Hello everyone.
This one is mostly repair work, and it starts with an apology: SOTA imports were down for six days, and the cause was entirely on our side.
What happened to SOTA imports
On September 9th, Andrew from the SOTA Management Team told us that ZOTA had around 800 authenticated sessions open on their servers at once. They disabled our account, and we suspended the SOTA imports the same day.
The cause was a silent breakage. SOTAData moved to a new front end over the summer, and our sign-in stopped being recognised as successful — even though it was succeeding. Every request therefore opened a fresh session on SOTA’s servers, decided it had failed, threw the session away, and tried again. The retry logic we had added a few weeks earlier to make imports more reliable turned that mistake into a flood.
That is fixed. ZOTA now signs in once and reuses that session for up to a month, spaces its requests out, and gives up on a run instead of insisting when SOTA pushes back. The catch-up run on September 15th made 862 requests in total and opened a single session.
Everything missed during the suspension should have been recovered, and your scores reflect them.
Thanks to Andrew for restoring our access, and for his patience.
Activations now have to be valid
SOTA requires 4 QSOs for an activation to count. POTA requires 10. ZOTA was not applying either rule, and that turned out to matter far more than it sounds.
Because the rarity bonus is large compared to the QSO count, an activation with 3 QSOs could be worth 103 points — as much as a serious one. Worse, it consumed the reference’s « first activation ever » bonus, so the first real activation of that summit or park got nothing.
From now on, an activation below its programme’s threshold scores 0 points, earns no rarity bonus, and does not count towards the rankings or your activation counters. It stays visible in your history, marked not validated, with the reason shown (so you can see the log is incomplete rather than wonder where your activation went).
Around 200 activations across the season have been corrected, and roughly 5,270 influence points removed. Some rankings and a few territory leaders have changed as a result. If this affected an activation of yours and the log was simply incomplete, adding the missing QSOs on SOTA or POTA is enough: the next import will pick it up and the activation becomes valid again, bonus included.
Also in this release
The home, about, sign-in and sign-up pages got some small fixes.
73 & 44