A node, and a site in front of it
OpenYacht is an open protocol for yacht brokerages to share listings directly between their own
servers. A server that speaks it is a node. This site sits in front of one:
the demo node at demo-node.openyacht.org, which any brokerage can partner
with.
Every page here is built from the listings that node has received from its partners. At the moment that is 154 listings from 1 brokerage. The site is rebuilt at least hourly from a single sweep of the node, and it stays up whether or not the node does.
Where a listing comes from
A partner brokerage publishes its listings on its own server. The demo node reads them,
checks the signature against the key the brokerage publishes at its
/.well-known/openyacht address, and keeps a copy. That copy is what you see, and
the brokerage can change or withdraw it at any time.
Each listing page shows this out loud: who listed it, which server it was served from, when this node received it, whether the signature verified, and when the brokerage last changed it. The View as received control opens the document itself, unedited. A brokerage that connects can therefore see its listings exactly as any partner receives them.
Straight through to the broker
The phone number and email address on a listing belong to the broker who holds it. This site has no contact form, collects no enquiries and passes nothing on. Call or write and you are talking to the brokerage, not to a site that will sell your name back to them.
What this site never does
- It never ranks, features, promotes, scores or rates a listing or a brokerage. Every list defaults to what changed most recently.
- It never presents a listing as its own. The brokerage is named on every card and every page.
- It never stands between broker and buyer.
- It never claims more than the node holds. Every figure on the site describes this node, not a market.
- It never keeps a copy a brokerage cannot withdraw. A withdrawn listing disappears at the next build.
Prices and units
Prices are shown as the brokerage published them, in the currency they chose. The smaller figure beneath is an indicative conversion at the European Central Bank's daily reference rate, dated on the search page, and only ever a guide. Lengths are metric on the wire; the header toggle shows them in feet.
Permissions the listing carries
Each listing arrives with its own usage terms, and the site honours them: attribution appears wherever the brokerage requires it, a listing that declines machine indexing is shown on its page but left out of every machine-readable artifact this site produces, and a photograph is used beyond the listing's own page only where the brokerage has permitted it.
The protocol
The specification, schemas and registries are public at openyacht.org. If you run a brokerage with its own listings system, connecting to this node is the quickest way to see the protocol working with your own inventory.