A badge for your station and a page about us
Four small changes went out today. None of them adds a new thing to do in the game. They make the site easier to trust, for people and for search engines alike.
A badge for your station
Every station page now has an Embed badge button with three ready snippets: HTML for a blog or a website, BBCode for forums, and Markdown for a GitHub README. Each one shows a small image with the station's name, its band, its place on the ladder, how many aircraft or ships it heard today, and its Signal class. The image updates itself, so the badge in a forum post you wrote in March shows today's numbers.
A click on the badge opens your station page. If a station is later hidden or deleted, the badge does not turn into a broken picture in old posts. It falls back to a neutral one that points at the network.
The image is English only. It has no language in its address and forum proxies that fetch it do not send one either.
An About page
skydex.online/about says who makes the game: Esso.dev, a small studio from Kherson, Ukraine. It lists our address, the contact email ([email protected]), our X account, and the public repository where the aircraft rarity tiers live and where anyone can open an issue. It also explains where the live data comes from (volunteer ADS-B and AIS receivers, Google 3D scenery, OpenStreetMap), shows today's network numbers, and answers the questions we get most often.
The page is in all twelve languages and shares as its own card. Until today the only way to learn who runs Skydex was to open the in-game About window, which a search engine never sees.
Links from the front page
The homepage now links to the aircraft types the network hears most, the busiest airports and the top stations. A visitor who lands on the front page from a search can go straight to something specific instead of picking a menu.
Aircraft type pages lead with the network
On every aircraft type page, the Heard by the network block moved up, right under the summary. It is the part no other site has: which of our receivers heard this type and how often. It used to sit below the reference specs, where most readers never scrolled.
If you run a station, the badge is waiting on your station page. Paste it where the people who share your hobby already read.