Dormant stations
Half of the stations on the network list this week were dead. Not broken, just silent: one fed for two hours on the 12th of August and never again, one for three days, one for an hour. They sat in the table as offline for two and three weeks, and each of them held a slot in the ranking. When your station said #3 of 6, three of the six had not heard an aircraft this month. That isn't a place.
The rule
The network is measured by data, not by registrations. It's the same rule that already decides whether a station is healthy: counters, never process state. Every registered receiver is now in one of four states:
- never: registered, not one packet;
- active: packets within the last week;
- quiet: a week to a month of silence;
- dormant: more than a month.
We picked the thresholds around how people actually disappear. A holiday is two weeks, and dropping someone on day eight would be rude. A move is a month.
What dormant means, and what it does not
A dormant station leaves the ranking. It is no longer numbered, it is not in the denominator, and the station list shows it in a folded section underneath the table, with the date of its last packet. #3 of 4 is an honest place. #3 of 6 with two dead rows was not.
A dormant station does not leave the network. Its page stays, its history stays, its reception rose and its record range stay. The page simply says dormant and drops out of search engines until it feeds again, because a page whose every figure is a month stale is not what a searcher wants. The first packet reverses all of it: back in the table, back in the ranking, back in the index. Nothing is deleted, and nothing will be deleted automatically. A receiver that comes back after a house move should find its story where it left it.
Reminders on the way down
Until today an owner heard from us once: a bell twelve hours into the silence. Every dead station on the list had received it, and none came back. Now there are three rungs. Twelve hours. Seven days, with a reminder of where the connector line lives. Thirty days, the message that says the station has left the ranking and how to return. Three lines and no more; a fourth would be spam, and spam doesn't bring receivers back.
A receiver that was registered but never delivered a single packet is a different case. That's not a fault, it's an unfinished setup. It gets one nudge, a day after registration, pointing at the connector line on the feed page. Then we stop.
The bell is read by people who open Skydex, and a person whose receiver died a month ago mostly doesn't. So the week and the month reminders, and the never-fed nudge, also go by e-mail, with the connector line in the message so the fix is one paste away. The twelve-hour rung stays bell-only: half of those are a router reboot, and a mail for each would be the kind of noise people unsubscribe from before the mail that matters arrives. Every message has a one-click unsubscribe, and the same switch sits on your feed page. Nothing else will ever arrive from that address. No digests, no marketing.
On your own page
Your station card on the feed page says it plainly when a receiver is dormant: out of the leaderboard until it feeds again, history kept. A station that never fed says so too, with the connector line right under it.