Without cheating the staff wouldn’t need to do anything. So the root cause is the fake feeder. But it need to be stopped by the site owner, or at least make it useless if the sender continues to cheat
And it seem to be a returning issue from some years ago:
The lack of action by the FlightAware Staff is sad. If they do not care about quality data, why should any of us? Maybe we should all corrupt our settings to boost the “Other” reports. Sad state of affairs. Maybe the owners of FlightAware have directed the system should operate this way. I used to care about providing accurate reliable data. Seems like FlightAware does not care at all. FlightAware can and should do better.
The time has come. We will be addressing this issue in the April ADS-B newsletter next week and deploy an update to the Leaderboard shortly after.
Thank you Eric, looking forward to it.
The ongoing failure of Flightaware to fix the obvious flaws in the “Other” situation leads me to believe this is on purpose. Who’s sons or nephews of the Flightaware officers or of the parent company officers are in the so-called top positions?
This is not rocket science, just a few code changes. I already did my rocket science work while in the USAF. Asking for all of us…
Very few feeder are in top 10 ranking, and majority are neither in top 10, nor they bother for ranking.
Cool down and dont spoil your health by increasing your blood pressure for “ranking”.
Eric announced that they were changing it shortly two posts above yours, and the newsletter that’s just come out provides details - ‘Other’ aircraft will be removed from the calculation of rankings from next Monday.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Monday, April 7, 2025
I suspect that Jeffry70’s enormous “other” count is the product of an inadvertent misconfiguration that they haven’t been motivated to resolve, rather than a deliberate effort to game the system.
I wasn’t interested in competing for ranking when I got started in this hobby. But as I find myself floating on the “top 200” bubble for this site, I’m interested to see how things shake out in the post-“other” era.
No worries on the blood pressure here. Just wanted to add a nudge to improving how we can compare our site performance to others around the system. Having coded since1966 in way too many different languages and hardware, unfixed code is an annoyance. Thanks to all the posters above, you people are the reason many of us keep our systems operating.
I’ve been the top station outside the USA for a long time and am really keen to see how things play out when this change comes in on Monday.
It’s just levelling the playing field and I’m pleased that after years of asking for this, we’re finally getting it.
Almost two million planes more through inadvertent misconfiguration? Not impossible, but I personally find that hard to believe… 
It will be very interesting to see, come Monday, how many of those receivers with the huge ‘other’ counts, suddenly don’t have them any more.
The count will stay it will just not be counted towards the ranking.
At least that’s my reading of the statements.
Oh you mean people changing their settings.
I guess …
Yup, exactly, so it will be very easy to see if they suddenly drop down, now that they no longer mean anything 
Depending on how FA configures it, the “other” will likely remain in the stats without counting and any meaning, but the ranking will drop immediately to a number which fits to their ADS-B/MLAT volume.
So they will disappear in the middle of the stats nowhere
Not sure if many will change the config immediately. There are many feeders which aren’t touched obviously by the owners for months, so they need to first notice that they are not on top position any longer
They might not even be aware of it or that it’s abnormal. I expect some people set up receivers after a cursory glance through the documentation and end up with it not properly configured. You can easily get what is effectively a random number generator if you have it set incorrectly - the mode-s preamble is very simple, so by passing anything that looks vaguely like it to a decoder and uploading the results you can have thousands of messages per second, the majority of which are completely worthless but look superficially like valid messages. Looking at the highest positioned receivers, that’s almost certainly what’s happening.
Getting rid of counting ‘other’ aircraft is one way to remove that sort of noise from the stats, but a more comprehensive way would be to do some cursory checking at the point of uploading - checking against a known good list of aircraft prior to sending would eliminate the vast majority of them. Such a list could be self maintaining by building it from only aircraft received by multiple receivers over a period of time.
It might not be worth the dev time however, since FlightAware will obviously do some form of filtering on uploaded data before it’s aggregated into their system already and that might well be sufficient.
They did show up earlier in this thread-- something along the lines of “nah it’s legit, I’m just in a high traffic area”. But didn’t follow up on comments calling out the absurdity of the numbers reported or offers to help troubleshoot.
If you look at the “Other” positions per day, they are pretty constant compared to e.g. the ADS-B messages.
It is different on the second site, though.
Edit: Okay, if you use an airspy, you have quite a few options you can set and inadvertently get wrong.
When I raised it in here, one of the people in question came in and posted and tried to justify it by telling me he’s in a good location and that one shouldn’t judge. As if I don’t know how good a location can be 
We all know how easy it is to fiddle the stats like that but come tomorrow, I’m looking forward to a proper leaderboard.
