For many years, we've been posting our flight logs on OLC, the defacto repository for such files, worldwide. While the website functions as a pretty good online logbook for individuals, its principal emphasis is on ranking and contests. (The "C" stands for Contest, after all).
OLC did not invent the "Distributed Competition," which is the generic term for what they do. The original distributed competition was probably the National Ladder in the UK, which has existed continuously since long before the internet.
OLC has spun off subgroups, which are distributed competitions with limited membership. Examples include SSA, which sponsors an OLC subgroup for its members. Another example, until recently, was DAeC, the German national aeroclub - the largest in the world.
There are formal and informal subgroups. Our club is an informal subgroup. The formal ones pay a fee to OLC to be featured on the website. It isn't clear how many national aeroclubs sanction OLC to handle their distributed competitions for them. It isn't even clear how many gliding countries claim to have national distributed competitions at all. SSA is a formal subgroup, but SSA-OLC isn't an officially recognized national championship in USA.
On the other hand, some countries take distributed competitions just as seriously as their national centralized competitions. Germany is one of them. In Germany it is a big deal to be the winner of a national championship, either a competition held at a specific site, or the distributed competition.
Until a few months ago, the official distributed competition for Germany was OLC. The Germans have now switched to a new one called WeGlide. The reasons for dropping OLC have not been published, but one can speculate that OLC's receptiveness to suggested changes to the rules might have been a factor.
WeGlide is new, and it improves every day. However, it must be stated that WeGlide's mission is to do a superior job of running a distributed competition, with special emphasis on doing that job for the German national aeroclub. A secondary objective is to be a useful repository for clubs and sites, and at a much lower priority, it serves as a personal logbook for individual cross country pilots.
Both OLC and WeGlide are weak at meeting the needs of an individual whose only interest is to keep track of cross-country kilometers for himself and his friends. (It is amusing to note that OLC has been adding features and relaxing security rules since they were abandoned by DAeC).
There are two other websites for the casual xc pilot to consider, crosscountry.aero, and Skylines. They have been around for a while, but neither one has crossed over the line into worldwide popularity. They are both better than the other two for keeping track of your individual achievements.
All four websites have advantages and disadvantages. In the broadest terms, OLC and WeGlide are aimed at competitive people, while crosscountry.aero and Skylines are for the rest of us. Also, all four of them are mediocre in terms of detailed flight analysis. If you want to analyze your flight with every conceivable statistic, you should be using a standalone flight evaluation program, like SeeYou or StrePla.
The difficult question, of course, is which of the four online portals should we use? I am not an expert at any of them, so I plan to use all of them until I figure out what I want. It's sort of a pain to upload every flight four times, but I am willing to do that. It would be nice if each of them would forward your flight log file to the other three, but that happens in only one instance: Skylines forwards to WeGlide. So make that three uploads for every flight. I can handle that.
In a future post, I will describe the pros and cons of each of the four websites.
