The directory shares as a card
Paste a link to the directory into Discord, Telegram, X or a chat app and you used to get the same picture as every other page on the site: the Skydex banner. It said where the link went and nothing about what was behind it.
Now the directory draws its own card, and it draws it from the collection itself.
What the cards show
The front page prints two rows of counters. The blue row is the sky side: how many aircraft types the reference knows, how many of them our receiver network has actually heard, how many individual aircraft players have caught, and how many airlines those aircraft belong to. The teal row is the water side: ships caught, flag states, shipyards and ports.
Caught aircraft (/directory/airframes) shows the size of the collection and two short leaderboards: the types players catch most often and the airlines whose aircraft turn up most. Right now that is the A320neo and British Airways, which says something about where our spotters live.
Caught ships (/directory/vessels) does the same for the water: the flags flown most and the most common kinds of vessel. Hulls we have no type data for yet are left out of the type list, so it only names types we know.
The hubs and the ship pages too
The six lists inside the directory got cards of their own the same day: aircraft types, airlines, manufacturers, shipyards, flags and ports. Each shows its counters and the top of its list, for example the types our receivers hear most against the types players catch most.
Ship pages now match the aircraft pages. A vessel, a flag state, a shipyard and a port each share as a card with the numbers from that page: how many times a ship was caught and how many days our receivers heard her, how many ships fly a flag, how many ships from a yard are in the collection, how many arrivals and departures a port logged. A vessel card shows the screenshot a player took when catching her, with their name on it.
Why most cards have no photos
The pages themselves are full of photos, and a mosaic of catches would look nicer. But every photo on Skydex carries a credit, and most licences require that credit wherever the picture appears. A share card has no room for six photographers' names, so the cards stay typographic and lead with numbers.
They stay current
The numbers are read when the card is drawn, and the image address changes whenever any of them does. Chat apps tend to keep a preview forever once they have fetched it; a new address makes them fetch a new one. If a number is unknown or zero it is left off the card rather than printed as a zero.
The same approach already covers station pages, the live network maps and aircraft type pages. If you share something from Skydex and still get the plain banner, tell us in Discord and we will draw a card for it too.