It's time to archive/expire old data
Posted: Tue Mar 22, 2016 7:16 am
In general, even the most conservative, tech-averse household will have their access point replaced every five years or so, usually by the ISP. More tech-friendly households will update every 2-3 years, yet the Wigle map puts everything from today to 15 years ago on equal footing.
I just did a survey of my entire neighborhood, which turned out great, and visually compared my findings with the map limited to 2001-2012; I couldn't find a single SSID in common. Almost everything from then is just gone. Yet one of the annoying things is that quite a few of these old access points are shown in green, as high-quality data, some of which haven't been seen since 2005. (I found a grand total of one "linksys" and two "NETGEAR" compared to the dozens of each shown before.) Aside from simply expiring, it seems like access points that haven't been seen in years should fade to red, and then fade out entirely, if they aren't seen anymore. At the very least, restrict the date slider to begin last year or the year before, so that only current data is shown by default, leaving historical data available for perusal.
Obviously, performance isn't a problem; the site is amazingly fast even with all historical data shown. This is really more of a usability thing.
I just did a survey of my entire neighborhood, which turned out great, and visually compared my findings with the map limited to 2001-2012; I couldn't find a single SSID in common. Almost everything from then is just gone. Yet one of the annoying things is that quite a few of these old access points are shown in green, as high-quality data, some of which haven't been seen since 2005. (I found a grand total of one "linksys" and two "NETGEAR" compared to the dozens of each shown before.) Aside from simply expiring, it seems like access points that haven't been seen in years should fade to red, and then fade out entirely, if they aren't seen anymore. At the very least, restrict the date slider to begin last year or the year before, so that only current data is shown by default, leaving historical data available for perusal.
Obviously, performance isn't a problem; the site is amazingly fast even with all historical data shown. This is really more of a usability thing.