Updates & Release Notes category use

[W7YBY]

The purpose of this entire post is to ask that new things like this get added to this Updates & Release Notes category.

I received an email asking for a bunch of confirmations, including one from Andy (whom I’ve never had a QSO with), and the remaining requests for confirmations were all from one other user, yet when I pulled that person up in QSO manager and looked at all the contacts, they were all confirmed via QRZ or WRL so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here. As an existing WRL user I don’t even understand why I received this email to begin with. Shouldn’t those emails only be sent to operators that are NOT already WRL members?

If I hadn’t watched the first few minutes of last week’s stream I never would have even had a clue as to why I was receiving this email to begin with.

I don’t have the time to spend watching 90 minutes of the stream on Mondays just to glean out 5-10 minutes of worthwhile info on new features / updates, but if all that info was condensed down into notes into this category it would be a lot easier to understand when stuff changes without any apparent warning other than the live stream.

It would also be beneficial if the live stream were to be broken down into identified Chapters afterwards so that a user can come back to it and find where specific topics are discussed instead of forcing someone to watch the entire thing hoping to find information that they need.

I understand how the confirmation request can be a good thing, but I am concerned that sending out a bunch of these requests to the same people over and over is just going to wind up with all these requests getting flagged as Spam from WRL and wind up in the trash instead of someone’s Inbox.

Looking at the email itself, if this gets sent to operators that have never even heard of WRL it might be construed as Spam and just deleted. There is no explanation of WRL unless you scroll way down the page. Perhaps a better way to approach this would be to start off the email along the lines of:

Hello (call sign),

(call sign) is a user on the World Radio League logging system and is requesting that you confirm one or more contacts with them.

<<at this point you can add the box with the 1 - 2 - 3 steps listed, and then add in the rest of the regular email>>

Please don’t take this as a rant because it isn’t; it’s just a plea for WRL to provide its users with a better way to keep abreast of the latest and greatest features and updates.

Thanks.

[N0WRL]

Hi W7YBY,

Thanks for taking the time to write this feedback, there are several great takeaways we can work on! And THANKS for being a WRL Life member!

Let me add some more detail to each of your questions.

I received an email asking for a bunch of confirmations, including one from Andy (whom I’ve never had a QSO with), and the remaining requests for confirmations were all from one other user, yet when I pulled that person up in QSO manager and looked at all the contacts, they were all confirmed via QRZ or WRL so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do here. As an existing WRL user I don’t even understand why I received this email to begin with. Shouldn’t those emails only be sent to operators that are NOT already WRL members?

If the contact is confirmed in WRL, then it should NOT be listed in your confirmation requests - this bug will be fixed very soon.

Contacts that have been confirmed in LoTW and QRZ are still eligible for WRL confirmation - it is best that both contacts exist in WRL to maintain the integrity of the system, which is why we allow confirmation requests for contacts that are already confirmed in QRZ and LoTW.

I’m not sure why you received one from Andy - perhaps @N0APX was doing some testing with your callsign? Sorry about that, it shouldn’t have happened!

The email is sent to both WRL and non-WRL members, as long as the contact isn’t confirmed. The other user might need the confirmation for an award, so if the confirmation is missing, we want you to have an opportunity to confirm it.

If I hadn’t watched the first few minutes of last week’s stream I never would have even had a clue as to why I was receiving this email to begin with.

In addition to the livestream, we also add all the major updates in our weekly email so you can read them quickly without having to watch the livestream, and we publish feature updates to social media. We also usually drop notes on Discord.

Perhaps we can add an in-app popup with release notes, or add more detail here in the community and discord. We will do our best to improve here!

I understand how the confirmation request can be a good thing, but I am concerned that sending out a bunch of these requests to the same people over and over is just going to wind up with all these requests getting flagged as Spam from WRL and wind up in the trash instead of someone’s Inbox.

We thought about this a LOT before releasing the feature, and we added careful safeguards to rate-limit the email to maximum one email per month.

A user will receive a maximum of one email per month, and all the confirmation requests will be aggregated into one email.

This prevents any user from receiving a bunch of emails for requests and it is very reasonable.

Thanks so much - we will continue to work based on this feedback!

[W7YBY]

James,
Thank you for taking the time to respond; I know you have plenty on your plate as it is.

I went through my trash folder and I did indeed have a feature update email from 3/27 in there so that is totally on me for not paying more attention to the content.

Regarding other sources of info, with the way Facebook’s algorithms work I may or may not ever see any particular post in my feed and I don’t typically go to any particular group page and scroll through it in an effort to see if there are new features / updates being discussed. And I don’t use Discord because it looks like a dumpster fire to these old boomer eyes with just a bunch of random “stream of conciousness” posts. And I accept that both of those are my issues and are no fault of WRL. As long as I start paying attention to the weekly emails I’m sure I’ll be better off.

I do like the idea of the in-app pop up, even if it’s just to say “New Features Update - check your email!”

Regarding the confirmation requests, when they get sent to the other party can the requests be put into date order by call sign for the other party to more easily check their own logs? For instance, in the attached image you can see that from a single user the requests are in this order:
02/07
03/17
03/16
03/19
01/27
03/17
02/13
01/11

Using the above image as a reference, I had nothing in my log for the first entry so I dismissed it. The second entry of 03/17 00:01 matches my March log entry of 03/17 00:01 so I clicked on the Log button with the checkmark and it appears to me that WRL wants to create a new log entry in my log in order to match it up with the requested confirmation even though my log entry already exists from the orginal contact.

On my log that entry shows a QRZ confirmation, but not a WRL confirmation although the contact was logged at the time of the original QSO. Some of his requests on my end show QRZ confirmations and others show WRL confirmations.

Shouldn’t WRL be automatically comparing the two entries and confirming the WRL contact on both ends? What am I missing here?

I’m going to hold off on working these requests until I hear back.

Thanks again for taking the time to give me a response.

[N0WRL]

Thanks @W7YBY !!

With regards to the contact sorting by date, we can quickly implement that!

As far as the contact that has a matching contact in WRL already, it should be confirmed and not appear in the list. We will figure out why and fix it!

[W7YBY]

@N0WRL just to clarify, all the other confirmation requests are already in my log and have been since the time of the actual QSO as I do not paper log and then electronically log at a later time.

I did a Re-check a few days ago to see what confirmations I had out there from QRZ and LoTW and I think that happened after the confirmation request email arrived but I had not viewed it yet. I’m just throwing that out there in case that action impacted the current situation.