VATSIM Virtual Airlines - Policy Changes

[Michael Gold]

7 hours ago, Antonio Dujmovic said:

We really don't. The only statistics we have from airlines are the ones previously provided on audits and signup. Although not much, due to reasons provided above.

What, then, is the purpose of our pilots putting a mention of our VA in the flight plan remarks? If you can't look that up, why do we do it? The policy suggests that you use this to measure a VA's activity level.

[Luke Kolin]

1 hour ago, Michael Gold said:

What, then, is the purpose of our pilots putting a mention of our VA in the flight plan remarks? If you can't look that up, why do we do it? The policy suggests that you use this to measure a VA's activity level.

In my mind, the only way to validate whether a VA is active on VATSIM is to check their logs. A flight was flown with our DVA if there's an entry in our log books and it has VATSIM track data. Relying on comments or callsigns (especially for a common real-world airline) strikes me as quite unreliable.

A big ++ for an automated way to pull this data. I wrote one and gave it to VATSIM in September 2007, according to our source control logs. We're still getting asked to this day - it seems that each time a new VA (or ATO) team we start from ground zero.

Cheers!

[Antonio Dujmovic]

9 hours ago, Lukas Jankauskas said:

it is getting late in the day for me and I will be sure to revisit it with fresh eyes - but you are assuming we were overjoyed with the previous data collection process - we were not, but we were willing to settle with it cause it was once a year.

With all the revelations which came out over the course of the day today - why would anyone send anything over? We can do this all on trust - saves me some GDPR headaches as well as work for you traversing some list where, as far as I can understand, you cannot and no not do any checks.

Hence me saying - I can give you a list saying I have pilots with VATSIM IDs starting at 126000 and ending in 1260100 - 100 pilots in total. 100 VATSIM registered people to qualify for your list. 

 

The reason why I will not recommend VAs to share their pilot list of users with VATSIM IDs is because your data handling policy does not touch on it at all. Your reply does and I believe that can be workable, but until it's in VATSIM policy, my hands are literally tied and I have little choice but to tie them up for my customers who are your VA Partners. 

Not at all. I haven't expected nothing like a positive response to our frequency update. But I haven't expected this amount of backlash either. Regardless of the outcome, I'm on the forums and dsicord trying to figure something out that everybody will be happy with.

Unfortunately, we can not base VATSIM partnerships with fully relying on trust. We need a way to verify, although I agree with you that CIDs are not the best solution in regards to GDPR concerns. I've began a discussion in our discord server, for anybody who wishes to express their thoughts on the idea of PIREPs, or some other alternative to this. I understand that you can give us that list, but that list means nothing to us unless we can verify what you sent us is correct. I understand your concer with the data policy part, and we'll most likely have a seperate section added to our policy in regards as to what happens to data that get sent to us, how we handle it and what we use it for.

 

7 hours ago, Michael Gold said:

What, then, is the purpose of our pilots putting a mention of our VA in the flight plan remarks? If you can't look that up, why do we do it? The policy suggests that you use this to measure a VA's activity level.

As previously mentioned, most airlines don't do this, and since it is easier for both parties to simply do it with CIDs, it has been done like that. Although, that won't be the case any more, as we have decided to pursue alternatives to CIDs. More about that to a reply above.

 

6 hours ago, Luke Kolin said:

In my mind, the only way to validate whether a VA is active on VATSIM is to check their logs. A flight was flown with our DVA if there's an entry in our log books and it has VATSIM track data. Relying on comments or callsigns (especially for a common real-world airline) strikes me as quite unreliable.

A big ++ for an automated way to pull this data. I wrote one and gave it to VATSIM in September 2007, according to our source control logs. We're still getting asked to this day - it seems that each time a new VA (or ATO) team we start from ground zero.

Cheers!

With a PIREPs system, we wouldn't rely only on callsigns, but origin, destination, callsign and time of flight. We're still looking into it. 

I'm not aware of such program from 2007, maybe Roger C. knows more about that, but even if it worked back in 2007, it probably wouldn't work today due to major overhauls VATSIM has had on their systems over the past years or so. And its functions would most likely be out of date. Just yesterday, member of our department who is in the field, has been arranged to get partial access to my.vatsim.net, so we could get the required changes that we have been requesting from the tech team for years now. 

For some more transparency, here is what we currently have on our list (includes stuff we've been asking for and a few new items):

- The ability to immediately set the VA as a Partner or Associate when approving an application. (Alternative: Separate applications for Partner)
If they are approved for partner, the standard email would be sent stating they've been accepted. If they're approved for Associate, they'd be sent email templates "Accepted for Associate Program" and "Introduction to Associate Program"

- Ability for VA owners to change the contact email address for the VA.

- "Send Mass Email" function returns a 503. Probably not a problem in the code but in the structure itself, but worth checking out.

- Some redesign of the VA Partner list.

- When submitting an application, the ability to select the contact email address it'd use, instead of defaulting to the person's primary vatsim address.

- Create new status named "Heritage", airlines with Heritage status would stand out at the top of the partner list with a yellow/gold-ish color. (Still being discussed, but here just as a placeholder for it)
Something like this would fall in with the redesign of the VA Partners list, so not only 10 airlines are put at the top.

- When sending mass email, a function to select the type of VA the email should be sent to (e.g. only Partners or only Associate, or both)

- Application status ‘Under Review’…change to something to better indicate if the application has been yet viewed and ability to have notes for an application that is being actively worked but needs a response from applicant to complete

- Display Requirements for acceptance (link?) before application can be submitted (or at very least a check box acknowledging having read said requirements

- Under Virtual Airlines - separate lists for Partner and for VAA

- Would be nice to have direct email option to job applicants (audit managers is only one currently) 



Happy to answer any more questions you may have.  Thanks for the feedback!





For any VA Staff Member who isn't in our discord server, and who wishes to provide us with feedback and join in our discussions, you may join here.
 

 

[Luke Kolin]

3 hours ago, Antonio Dujmovic said:

Unfortunately, we can not base VATSIM partnerships with fully relying on trust. We need a way to verify, although I agree with you that CIDs are not the best solution in regards to GDPR concerns.

Help me out here - what exactly is the privacy concern with CIDs? They're not identifying on their own (if I got a list of every issued VATSIM CID it still wouldn't tell me who was a member) and they're somewhat random (based on issue order) and certainly non-deterministic. If CIDs are a privacy concern then any single unique ID would have the same issues, which doesn't make sense. You can certainly use IDs as long as they don't encode or expose any information on their own (which CIDs do not).

And even if it was a privacy issue, we're just giving the CID back to VATSIM, which generated and issued it in the first place! The data isn't going to any org that didn't already have it.

3 hours ago, Antonio Dujmovic said:

I'm not aware of such program from 2007, maybe Roger C. knows more about that, but even if it worked back in 2007, it probably wouldn't work today due to major overhauls VATSIM has had on their systems over the past years or so. And its functions would most likely be out of date. Just yesterday, member of our department who is in the field, has been arranged to get partial access to my.vatsim.net, so we could get the required changes that we have been requesting from the tech team for years now. 

The "program" is a web service on our end, which dumps the data in human-readable and (at the time) XML format (I updated it to emit JSON now). The point is that VATSIM absolutely needs to move towards automated verification and data exchange with its VA partners, and even if it's just going to be handled by Google Sheet you can put the URL in there and be done.

This may be more for @Roger Curtiss, but if you have a list of features for your back-end systems, are you planning on asking your VA partners what they would like to see that could help them?

Cheers!

[Antonio Dujmovic]

22 minutes ago, Luke Kolin said:

Help me out here - what exactly is the privacy concern with CIDs? They're not identifying on their own (if I got a list of every issued VATSIM CID it still wouldn't tell me who was a member) and they're somewhat random (based on issue order) and certainly non-deterministic. If CIDs are a privacy concern then any single unique ID would have the same issues, which doesn't make sense. You can certainly use IDs as long as they don't encode or expose any information on their own (which CIDs do not).

And even if it was a privacy issue, we're just giving the CID back to VATSIM, which generated and issued it in the first place! The data isn't going to any org that didn't already have it.

The "program" is a web service on our end, which dumps the data in human-readable and (at the time) XML format (I updated it to emit JSON now). The point is that VATSIM absolutely needs to move towards automated verification and data exchange with its VA partners, and even if it's just going to be handled by Google Sheet you can put the URL in there and be done.

This may be more for @Roger Curtiss, but if you have a list of features for your back-end systems, are you planning on asking your VA partners what they would like to see that could help them?

Cheers!

They are not identifying on their own, but can be easily used to find out anything that you do on the VATSIM network, and your full name.
While this hasn't posed a problem in the past, I will respect the concerns others presented about that. And right now, I am convinced that requesting flights/PIREPs instead of CIDs is a better way of auditing the airlines.

As previously mentioned, we now have a developer working on overhauling the entire process on my.vatsim.net, which will come with improvement for both us internally, and the VAs.

I believe I already stated multiple times that I am open to suggestions and feedback regarding anything, and just today I held a conversation with a few VAs in our discord chats in regards to their preference with a new system with flights, and what type of data they would be willing to give us without it being an additional burden to them or us. This is something I plan to do more often, to get more input from VAs so we could satisfy their needs and wishes.

Any VA partnered or associated with VATSIM is more than welcome to join in on that, or any future feedback/surveys we may seek from Partners/Associates.

Thanks!
 

[Jan Podlipsky]

3 minutes ago, Antonio Dujmovic said:

They are not identifying on their own, but can be easily used to find out anything that you do on the VATSIM network, and your full name.
While this hasn't posed a problem in the past, I will respect the concerns others presented about that. And right now, I am convinced that requesting flights/PIREPs instead of CIDs is a better way of auditing the airlines.

As previously mentioned, we now have a developer working on overhauling the entire process on my.vatsim.net, which will come with improvement for both us internally, and the VAs.

I believe I already stated multiple times that I am open to suggestions and feedback regarding anything, and just today I held a conversation with a few VAs in our discord chats in regards to their preference with a new system with flights, and what type of data they would be willing to give us without it being an additional burden to them or us. This is something I plan to do more often, to get more input from VAs so we could satisfy their needs and wishes.

Any VA partnered or associated with VATSIM is more than welcome to join in on that, or any future feedback/surveys we may seek from Partners/Associates.

Thanks!
 

Hi Antonio,

many thanks for being open to change, and inventing a lot better process. Could you please confirm that you will therefore not ask us for CIDs during the planned August audit, and you will ask for PIREPs instead?

Just so we can make the system arrangements.

[Antonio Dujmovic]

6 minutes ago, Jan Podlipsky said:

Hi Antonio,

many thanks for being open to change, and inventing a lot better process. Could you please confirm that you will therefore not ask us for CIDs during the planned August audit, and you will ask for PIREPs instead?

Just so we can make the system arrangements.

Hi Jan,

Until we finish up work on the policy to bring those changes (which we have already began working on, and a part of that is communicating with VAs), our current policy stays, therefore, any VAs audited before the new policy change will require CIDs to pass the audit per the policy, with the exception when its time for a VA to be audited, and we're unable to find the information we need online, upon the VA being contacted by the Audit Manager, the VA may request for us to waive the requirement for this specific audit period, as we are working on changing the requirement and procedure. I hope that answers your question.

I believe that by the end of this month/beginning of the next, we will have that sorted out.

Our next batch of audits goes out tomorrow, and the VAs from that batch will be audited by the end of next week. Currently, each week 35 VAPs gets audited, thanks to our Audit Managers!

[Luke Kolin]

1 hour ago, Antonio Dujmovic said:

They are not identifying on their own, but can be easily used to find out anything that you do on the VATSIM network, and your full name. While this hasn't posed a problem in the past, I will respect the concerns others presented about that. And right now, I am convinced that requesting flights/PIREPs instead of CIDs is a better way of auditing the airlines.

What you do isn't PII, just the personal info - and at some point you probably do need to expose that for validation between the VAs and VATSIM. From a flight validation perspective, the flight really isn't good enough IMO - you need to map it to a CID because you also need that to match against the statistics - was the flight actually flown by the pilot in question?

1 hour ago, Antonio Dujmovic said:

I believe I already stated multiple times that I am open to suggestions and feedback regarding anything, and just today I held a conversation with a few VAs in our discord chats in regards to their preference with a new system with flights, and what type of data they would be willing to give us without it being an additional burden to them or us. This is something I plan to do more often, to get more input from VAs so we could satisfy their needs and wishes.

Any VA partnered or associated with VATSIM is more than welcome to join in on that, or any future feedback/surveys we may seek from Partners/Associates.

I fired up my Discord client for the first time in whenever. Happy to chat more. I'm already in the VATSIM Development/Tech server.

Cheers!

 

[Leslie Jarrett]

using my 40 years or more in software development my response to the all of the above discussions is as follows -:

The CID as it stands belongs to a single pilot regardless of who they fly for in terms of Virtual Airlines or groups or even as an individual and that must stay of course in that this is a number allocated to an individual and not a virtual airline.

Suffice to say that the audit of a virtual airline at present is dependant on a list of individual pilot CID numbers and thus involves a great amount of checking both on the part of the Virtual Airline and people like myself who have the role of auditing Virtual airlines.

It may be simple the suggestion I propose but given that most of the data that Vatsim Holds is in a database so adding one more table is not going to break the system.

My proposal is that each Virtual Airline is given a set of numbers that they can use for Vatsim flying and these become a VACID.

I can see a change needed to the pilot client in that an option to select a VACID is added for the connection of a flight. There is no problem with this as it would be a dropdown list of the pilots VACID's so that they select the VACID to use or none

Given this when the vATSim system traces this VACID it records the flight in the VACID account and then adds the hours etc to the associated personal pilot CID account 

This table will have no pilot names or emails or whatever and the access and information that the Audit team can use is restricted to the VACID list table .

HOW DOES THIS HELP THE VA AUDITING ?

It does not help of course with the log checking but for activity the there would just be two tables needed for an enquiry the VACID allocation Table that holds the VA details [Could be two fields added to existing VA information table i.e. start VACID code and end VACID code .). and the stats for the VACID table relating to the virtual airline.

Since no personal details can be linked by auditors or the the VATSIM stats type web pages then no PII will be exposed as part of the process and also the Va Auditing team do not have to ask the Virtual airline for set of CID  numbers.

Please if anybody from the Vatsim BOG can read this I hope that you can pick this suggestion up and evaluate this as this g=has been a bottleneck with Va Auditing for many years and as such a simple change to a few pieces of software is not beyond VATSIM

 

[Richard Jenkins]

Seems to me we should create a solution that doesn't increase the burden on Partner VAs, who already get minimal return on affiliation, and also does not increase the  bureaucratic footprint of VATSIM. Every 90 days is onerous for everyone concerned. 

[Roger Curtiss]

On 8/10/2022 at 3:27 PM, Lukas Jankauskas said:

Hi Roger, It's probably my bad english, but this sounds a lot like big VAs need not apply and enjoy the bragging rights (failing any other benefits) of being a VATSIM registered VA?

The term 'strong enough' is meant to mean that, for example, the VA was not formed recently and only has two members.  Strength in this context implies duration of existence (minimum 6 months), roster of at least 20 pilots, and a substantial number (minimum 15) of those pilots using the network.
VAs that fall short of these standards may be eligible to join the Associate program in order to grow and achieve those numbers.

[Roger Curtiss]

19 hours ago, Richard Jenkins said:

Seems to me we should create a solution that doesn't increase the burden on Partner VAs, who already get minimal return on affiliation, and also does not increase the  bureaucratic footprint of VATSIM. Every 90 days is onerous for everyone concerned. 

Options are being explored to do this utilizing existing databases and resources.