Rare sky, in your Discord
Until today the Discord server had one feed. #live-feed is the highlight reel of world-firsts, epic catches and track records that the game posts when somebody does something, so it says what the players did. It never said what the sky was doing, and the sky doesn't wait for you. An Antonov An-124 crosses the network's coverage in twenty minutes and is gone.
Five new channels fix that. All of them are fed by the receiver network itself, from the same privacy-filtered snapshot the live map draws, so nothing here can say more about an aircraft than the map already does.
#sky-alerts carries legendary and mythical types plus the ten legend-class airframes the game treats as world-first material: Beluga, BelugaXL, Dreamlifter, An-124, An-225, C-5M, VC-25, B-52, U-2, A400M. Each alert is one card with the model, the operator and its flag, the registration and callsign, the flight level, and the nearest city the aircraft is over. Two links go with it: the live map opened with that aircraft already selected, and its type page. Mythical types and legends ping the Sky Alerts role. Pick it up in the server's onboarding if you want the push, leave it if you'd rather just scroll.
#epic-sky carries the same cards for epic-tier types, with no role ping. We measured before deciding. The network hears about sixty distinct epic airframes a day and around eighteen legendary-or-rarer. Sixty pings a day isn't an alert, it's a stream, so epics got their own room.
#squawk posts an aircraft holding 7700 (general emergency) or 7600 (radio failure) for two consecutive minutes. Two minutes, because a one-sweep 7700 is a mis-dial far more often than an emergency. 7500 is never posted, on purpose. Military aircraft never post in any channel, also on purpose.
#network carries station milestones: a receiver's first packets, a station back online after days of silence, and a range record broken by more than five percent. Stations that opted out of the public list stay out of this channel too, and owners are credited only if they left "credit me" on. Receiver uuids never appear anywhere. On Mondays the channel gets a week-in-the-network roundup with the top five stations by Signal and the new stations that joined.
#daily is one post at 20:00 Berlin time, DST-aware: top pilots by XP in the last 24 hours, how many aircraft and ships were caught and by how many people, the rarest catch, how much rare sky the network heard, the top three stations with the network's live numbers, and which countries had the busiest sky yesterday. Numbers we couldn't measure are left out rather than printed as zero.
Two rules sit under all of this. Every airframe posts at most once per channel per UTC day, and that memory lives in the database rather than in the process. This stack deploys almost daily, and an in-memory set would re-announce every aircraft still airborne after each restart. And every thumbnail is a public-domain or CC0 photo from Wikimedia Commons, never a Planespotters shot. A Discord card has no place to print a photographer's name, and their terms require one.
We didn't build a catch log. Manual catches below epic came to 132 in the last thirty days from two accounts, and epic-and-up catches already go to #live-feed. The daily digest carries the count instead. Per-rarity forums, personal watchlists by type or registration, and a Telegram mirror are in the plan for later.
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