The receivers nobody owns
Someone in Japan pointed a receiver at us this week. We could see the aircraft arriving, we counted them into the network's totals, and we drew them on the coverage map. What we could not do was say whose antenna it was, because the stream carries an id that belongs to no account here.
That happens more often than you would guess, and it is almost never a choice. Feeder images like adsb.im generate their own id for every aggregator you add, so if you paste our address into the config, the data starts flowing immediately under an id we never issued. Nothing about the setup tells you that a second step exists. Your receiver works, the map fills in, and your name is attached to none of it.
Until today the only thing our pages said about those streams was a number. That was not much use to anyone, least of all the person who could fix it with one click. So the station leaderboard has a new section at the bottom: Unclaimed receivers. Each line names the country its traffic was over, how many distinct aircraft it heard, how many positions it delivered, and how many of those aircraft nobody else in the network heard at all.
That last figure tends to surprise people. One of the four unclaimed streams delivered 590 aircraft on its first day that no other receiver of ours picked up. Those are positions the map would simply not have.
A few things the block deliberately does not do. It prints no station id, ever: that id is the key to a station's credit, and anyone holding it can feed under that name. It prints no rank, no Signal score and no ordering by size, because an anonymous stream was promised it would never be ranked and a list sorted by volume is a ranking with the numbers filed off. And the place it names is the country the aircraft were over, not the antenna's position. We do not hold the antenna's position for these streams, and the country is coarse enough that it identifies nobody while still being specific enough for an owner to think "wait, that is mine".
If one of those lines looks like your receiver, open /feed from the same network and claim it. The stream keeps running, and the days it has already fed come with it: uptime, aircraft heard, everything. Nothing restarts from zero.
Discord hears about it too
Same day, second half of the same idea: when one of these streams settles in, the #network channel on our Discord now says so. One message, once, for each new receiver, and only after it has been up for twenty minutes and delivered aircraft. A port scanner opening a socket and a decoder being restarted both look like a connection for a few seconds, and neither is worth a message.
The reason the message exists at all is that there is no other way to reach these people. A registered station has an owner, an inbox and a bell. An unclaimed stream has none of that: we know a receiver somewhere in Germany is handing us two million positions a day, and we have no way to say thank you, no way to ask if they want the credit, and no address to write to. The channel is read by people who run receivers, so there is a decent chance the right person is in it and recognises their own country and their own numbers.
The daily digest counts them too, in three separate numbers: receivers that joined, receivers somebody took over, and streams still feeding for nobody. They are different events and reading them as one total would hide the only one we can act on.
The message carries exactly what the block on the leaderboard carries: the country, the minutes, the aircraft, the positions, and an invitation to claim the stream from the same network. No station id, in the message or in our own logs. The one event we deliberately do not post is the opposite one. When an unclaimed stream goes quiet we cannot tell whether the box was unplugged or the owner pointed it at a freshly generated id, and there is nobody to ask.
And now the site says it too
The Discord channel only reaches people who are in it. Most of the receivers pointed at us belong to someone who found the network in another project's list of aggregators, added a line to a config, and never opened an account here. Some of them do turn up eventually, read the leaderboard, recognise their own numbers in the unclaimed block, and leave again, because nothing on the page told them there was anything to do.
So the address check now runs by itself on the pages that audience lands on: the ADS-B hub, the station leaderboard and the feeder landing. If a receiver on the network you are browsing from is feeding under an id no account holds, you get a note with that receiver's own figures, the aircraft, the positions, the days, and the ones nothing else in the network heard, plus the button that takes it over. Everyone else sees nothing at all. A page that asks every visitor about their receiver is noise for the overwhelming majority who do not have one, and the check is not run on the city pages for the same reason.
Nothing new about you is published by this. The check compares the address your browser came from with the addresses our ingest sees, in memory, and keeps neither. It never hands back a station id. The numbers it shows describe the box you are sitting next to, which is why they are safe to show: you are not learning about someone else's receiver, you are learning about yours.
There is a second half, for the people who are already here. Receivers now appear in the live feed inside the game: someone putting a station on the air for the first time, and someone taking over a stream that had been feeding for nobody. Those two are named events with a station page behind them. Unclaimed streams stay out of that feed. A feed row is a person and a link, an anonymous stream has neither, and the person behind it is not in the game to read it anyway. They get the banner instead.