Directory cards: no more black squares
Open the vessels section of the directory yesterday and most of what you saw was the same anchor icon, over and over. Of 1,687 ships, 311 have a photo. The other 1,376 cards were a placeholder. Worse, a good share of the 311 with photos rendered as black rectangles.
The black ones had two causes. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons, and we were loading them straight from Wikimedia's servers in the visitor's browser. A directory page asks for a hundred or so thumbnails at once, and Wikimedia answers a burst like that with "429, too many requests". The browser draws nothing. On top of that, some photos were stored with an http:// address, and a secure page refuses to load an insecure image.
Photos now come through skydex.online
Every Commons photo on a card is now fetched by our server, at the size the card actually needs, and kept in memory. Your browser only talks to skydex.online. Wikimedia sees one polite client with a clear name and a contact address instead of a hundred anonymous requests per page, and a photo fetched once is served from memory to the next visitor. If Wikimedia does ask us to slow down, the server waits a minute before trying again instead of hammering them.
Photo credits stay on the picture, exactly as before. Nothing about the licence changes because the bytes take a different route.
A card without a photo looks finished
Instead of the anchor, a card without a photo now shows a chart panel in the colour of its lane (teal for water, blue for sky) with a silhouette of the vessel's category: cargo, tanker, passenger, fast craft, tug, fishing or other. Aircraft get the outline of their type family: airliner, wide-body, business jet, light aircraft, glider, helicopter or balloon. The ship's MMSI or the aircraft's code sits in the corner in a monospace font.
If a photo exists but fails to load, the card falls back to the same silhouette rather than a black square.
Small things that make a wall readable
- The rarity ribbon on ship cards is now coloured by the tier, the same colours aircraft cards already used. An epic tanker and an epic cargo ship finally look equally epic.
- Under the name there is a thin ruler showing length: up to 400 m for ships, up to 85 m for aircraft. A canal boat and a container ship look different at a glance.
- The bottom line says how many times it was caught, by how many spotters, and when the last catch was.
These cards are shared, so the change also reaches your collection pages, flag pages and shipyard pages.
This is the first of four steps. Next come a new /directory landing page, category bars and tier chips on the section pages, and an airlines hub with logos.