I don’t know if anyone’s reading the feedback here anymore, but I hope they do before the World Hub reopens again.
One of the World Hub airports I did was CYNJ. It was published in July 2024, and actually, my primary reason for doing that airport was to fix a bug where the airport had two towers. And I actually got the bug report resolved in the forums by talking to one of the Community Managers. (When the World Hub reopens, there needs to be a better way to do this.) Note the location of the tower in the closing post:
Here is that same tower today, post-World Hub closure:
Clearly, something or someone changed it. Now, if someone changed it, then there’s not much point in discussing it, here: They obviously made a mistake and should be ashamed of themselves for doing something this silly. But if something changed it, that’s worth discussing. I’m sure that the algorithm for airport object placement is complex, and AI-based. A few thoughts come to mind:
- The placement algorithm should never place objects on top of taxiway paths or runways, period. (This goes for the occasional shed, too, that the algorithm places on runways when it mistakes runway paint for a building.)
- The placement algorithm should give some weight to airports and objects that were touched by the World Hub. This does not mean that if a human placed it in the World Hub that it’s 100% correct (scenario 1: someone could update an airport, and then the airport actually does move the tower and no one fixes it in the World Hub, or scenario 2: someone is careless and they really don’t place it in the correct place, and the moderator doesn’t catch the mistake). But, I do think that if the algorithm has some threshold of doubt about where that object goes, they might want to defer to the human that placed it there. The weighting of the object placement could be related to how long ago a human touched it, too.
- Once we get back into the World Hub, we should be able to see the edit history, showing who or what made this change. Clearly, it was changed, and it wasn’t done in the World Hub. But seeing outside changes is every bit as important as World Hub changes, so we have a full understanding of what happened.