The front page now speaks your language
Until today the front page of skydex.online was a single static English file. The game inside it has spoken twelve languages since October 9, but the page around it didn't. A German reader saw English in their search results. A link pasted into a Japanese chat unfolded into an English card. Someone reading the page with JavaScript off got the English text too.
Now our server builds the front page for every visit.
In your language. Open the site with a German browser and the title, the description, the text under the game and the questions at the bottom are in German. The same goes for Ukrainian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Japanese and Arabic. Adding ?lang= to the address (for example skydex.online/?lang=ja) picks one by hand. Each language has its own address, and search engines are told about all twelve, so they can show the right one to the right reader.
With live numbers. The page now says how many aircraft and ships our receivers hear at that moment, and the description search engines show starts with those numbers. The counts come from the same place as the live globe. If we can't read them quickly, the page is sent without them. A zero is never printed in their place: no count is better than a wrong one.
With its own card. Share skydex.online on X, Discord, Telegram or WhatsApp and the picture now carries a strip: LIVE, how many aircraft, ships and receivers, and how many countries. It is redrawn every ten minutes, so a link shared tonight shows tonight's sky.
Still fast, and still up when we are down. The front page must never depend on our server. If the server doesn't answer within a few seconds, or answers with an error, the web server in front of it hands out the familiar static English page, exactly as before. You may never notice, which is the point.
Nothing changes in the game itself. Take off works the way it did, from the same button.
The translations are machine translations for now, like the rest of the twelve-language work. If a sentence reads oddly in your language, tell us in Discord or on X @SkydexOnline and we'll fix it.
If you run an ADS-B or AIS receiver, the numbers on that card are partly yours. Add a station and they go up.