As a result of directives from NOAA Management, DCS Field Test user accounts must be affiliated with an active DCS Group, and will now be required to submit and abide by a system user agreement (SUA) each year to maintain an active DCS Field Test user account. When a renewal is required, users will be presented with the system use agreement text to review, confirm and submit. Once complete, users will then be presented with an edit account dialog window where they must confirm their contact information. Once these two steps are complete, field test users will be authorized for use of the DCS Field Test feature of the DADDS website for a period of 1 year, after which the SUA renewal and contact information confirmation must occur again to maintain an active account status. Users who do not complete this process within the designated period of time will have their accounts disabled and will no longer be able to use the DCS Field Test feature.

A recent update of the DCS website included changes to the DCS Field Test to restrict access to users with a DCS website account. Access to the field test now requires that login credentials be submitted along with query parameters, and will authenticate a user before executing a field test query. Because login credentials for a DCS website account are now requried, requests from automated systems began to fail, and continued to do-so until the necessary changes were made to the automated scripts. While some systems handled the failures in an acceptable manner, others responded by increasing the frequency of the field test query requests, which resulted in denial of service conditions and website outages. When failed requests are handled correctly, automated systems can continue request attempts and not cause website outages triggered by denial of service conditions. The field test and automation help document contains examples, potential pitfalls and best practices to help users create robust automated systems.