[CQ-Contest] Contest Spam

[Kenneth E. Harker]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 08:33:14AM -0400:
> At 08:04 AM 10/14/03 -0500, you wrote:
> 
> >     So, I received the following spam from AH2R.  It was unsolicited 
> >     email -
> >although I have worked them in contests, I doubt that my own callsign has
> >ever even shown up in their logs, and I certainly never asked to be on any
> >sort of announcement list.
> >
> >     I would like to think that contesters would be above this sort of
> >pre-contest QSO solicitation through bulk (SPAM) email.
> 
> I don't know ... it seems to me as if this is pretty harmless.  We allow, 
> even encourage the maintenance of lists of planned contest DXpeditions, so 
> why not allow this sort of message posted to one reflector?  After all, 
> most reflector mail is "unsolicited," so we decide what we'd like to read 
> and what not to read.

Yeah -

So who cares if a station makes one or two well-disguised self-spots?  
That's pretty harmless, right?

Who cares if they spend a few days before the contest on the internet
and making long-distance phone calls to secure skeds with a few rare 
mults that their competition won't work?

Who cares if they try to convince all their contest club buddies to 
work them (because they're trying to win their continent or set a record
or make history or something) and these good buddies don't also work their
competition?

Who cares if they spam a few thousand hams looking for that extra QSO 
or two?


Doesn't it all add up?  Is any of it really _contesting_?  What makes 
pre-contest spamming any more ethically or socially acceptable than 
these other unethical score-booster activities?

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth E. Harker      "Vox Clamantis in Deserto"      kharker at cs.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin                   Amateur Radio Callsign: WM5R
Department of the Computer Sciences          Central Texas DX & Contest Club
Taylor Hall TAY 2.124                         Maintainer of Linux on Laptops
Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA            http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------