Well, the one time I did such a thing, many years ago, I protested myself. Let us just say an egregious error was made.

As there is no counter party for a part 4 request for redress, "helping a boat in danger", if the online form will not accept a request without an entry as a counter party, you just have to finagle it. Enter your own boat name, or the OA. 

RRS 61.2 only requires the request to be in writing (which includes email/online etc) & identify the reason for making it. If the system the event is using has not caught up with this yet & there is no obvious counterparty, just put PC  or Jury as the counterparty, as they are the ones who you are requesting to grant it. If it is due to an improper action then the counterparty is the committee that you consider did that action.

In an offline conversation last night, Richard pointed out the above issue and we were reviewing some solutions.  I'm always concerned about making the online form more complex as it becomes more of a challenge for competitors to figure out and introduces new edge cases we hadn't contemplated.  One solution is to do nothing, as it isn't an error to name a boat or committee that is not really a party.  That does introduce some confusion however, as the RC may be wondering why they are named as a party when it doesn't involve 61.4(b)(1).  Another solution is to add an option for requesting redress for giving help and not require a respondent on the request.  I have added that option trying to keep it as simple as possible.  I suspect it won't be an issue as it will be rarely used.  But be aware that a competitor can select that option and not provide any information about a respondent, which may not meet the conditions for validity for various other hearing types.  

I also note that there various other inputs on the form that may or may not be used based on the type of request.  We really haven't gone down the path of trying to toggle those off or on depending on the request type.  The difference being that they were never a required field so could just be ignored.  

Why not add "not applicable" or similar as a choice for any field where it would be a valid entry?

Wouldn't a PC always want to hear from the boat helped in the case of assessing the danger?  Why not put the boat helped in?

More of a witness really .. but it all becomes obvious when the boat helped is also described in the written  "reason for redress".