[SFDXA] Ten years of Club Log - a thank you from the team

[Bill]

 From Tony N2MFT:
Thanks to Jack W4JS for sharing this email.

Perhaps you have also received this overview but, if not, you may find 
it of interest.  This very small group of fellow DXers have essentially 
given all of us a fantastic operating aid, and we all should be thankful 
for their contribution.  It seems we would almost be "lost" without Club 
Log and its attributes.
73, Jack-W4JS

Dear W4JS,
As you’re someone who has donated to Club Log this past year, I’m 
emailing this to you directly as I really want you to see what a 
difference your support has made.
It’s now been 10 years since the first few features of Club Log were put 
together. This feels like longer than I expected – probably because the 
whole story of Club Log has rushed by. They say that time flies when 
you’re having fun! I wanted to share a few reflections and say a few 
thank-yous, to mark this decade.

In the early days, where about 2 million QSOs (all from members of UK DX 
clubs) were stored in Club Log, you could expect quite a bit of 
difficulty with DXCC mappings, as we just had the main prefixes at that 
time. Alan 5B4AHJ was just starting to propose some exceptions via 
email. These were small beginnings and a great deal of head-scratching 
and trial and error was needed to get past the practical issues. But, if 
we fast-forward to today, Club Log has grown to half-a-billion records, 
under more than 75,000 callsigns (held by 55,000 users) and is dealing 
with 2,300 uploads every day. Expedition logs have been searched 43 
million times, and the amazing OQRS facility that Marios, 5B4WN wrote 
has processed $2 million (and €327,000 – plus other currencies another 
$50,000 or so) of requests for cards. Given that each OQRS transaction 
has halved the postage and material costs for the card requested, we can 
begin to guess how much money has been pulled back into the hobby by 
this step-change in how QSL requests are typically made. Not only did 
Marios write these wonderful tools, but he contributed the amazing 
expedition log search, propagation and activity tools as well. It is a 
huge privilege to work on Club Log with Marios,
who is so passionate about inventing new features. Thanks, Marios, 5B4WN!

Looking at the record now in November 2018, there are 530 million QSOs 
stored, each of which passed through the upload logic of Club Log in the 
blink of an eye. Every callsign is studied to make sure the date and 
time and the callsign are accurately mapped to an entity. To get those 
callsigns assigned to DXCCs needs 4,320 prefixes, and an incredible 
22,700 exceptions – all of which have been painstakingly curated and 
managed by Alan 5B4AHJ, by hand.

Bear in mind, in 2008 there were no exceptions, that’s equivalent to 
adding 6 new pieces of research every day of every year - for a decade. 
I’d like to make a special thank you to Alan for this amazing 
contribution. Making a DXCC database has needed ongoing support of some 
very well-learned DXers, who have made this feat more achievable, but 
still represents an extraordinary personal undertaking of time, effort 
and focus.

Almost all modern logging software now relies on and uses the Club Log 
database to get DXCC mappings right, not only today but over all of the 
dates of modern amateur radio (right back to 1945). Although the 
software and features in Club Log are a prominent part of the DXpedition 
world (and many individual DX clubs who use it for leagues, propagation 
and evenfunding and grant decisions), it’s true to say that all of those 
features – every part of Club Log – is resting on the foundation of the 
research in the DXCC database. Thank you so very, very much for your 
tireless work, Alan, 5B4AHJ.

I must also mention our helpdesk service. As you know, anyone using Club 
Log can ask for some assistance with features, queries about DXCCs or 
other matters. The Helpdesk is staffed by people you’ll know – like Joe, 
WL7E, our resident LoTW expert, and Jim KE8G who gives friendly backup 
to anyone struggling with getting Club Log to work for them, along with 
Alan, Marios and me. Like everything in Club Log, it’s all about ham 
spirit and we get a lot of satisfaction from being able to help. We use 
a tool called Freshdesk to manage the volume of queries we get. In fact, 
between the five members of the team, we’ve dealt with 2,200 pieces of 
correspondence in the last 12 months – quite a bit more than I thought 
it would be, when I looked!

That brings me to the most important thing I have to say. I’d like to 
extend my sincere thanks to you, as someone who saw what we were doing 
and gave us a donation to help make it possible. Ten years has seen the 
Club Log equipment repeatedly get upgraded, with only donations to 
unlock each new bit of outlay for bandwidth, and all the other parts 
involved. Today, running on servers that are right at the limits of 
modern storage capabilities, things are really in great shape. While 
Club Log is in the middle of so much of what we do as DXers, it can 
still exist without any advertising. We’re able to confidently keep this 
service going this way.

You made this happen, and on behalf of all five of us (and the many 
others who’ve also been able to enjoy Club Log), please accept my 
heartfelt thanks and appreciation.

If you’re settling down for Thanksgiving, or if you’re just about to 
take a shift at CQWW, may I wish you a happy and peaceful end to the 
year 2018, and here’s to another 10 years of Club Log and 'big data' in 
amateur radio!

With best wishes,
Michael G7VJR
And the team at Club Log: Alan 5B4AHJ, Marios 5B4WN, Jim KE8G, Joe WL7E

========================================================
Alan, 5B4AHJ asked me to include this postscript:

"Michael, G7VJR has been very generous in his comments on the  
contributions made by  the various Club Log team members to the project. 
In his typically modest style, Michael hasn't made any comment on his 
own contribution.

I have had the privilege of working with Michael since almost the 
beginning of Club Log. I have seen the architecture evolve from those 
early days into what it is now. I well remember the time when it dawned 
on Michael that the unexpectedly high rate of database growth meant that 
there were upcoming scalability and performance issues that needed to be 
dealt with in fairly short order. I remain impressed by the scaleable 
database architecture and caching strategy that was put in place, 
coupled with the choice of state of the art hardware that donor's 
contributions have enabled to be purchased. There continue to be 
on-going tweaks to improve performance. Having spent my entire career in 
the electronics/software industry at both technical and management 
levels, I feeI that I am qualified to say that Michael's vision, 
technical and interpersonal skills make him absolutely the right man for 
the job. Thank you, Michael - you ARE Club Log.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the contribution made Jim AD1C, 
with whom I have collaborated over probably the last eight years, and 
hope that he has found our collaboration as beneficial as I have."