Aircraft pages now share as a card with our numbers on it
Last week someone pasted a link to the C-17 Globemaster III page into Reddit and Telegram. Neither showed a picture. The page did name one, a public-domain photo on Wikimedia Commons, but the link pointed at Wikimedia's image servers, and those don't always answer the bots that chat apps send to fetch previews. Facebook's gets a flat refusal. We only found out because a person told us.
The first fix was to serve that photo from our own address. That brought the picture back, but it also made us look at what the preview was saying. It was a stock photo of a plane. Anyone can show that. What only this site can show is what our receivers actually heard.
What the card says
Every aircraft type page now shares as a card we render on our own server. On the right: the rarity tier, the maker and the ICAO designator, the name, and three numbers from the receiver network. How many different airframes of that type the network picked up, how many sightings that adds up to, and how many receivers were involved. Under them are the towns nearest to the antennas that heard it most often, and the last day it was heard. On the left is the photo, with the photographer and the licence printed into the picture itself.
Printing the credit into the pixels is the part that lets more pages have a picture at all. Most Commons photos are CC BY-SA, which is fine to use as long as the author is named wherever the image appears. A chat preview has nowhere to put that name, so until now only public-domain photos could go there, about 45 of our 227. With the credit on the card, any credited Commons photo can travel.
The same card now exists for the other three kinds of page:
- An airframe (
/aircraft/{hex}): the registration, its type and operator, how many days the network heard that exact tail, on how many receivers, and how many pilots caught it. - An airline: how many of its aircraft have been caught, across how many types, by how many spotters, plus its radio callsign.
- A manufacturer: how many of its types are in the reference, how many were caught, and a few examples.
Airframe and airline cards borrow the photo of the type, and say so ("Type photo"), because we have no free picture of that particular tail or of the airline's own jet. Photos from Planespotters never go on a card: their terms ask for a link back, and a picture in a chat preview can't carry one. When no usable photo exists, the left side shows the designator in large type instead.
A number that is zero isn't printed. A card that says "0 receivers" reads as a broken network, not as one that hasn't heard the aircraft yet.
If a preview still looks old
Telegram and some other apps remember a preview for a long time. The image address changes whenever the numbers on the card do, so new shares pick up the new card. For a link that was already posted, Telegram's @WebpageBot can refresh it. Reddit doesn't draw link previews inside comments at all, so a link in a comment will stay a plain link.
If you run a receiver, this is also a way to show your station's work: every type your antenna hears adds to the numbers on those cards. You can see what the network hears right now on the live map.