The panadapter has finite room: spots close in frequency are stacked
behind a '+' and only one is drawn, chosen by PRIORITY — a parameter
'spot add' accepts and OpsLog never sent. So a new entity sat invisible
behind three stations already in the log. DXHunter has sent it for
years; the tiers here are the same idea in the operator's own words:
the entity never worked (with my own callsign, for a multi-op), then
band/mode/slot, then the reference hunts, then everything else.
And a callsign already worked on this exact band and mode stops
advertising a need. Working it again cannot turn a missing QSL into a
confirmation — the QSO is already there — so shouting NEW DXCC over a
station worked an hour ago only teaches an operator to distrust the
colour. The need is real and stays on every OTHER station of the entity,
which is where it can be answered. Applied on both paths out of the
verdict, including the early one that leaves the loop first.
Reported as 'South Africa shows NEW BAND although I have worked 15m'.
The verdict was right — his hunt counts only LoTW and paper QSL, and no
15m contact is confirmed by either — but the badge drew SOLID, saying
'never worked here' about a band with four contacts in the log.
Proved with his own data: the confirmed ledger holds 10/12/17/20/30/40/80
and not 15, the all-QSO ledger holds 15m FT8 four times, and the backend
sets UnconfStatus correctly for exactly that case (new test, end to end
through ClusterSpotStatuses).
The flag died in the frontend. FOUR hand-written copies of the same
backend-result mapping, and they had drifted: the two that RE-fetch —
after a QSO is logged, and when a pane becomes visible — rebuilt each
entry without the unconf_* flags, so the first refresh after any contact
turned every dimmed badge solid for good. None of the four ever copied
grid_state either, so a known-but-unconfirmed square never dimmed at all.
One mapper now, used by all four.