Coverage and limitations

Every number on this page is measured from the record as it stands, not typed. Last checked 10 Oct 2026, 20:36 UTC.

What is watched

Docket Yard asks the Board's record search for new filings and decisions every thirty minutes, across every docket, and has done so continuously since 26 Aug 2026, 01:21 UTC. Environmental comments joined that watch later, and the date above measures the filings and decisions captures only. An entry the Board posts is usually on its sheet within the hour. The record has 53,704 filings, 19,880 decisions and 34,394 environmental comments, and holds 104,756 documents — the Board's own files, kept by their content hash so a replaced file is noticed; 121 files listed by the Board have not yet been fetched.

The record spans entries the Board dated from 25 Jan 1996 to 9 Oct 2026 — what the watch has caught since it began, plus the dated waves described below. Those are the Board's dates, quoted; the watch's own start is the timestamp above.

The docket registry

The registry of proceedings — 32,640 dockets — was walked in full from the Board's dockets table on 25 Aug 2026, one prefix at a time. Six prefixes the Board's search offers return nothing (ARB, ASC, DSO, RER, S5A, SUS); they are listed so that their absence here is not mistaken for a gap.

That walk is not repeated. Since it, the watch fills in what it misses: each pass asks the Board's dockets table about proceedings that hold records but no caption — at most 10 a pass, only those opened in the last 45 days, and no more than 8 times each, after which the silence is reported rather than asked about again. One row per request, so a proceeding that opened after the walk gains its caption without the registry being walked a second time.

What is not here

• History before 25 Jan 1996. Every month of filings and decisions from 1996-01 to the start of the watch has been walked; none is outstanding. The waves added 54,422 filings and 23,702 decisions, counted once per docket they were entered in (a filing entered in a docket and its sub-docket counts twice here and once on the statistics page). Before 25 Jan 1996 a sheet is not the docket's complete history and does not claim to be. Entries added by a wave never trigger an alert.
• The early years are thin because the Board's own table is. Filings this record holds, by the Board's year: 1996: 4 · 1997: 6 · 1998: 102 · 1999: 14 · 2000: 1,180 · 2001: 456 · 2002: 2,382. Those months were walked and the Board's search returns little for them, so a small number there is the source, not months still to come. Decisions reach further back than filings do.
• What crawlers are told. The sitemap lists every docket address — families and sub-dockets — every filing and decision, every party page, and every document the record holds at its hash; it is regenerated from the record as it moves.
• Environmental comments are walked separately, on their own ledger, and how far that walk has reached says nothing about the filings and decisions above. The earliest comment this record holds is dated 22 Sep 2000. A month neither the walk nor the watch has finished is recorded as unfinished rather than empty — the Board's search answers a month it has nothing for with the same envelope it answers a failed query with, so this record declines to call a month empty it has not probed, and months the Board's own comment table does not reach will stay on this list. Months not yet complete for comments: 1996-01 to 2000-08.
• Rail recordations, which the Board keeps in a separate table.
• Document text. Files are kept and linked. Text is read from inside them as passes run — the publisher's own text layer first, machine-read scans after — and shown page by page at each record's text address, labelled with who read it. Nothing derived from it is asserted. It is searched: a page found that way is shown with who read it and the scan one click away.
• The Board's activity outside its dockets — voting conferences, hearings and arguments as events, press releases and Federal Register notices. Where the Board enters a notice of one in a docket, that entry is held like any other.
• Anything the Board's search itself does not show. Its result tables display at most 10,000 rows per query and fail in ways that look like success; the pipeline asserts on every response that the filter it asked for was applied, and quarantines anything it cannot prove.

Outages

The limits above are by design and stated. An outage is different: a period when the watch was not keeping the record and entries were caught up late.

Entries the Board posted during a gap were caught up afterwards; any alert that carried them said so.