Lists that arrive instead of appearing
If you opened the station leaderboard on a slow connection, this is what happened: a heading, a paragraph, and then a strip of nothing where the table belonged. A second or two later the whole table existed. Nothing was broken, but the page gave you no way to tell whether it was working, finished and empty, or about to show you something.
The same pattern was everywhere a list is fetched: your aircraft and ship collections, the aircraft types, airlines and manufacturers hubs, a station's own page, and the receivers dashboard that people keep open on a second monitor while they re-aim an antenna. Some of them printed a single character while they waited. That character occupied one line, so when the real content landed the page also grew by several hundred pixels and everything below it jumped.
Now each of those places draws a placeholder in roughly the shape of what is coming: rows with a wide name column and narrow number columns for a table, a grid of card-sized tiles for a collection wall, a card-sized block for a station. The placeholders carry no text and no numbers. A loader that guessed "12 stations" would be making a claim about data we have not received yet.
Sorting and filtering got the other half of the fix. Re-ordering your ship collection, switching between "by type" and "by manufacturer", changing the board on the XP leaderboard or re-sorting the models a station has heard used to swap the contents underneath your cursor with no transition at all, which reads as a flicker rather than as a change you asked for. Those views now settle into place over about a quarter of a second.
The rest of the public pages went the same way in the same day, so there is no half-fixed corner left to trip over: the live feed and its photo filter, flag, shipyard, port and vessel pages, the race track pages and the race leaderboard with its four filter menus, the rank ladder, the achievement catalog, the season archive, your fleet and hangar, and a pilot's public profile with its buildings, passport and photo wall. Where a page is one object rather than a list, the placeholder is shaped like that object instead: a hero block the size of the picture or the timelapse that is about to load, then the title and the line under it.
One thing we deliberately did not do. The two hub pages for the ADS-B and ships networks show live figures that are omitted entirely when the server has not measured them, so drawing a "top stations" placeholder there would promise a list we might have nothing to put in. Those sections simply fade in when the numbers arrive.
Two details worth knowing. The receivers dashboard only shows the placeholder on the first read, so the 20 second refresh that keeps the status current never flashes it at you. And if your system is set to reduce motion, the shimmer and the settle animation are both off; the blocks stay, the movement goes.