Some new ones that took me by surprise. I received some POTA logs from a new activator. The first surprise was none of his logs had the .adi extension. From the header info, it appears they all were exported directly from HAMRS version 1.0.3, so I was surprised at the lack of the extension.
Another surprise I had not seen before was almost all the contact records had “<qso_date_off:12>Invalid date” and a few contact records had “<qso_date:12>Invalid date” entries. To my recollection, there isn’t a box on the entry window for the “date off” entry, so I don’t know how that got messed up. And I’m not sure how he messed up the date to get the “invalid date” entry as opposed to just wrong numbers. I know they were working on making a warning for bad date info to alert the operator of the error, but I didn’t think it would just put it in the log that way and let it go forward.
Good evening! Hope all is well.
A couple of thoughts:
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HAMRS saves with the ADI extension by default, so this user must have changed the file name after saving or he changed it in the file export dialogue box. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to prevent this. IMHO that user didn’t read the log part of the POTA instructions. He could have just as easily emailed it to the wrong coordinator… no way to protect all users from themselves, unfortunately.
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I would hope the QSO_OFF_DATE wouldn’t throw off the POTA uploader. Doesn’t it ignore that field? Regardless, it always reflects the QSO_DATE. However, if the QSO_DATE is missing or wrong, then the OFF date would show as invalid, too.
I just tested to see if it is possible to completely delete the date when entering a QSO and subsequently save it. Looks like that is possible, and instead of saving it blank, HAMRS exports the invalid language. Never thought anyone would even try to enter a blank date, but now we know it can be done. You found THAT user. 
(Hey, we were all newbs once…)
@jarrett, recommend in addition to validating the date is a real date, that you add a check to make sure it’s not blank.