That is an outstanding idea.
I am going to implement it.
There is the issue of what to do if a record is subsequently edited or even deleted. One could deal with this by delaying the forum thread update for day 1 week (currently there is a 7 day edit window). However, if the forum thread update is just a one-liner saying a record on say EDMA has been created… then there is no problem.
Then somebody can put a Watch on that thread and get an email notification on each update.
Hi guys,
I filed a first Airport report about EHBD back in May, which is incomplete and inaccurate. I’d like to fix that, but there are no EDIT / DELETE buttons on this entry?
New entries created today for other airport do have these buttons.
How can we fix this? You may elect to remove the entry posted in May, in which case I’ll file a new one altogether.
Thanks,
Marcel
@Marcelgroos post moved to existing thread on the database.
There is a 1 week edit window but admins can extend this on request. I have just done that for that entry; you have until 22nd August to edit it.
I am writing the spec on the proposal above about updating a forum thread on each new entry in the airport database.
Any views on what it should look like?
Due to the much bigger challenge of dealing with subsequent edits, the entry will have to be just fairly basic information.
Peter wrote:
I am writing the spec on the proposal above about updating a forum thread on each new entry in the airport database.
You might want to consider making it an RSS feed.
I thought RSS died about 10 years ago 
I used it to get a feed from some forums and it was a nightmare to get it configured correctly. Each site formatted the data differently.
The basic idea is great though. However once we have an auto-updated thread here, anyone can set a Watch notification on it. Then you get plain old emails which “always work” (well you know what I mean).
As a “data point on enthusiasm” we had this a while ago – arguably a more modern way to do it – and the interest was as close to absolute zero as anybody has managed to get I also found the pushover notifications very unreliable on my phones.
Perhaps an even more modern way is notifications via Telegram, which is a really great app which just keeps getting better and better. However that will not work well for many because many people don’t know how to config notifications on their phone and when they get fed up with the thing beeping they uninstall the app…
Peter wrote:
However once we have an auto-updated thread here, anyone can set a Watch notification on it. Then you get plain old emails which “always work” (well you know what I mean).
Fair enough, however, the email notifications don’t contain the content of the post, only that a new post appeared. If you’d change that, it would make me happier :)
The issue there is as described above for the airport database new entry notifications: what do you do about edits? Once the original post has been notified to a load of people via RSS or whatever, you can’t apply subsequent edits. Could be quite embarrassing… Unless one delayed the notification for the duration of the edit window (2hrs for the forum, 1 week for the airports database). And then we still have the problem of admin edits etc. Posts are almost never admin-edited for “intended content” but quite often broken links and broken formatting are fixed up.
Well, a forum thread, you can always edit the forum post… Give the airports database some special privileged access to the forum (thread) that it can “always” edit its posts, in effect that it has an unlimited edit window.
In RSS, that would be a new RSS notification for each edit, which may be lived as “too much”. Or you just abandon, and give the people the original post… just like in a good old mailing list or usenet.
We now have an AIP button on the airports site. It gets the URLs from EAD and presents the URLs, so there is no possibility of storing obsolete PDFs etc.
Also EAD stores only the current stuff, whereas national AIP sites frequently carry obsolete AIP PDFs.
Maybe there is a case for going to one of the national AIP sites, for cases where (a) the country does not deliver to EAD and (b) the access is free. So obviously Germany can never be presented, for airports which have no IAPs.
The site will shortly be improved to make all airports listed in a search immediately clickable, not just ones with reports. That will give rapid access to the AIP (AIP AD and any Charts) where published by the respective country, weather, notams, and the location on a map. In the general case this will give the fastest access to this data, all in one place.
The Notam feature has also been enhanced to go to EAD first and if there is nothing there, go to NOAA. EAD normally works for Europe – as it damn well ought to! – but there have been some bizzare cases where EAD delivers nothing but NOAA has got it – ETMN was one such yesterday.
