Feature suggestion: Make it more visible when the data retrieved from Citybikes is outdated

[a3nm]

Hi,

At the moment, for the city of Lille, France, the Citybikes API seems to always return outdated data (timestamped to December 2024). I just reported this problem to them: eskerda/pybikes#779

Independently from this upstream problem, I was thinking it could be a useful feature of BikeSharingHub to make it clear to the user whenever this sort of problem happens, i.e., the availability data returned by Citybikes is outdated. Currently there is a "Last update:" at the bottom which indicates when the availability data was downloaded, but it is not easy to notice that the data retrieved only contains information from 2024, even if it was downloaded by BikeSharingHub recently. The freshness of the data can only be checked by looking at the details of a specific station, where an indication like "24 days ago" is displayed.

So my suggestion was: maybe the "Last update" indication could also show the most recent time which appears in the availability data downloaded from Citybikes? This way, if the data returned by the API about all stations is outdated (as is the case now), it will be possible to notice it.

I hope this suggestion is useful -- thanks a lot in any case for this great app!

[francoisfds]

Hello and thank you for the feedback !
I've experimented the same situation once, the entire network was outdated. I agree that it's not clear for the user.

The "timestamp" value in citybik.es is related to a station object so we could have situations with different timestamps. It will definitely be the case if the user chose 2 networks, but it could theoretically happen with a single network that only few stations are outdated. For this reason I would prefer to keep the "Last Update" as it is.

However, I think that the stations with a timestamp older than 5 minutes (or another value) might have a warning icon next to their name (both in the stations list and in the map). For more than 24 hours, the icon might be even different.

What do you think ?

[a3nm]

Hi @francoisfds, thanks for reacting. The info is per-station, so I understand it may be more obvious to indicate it per-station -- but maybe it's important that it is also visible on the map view (without looking at the station list, and without having to click on a specific station).

Essentially I think any availability which are more than say a few hours old (either because the data wasn't downloaded recently or because the downloaded data is old) should never be displayed in the map or in station lists, and should instead have some warning icon making the situation clear.

So yeah essentially what you are proposing sounds great -- thanks!

PS: the issue with Lille is now fixed (cf eskerda/pybikes#779) so I no longer have the specific need, but the situation might recur