Add WWBOTA spots

[kwirk]

I've had an initial attempt at adding WWBOTA to HamAlert.

Would welcome feedback if you think it'd be acceptable to add this, and if I'm going about the right way of adding it?

I've not currently tested this, as wasn't initially sure how to run this, but thought I'd share as draft for initial consideration.

Thanks for Ham Alert and making it open source 😄

[manuelkasper]

Thanks for taking the time to contribute code to HamAlert! At first glance, your code looks good to me (although I haven't run it yet).

One thing that concerns me a bit is where to draw the line for new xOTA programs to add to HamAlert. While it's nice to support everything (at least from the point of view of the concerned users), there are also disadvantages, like UI clutter and maintenance issues. It seems like there's a xOTA for almost everything now – summits, parks, islands, beaches, castles, bunkers, silos, jamborees, lighthouses, mills, even Walmart parking lots. And sometimes there are multiple (rival) programs for a given entity category. Each of them comes with their own reference structure, entity list and spotting platform, all using bespoke APIs.

I think before adding more of them, we need to define objective criteria for such programs to be supported by HamAlert, to avoid overloading the UI and codebase with niche things that are of interest only to a handful of users. Perhaps the average number of daily unique users (based on spots or activations) could be a useful number?

[chrisdebian]

I agree, this will very much need to be kept in check, for the reasons Manuel mentions.

This is what Field Spotter currently reports on, as an example.

[kwirk]

Thanks @manuelkasper and @chrisdebian.

I can understand your position regards adding lots of xOTA programmes and the overhead on maintenance, and possibly having to rethink the UI in order to keep it user friendly and uncluttered.

WWBOTA is a fairly new xOTA programme but growing in activity and countries participating. WWBOTA has been keen at integrating into community tools, like logging applications (e.g. Ham2k PoLo), spotting tools (e.g. FieldSpotter), etc. to help promote activity and easy of entry for newcomers.

I also maintain the API for WWBOTA, and would be happy to help maintain the WWBOTA side of the Ham Alert code base. But obviously that doesn't help much with other concerns like UI clutter, etc. 😄

It's great that you've open sourced HamAlert, but given it was only a very recently, I understand you probably need to think about criteria for contributions and how you're going to manage the project.

I'll standby for now, but if you think this could be included at some point, I'll look at seeing if I can get local server and web elements up and running for testing.