Back to Support / Building a hike
How drafts, publishing and version history work together.
Preview in the builder's header opens your hike in a new tab exactly as visitors will see it, with your latest edits saved first. It's there from the moment you create a hike, and on a published hike whenever your draft has changes that aren't live yet. Only you can see a preview. To show a draft to someone without an account, make a private preview link.
Everything you edit is a draft. Visitors keep seeing the last version you published until you publish again: its text, stops, photos and their captions, its hero photo, and its address. Renaming a hike, or moving it to another place, changes its web address when you publish; the old address keeps working. A blue ribbon appears in the builder once your draft differs from what is public, with two links:
Setting, moving or removing the trail start or trail end, connecting the path to them, their switches, and getting back are draft changes like any other: visitors see them once you publish.
Once a hike has been published, Version history sits in the header above, next to View live and Unpublish, not only in the ribbon. It shows how many versions you've published, whether or not the current draft has moved past them.
Some tools only make sense once a hike has been public, so they appear only then: the blue ribbon, See exactly what will change and Version history in the builder, and Transfer beside the hike in My Hikes. Suggestions and Ratings appear in My Hikes once you maintain at least one hike that has been published.
Publishing takes a snapshot of the whole hike — text, stops, photos, quiz answers — and points the public at it. You can label a version when you publish ("Rerouted around the bridge closure"), which makes the history readable later. The hike's tags, like 5-miler or Has Quiz, are worked out again from what you publish; edits you haven't published don't change them (see Finding a hike).
The first time you publish a hike, the publish window asks Publish as: yourself, or one of your organizations. This decides who the hike page credits as its creator. The choice is fixed once the hike is published; before that, you can also change it on the Review & publish step. Later publishes don't ask. If the credit needs to change after that, contact us.
People see your hike as the full interactive page. Search engines and other tools that don't run scripts get a plain-text copy of the same published page: its title, place and facts, the trail start and trail end, each stop's name with the opening of its story, and links to trail mode, the printable kit and the GPX file. It is rebuilt each time you publish, roll back or unpublish, and checked again every night. It only ever reflects what is published, never your draft.
The page's title, the short description under it in search results, and the preview card shown when someone shares your hike's link are all worked out for you from the published hike: its city, distance, number of stops, difficulty and time. The description only mentions what the hike has, so a quiz is listed only when it has quiz questions. The card's picture is your hero photo, cropped to a wide banner; a hike with no hero photo shows the site's own card instead.
Search engines also get the hike as structured data: where the trail starts, the stops in order, that it is free, when it was first published and last updated, and a link back to the site and the license. The hike's city and state each get a page listing the hikes there, so a hike you publish with a city is added to that city's page (and to the sitemap) automatically.
AI assistants can read a single text file at /llms.txt. It lists every
published hike by place, with its distance, number of stops and difficulty,
and it reminds assistants that a hike has a printable kit, a GPX file and an
offline trail mode. It updates when a hike is published, changed or taken
down.
The Review & publish step keeps two lists.
Needed to publish is the only thing that can stop a publish. A hike needs:
Each missing item has a Go to button that takes you to the step where you add it. This is checked every time you publish, including a republish. A hike that's already live with fewer than three stops stays live, but it needs a third stop before you can publish it again.
Hike completeness is a score out of 100 for everything else that makes a hike better to follow: a hero photo, a short summary, a story at every stop, photos at half of them or more, a quiz question, a history introduction, planning notes, and a path shaped to the real way to walk. The path item counts once your stops are joined by at least one leg. A meter shows the score, and each item still to do has a Go to link. None of it is required. Publish whenever the hike is ready for you.
A hike published without a summary still gets a line on its card, in search results and in link previews: a short automatic one naming its place and how many stops it has, such as "A historic walk in Savannah, Georgia with 5 stops." The place is the hike's city, usually with its state or province; a hike with no city reads "A historic walk with 5 stops." Write a summary on the Marketing step and it takes that line's place.
The Publish button sits in the builder's header, so it's one click away from any step, both for a hike that has never been published and for a published hike whose draft has changes. It's also at the bottom of Review & publish. Until the hike has everything under Needed to publish, the button is turned off and a short note beside it says what's missing.
A published hike with no changes since its last publish has nothing new to send out, so the header shows no Publish button and Review & publish says your hike is live and up to date. Make a change and Publish comes back.
Publishing is limited per account, across all of your hikes, not per hike. During its first 7 days, an account can publish 3 times a day. After that, it can publish 10 times an hour. Review & publish shows which limit applies to you.
When you have one publish left, a banner on Review & publish says so and tells you when the limit resets. Once you've used them all, the Publish button is turned off until then, and the page tells you when you can publish again.
Restore to draft brings an old version's content back into your draft, where you can look at it and change your mind before publishing. It never touches what the public sees, and your current draft is snapshotted first — so restoring can never destroy work you did since that version, including photos you added since: restoring never removes a newer photo to make a stop match the old version exactly. Newer photos stay, after that version's own.
Restoring puts back the photos that version shows: a photo you've taken off a stop or off the hike since goes back where the version had it, in the version's order and with its caption, and so does its hero photo. Restoring the version that's live is how you undo changes to your draft. A photo that can't go back — one that's been deleted, one under review after a report, or one with no room left under the limits — stays off, and you're told which stop it was on. A photo a site administrator has taken off your hike is gone from all of its versions too, so no restore brings it back.
A hike's souvenir, if it has one, is arranged by the site rather than by the person who wrote the hike, so restoring a version never changes it.
You can unpublish your own hike, which removes it from the directory and from search. It is not deleted and can be published again.
Delete is on each hike's row in My Hikes, and in the builder header next to Unpublish — you can remove one you no longer want. Because this can't be undone from the builder, a box asks you to type the word delete before the Delete hike button turns on.
A published hike can't be deleted directly — the button stays visible but disabled. Unpublish it first, so it stops appearing to hikers before it stops existing at all, then delete it. This guard always applies.
A hike that's under review — for example while an administrative hold is in place — also can't be deleted. The button stays visible with a note that the hike is under review; contact us if you have questions. This guard applies until the review is resolved.
Deleting takes the hike out of your list, the public directory, and the sitemap immediately. Its route history and ratings go with it. Its photos come off the hike but aren't deleted: each one is kept with the account that uploaded it, ready to use on another hike (see Photos and licensing). This is not the same as unpublishing, and there is no self-service way to bring a deleted hike back. It isn't erased, though: contact us if you need it restored.