Since around 3-4 days the “Nearby Sites” statistics are wrong or outdated and do not represent the current values of the listed feeders. For example the displayed values for my feeders are lower than any of the last 10-15 values. Same is true for the other displayed feeders.
Looks correct to me:
The nearby sites position value for your site is coming from the 21st’s data: 96373 = 92625 + 3748
This is a little counterintuitive, but: the “nearby sites” statistic is the median value, over the last week, of the total positions as used in the overall ranking. This ranking now excludes “other” positions. We probably need to show that number separately somewhere, since “total positions” is no longer what’s used.
Ok, so you changed the values used for calculation from Total to “Total-Other” some days ago. It would be nice to communicate such changes to avoid confusion.
But thanks for the clarification, anyway.
The changes to exclude “other” from rankings were announced in the April ADS-B newsletter.
Here’s the announcement, starting April 7 2025
ADS-B Statistics Ranking Update
We are making an update to our ADS-B Statistics Leaderboards and how we calculate the rankings for different “Top” categories. Currently, your rank is determined by the number of unique aircraft your receiver tracked and contributed to FlightAware. This includes ADS-B, MLAT, UAT, and “Other” aircraft.
What’s Changing?
We will be officially removing “Other” aircraft as a factor in the rankings. Other aircraft statistics will continue to be displayed, however it will not be a contributing factor to your overall ranking.
What are “Other” Aircraft?
A commonly asked question is what we consider “Other” aircraft.
Other aircraft refers to aircraft that you received Mode-S messages from, but were not tracked via ADS-B or multilateration (MLAT). In other words, the received message did not include position information or were not used in a MLAT calculation to derive its location. These aircraft messages were relevant when ADS-B and MLAT were less widely adopted, so we decided to include all aircraft types towards ADS-B Statistics Rankings at the time.
Why Change It?
With the widespread adoption of ADS-B and MLAT today, “Other” aircraft have become less useful for aircraft tracking. Messages that contribute to “Other” aircraft often include unreliable, low-quality data. We have also observed that certain ADS-B receiver settings can cause receivers to emit more data that we consider “Other” aircraft which skews the leaderboard results.
For these reasons, we have chosen not to consider them in your overall ranking going forward.
When Will the Change Happen?
Monday, April 7, 2025