Finally, someone has come up with a global shortwave competition for an average operator and with reasonable scoring scheme.
The Central Siberia DX-Club sponsors the Ham Spirit Contest -
https://www.hamspiritcontest.com/Please read the rules before posting any comments. The positive features, in my opinion, are following:
a) 24-hour format - bearable for many contesters without the use of stimulants
b) points given for contacts with own country, bonus for separate ITU Zones even within own country
c) multipliers based on internationally accepted zones and locators
d) the exchange must be actually received, not filled in by the logging software
The controversial 40-zone and 340-country multiplier lists used in other worldwide competitions create high demand on selected spots.
This is probably attractive for professional contest operators, spending thousands of dollars travelling to rental stations.
These multiplier tables had been conceived long time ago by one ham magazine publisher and a national organization. Today we must comply
with the rules of the International Telecommunication Union, while the Maidenhead Locator System is officially accepted by the IARU and even
implemented in better GPS receivers. The FT8 mode is using this system by default. It seems to me a reasonable and modern layout for a fair play event.
I would suggest skipping the nonsense five-nine/5NN and replacing it with some useful information, for instance the year of birth, or of the first licence.
Processing the logs could show interesting statistical data about activity in assorted Squares and the age of participants. If IARU takes over the
sponsorship of such contest, a lot of vital data would be available for our Union.