paul G4MD
Enjoying the format of the new website also here very much. Looking forward to seeing what the other changes are which have been mentioned by others such as Andy and his database. Not frightened of change hereā¦
From the home page of the new website I wonder if anyone else would prefer the default sort order to be different when clicking on Associations and Summits? Jon has the default screen set to the date an association was created. My default preference would be country prefix, but of course you can sort by column heading anyway.
Just asking then - is it worth taking a vote on - itās no big deal anyway as you can get what you want to see with a single click anywayā¦
73 Phil
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It would be very easy to change this if it were felt this was better. The current order is how it has been on the website since the beginning and itās been good at showing how SOTA has been steadily growing over the years. As you say, itās very easy to sort in the way you want it anyway. However, alpha order might be more immediately useful in which case I could easily make the change.
73, Jon
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Hi Jon,
When I realised there was an option to sort on association code, I immediately did that and now do that whenever I use the page.
A wicked thought has occurred to me, that of storing the user preference for sort order in their profile and sorting it by that key when the user goes to the pageā¦ More work for the programmer, but that would allow for the activators of a certain initial country to retain the date based sort, while allowing those of us who were later recruits to more readily find our obscure country prefixes in the list when it is sorted in that orderā¦
I really like the clean layout of the new site. nice modern styleā¦
73
Andrew VK1DA/VK2UH
Dear all,
Iām one of those old fashioned guys that instead of eagerly upgrading their softwares and different rigs to investigate, explore and test them, as well as having the latest features available before anybody else, I hate whenever a message pops up telling me that I need to upgrade my software version for whatever reason, as I have to spend (most of the times āwasteā) important amounts of time to learn how to do the same things I was already doing before the change because the new software version will probably have changed colour, position, naming, icons of most of the things I was and I will have to keep using. Is that done to prevent us from getting Alzheimer? I canāt understand it.
Well, after this boyish crying, Iāl go to the grind.
The purpose of this post is to ask you what will be the deadline for me (for all of us) to stop using the old database, old sotawatch, old everything and jump into the new several different sites with its different IDās and different passwords 
I know Iāll have to go there one day, but I donāt really fancy such change and Iām consciently and deliberedly procrastinating about thatā¦
At the same time, I know that once Iād done it and Iād learnt to use everything I need properly again, Iāll like it, because Iām sure it will be a better tool, but I admit I feel lazy about switching into thatā¦
Cheers,
Guru
Hi Guru,
This is my understanding of what the MT are doing (I am not a member of the MT, so this is from a users viewpoint).
While often companies will change software, and have you upgrade to add so called new features and to stay ācoolā - in this case, the various web pages used by SOTA have grown from different starting points and are held together with Duct Tape. While there is no doubt the service we get from the sites is second to none, and the envy of all other amateur radio award schemems, it is starting to worry the people who have to maintain the sites, that with the ever increasing number of users there will come a point when one or more parts will fail. For that reason the direction (as I have understood it) is towards a better intergrated solution using scalable tools which are easier for those behind the scenes to maintain, while still giving as good or possibly an even better level of service even as the number of users grows.
As we are currently between the two positions - all the new websites are not yet ready and we need to use a mixture of old and new, you do have to maintain more userids and passwords.
Overall, at the end of the day (which Iām guessing is at least a year away from the size of the work involved) it will be better, more consistant and more reliable.
73 Ed.
Hi Ed,
Thanks for the answer.
Donāt get me wrong. I wrote, the explanation of how tedious it is sometimes for me the forced software upgrades and system changes, just to illustrate the fact that Iām still stuck on the old SOTA stuff without having yet signed up, tried or entered into the new stuff.
But I donāt mean at all that the changes taking place on the SOTA Website are unnecessary.
I read all or most of the posts in this thread and I understood very well the reasons for these changes. I also understood that there were some bugs, which have had to be identified and corrected. Which is obviously something to expect from a newly designed or written code.
As the bugs are being identified and the issues corrected, things will still change and thatās the main reason why I havenāt yet moved into the new stuff. as I thought it will be best doing it once the experts creators, programmers, testers, working on it have fully debugged and optimised the whole thing.
I only wanted to know whether there is a known date when we all will be no longer able to do things the old way and will mandatory have to sign in to get into the new stuff.
Perhaps, since things are still slowly moving forward, no one can say this yet.
Thatās the only thing I wanted to know.
Best 73 from Guru
Hi Guru,
SOTAwatch is now over 10 years old and itās retirement as a codebase is overdue really.
The first step in this process was moving the reflector across to a Discourse instance a while back. Quite a few people bemoaned the loss of the simplicity of the old reflector but hopefully everyone now sees this as a strong improvement.
The second step was the recent replacement of the old website with a refreshed version on a modern publishing platform. Some improvements to the association and summit listings compared to the old website allowed the old listings on SOTAwatch to be cut loose.
The last stage will be the integration of the spotting and alerting functionality into the new website. Good progress is being made and I expect to be opening this for beta testing over the next few weeks. After this is complete, users will have one less site to have to register and log into which should be good news!
I appreciate everyoneās patience during this process. All development is subject to time and funds available at any time.
Whilst not giving exact time commitments, hopefully this does give a sense of where things are at.
73, Jon
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Thanks, Jon, for the explanation.
Itās cristal clear for me.
Iāll keep patiently waiting. No rush, as far as Iām concerned, although I understand you may feel some need to rush.
Take it easy and keep on doing the good stuff youāre always doing for our benefit and fun.
Iāll keep helping you from time to time with my very modest donations.
Thanks a lot.
Guru