Maintaining a hike

Whoever builds a hike maintains it. Maintaining means keeping it true: reading the suggestions walkers send, fixing what has drifted, and publishing the fix.

Creator and maintainer are two different things. The person who created a hike is recorded permanently and never changes, even if the hike later passes to someone else. Maintainership is a job, and jobs can move. The one exception is a draft that an administrator built for a partner and hands over before it was ever published. The partner becomes its creator and its maintainer, and the draft stays unpublished until they publish it.

A hike can also be credited to one of its creator's organizations. The hike page then says "Created by" the organization, and the creator is named as the person who posted it.

Your responsibilities

• Read suggestions people raise, and respond — accepting, declining or applying them all count as responding. Silence is the only thing that does not.
• Keep the route walkable and the descriptions accurate.
• Look at the low-score reasons on your ratings page. "3 said bad routing" is worth more than any single review.

Suggestions and Ratings appear at the top of My Hikes once one of your hikes has been published, since both come from people who walked it.

Suggestions are separate from reports. A suggestion proposes a change to the route or its description, and it's yours to accept, decline or apply. A report flags a hike for an administrator to review, in its own queue.

Your hike's reach

Once a hike is published, the Review step in the builder shows Your hike's reach: how many times the hike has been used, for this year, all time, and each of the last twelve months.

• Page views are full loads of the hike page. Switching tabs on the page, reloading part of it, and previews don't add to it.
• Trail mode starts are the times someone pressed Start in trail mode.
• Kit downloads and GPX downloads count each time the field kit or the GPX file is downloaded.
• Completions logged are the walks members marked as finished, counted by the month they finished.

Your own visits, and visits by search engines and other automatic readers, are left out. These are totals only: we don't record who visited, and counting began on the date shown on the card. A hike with nothing counted yet says so.

A draft handed to you

Sometimes an administrator builds a draft for you, such as a walking tour for a historical society, and offers it to your account. The offer shows on your Transfers page with the hike's title and who is offering it, and expires after the same number of days as a maintainership offer. You can accept or decline. If you accept, the draft is yours: you are its creator and maintainer, everything on it comes with it (route, stops, stories, quiz and photos), and you can remove or change any of it before you publish. Nobody else can see it until you press Publish, and you agree to the current terms and license for your content at that point. Photos the administrator uploaded keep crediting the person who took or uploaded them.

Handing it on

You can offer maintainership to another member from My Hikes: choose Transfer on the hike's row and enter their username. The Transfer button appears once the hike has been published, and stays while an offer is out so you can cancel it from the same page. Maintainership moves the moment they accept — this is between the two of you, and no admin has to approve it. Your credit as creator stays exactly where it is, and everything on the hike — description, waypoints, its photos — goes with it; there's nothing to separately hand over. The new maintainer can take a photo off the hike's draft, which takes it off the public page when they next publish; a photo taken off is kept with the account that uploaded it, and only that account can add it to a hike again from their photos. While a photo you put on a hike is there and someone else maintains that hike, you can't delete it: it stays with that hike. See Privacy and what we store for what that means if you later close your account.

You are both told. The person you offer it to gets an email right away, so they don't have to happen to visit their transfers page to find out. Once they respond — or you withdraw the offer first — you get an email back with the outcome.

Unlike adoption below, handing off maintainership needs no admin approval. A hike with no maintainer can't be handed on, because there's no one to hand it on from; it can be adopted instead.

If you go quiet

If a maintainer goes quiet, a hike can move to a new one through a series of steps:

1. A year with no sign of you, or 90 days of ignoring genuine suggestions from more than one person, moves the hike to at risk. You are told, and any sign you're still here clears it: editing the hike, responding to a suggestion, or pressing I'm still maintaining this — the button appears on that hike's row in My Hikes and on its edit screen for as long as the hike is at risk.
2. If the grace period passes with no response, the hike becomes adoptable — another member can ask to take over maintaining it. The same button, in the same two places, still brings it back to you.
3. Adoption is never automatic: an administrator reviews and approves every request before a hike changes hands this way. Offering maintainership to someone directly, described above, is different — it moves the moment they accept, with no admin step in between.

While an at-risk hike is showing that button, pressing I'm still maintaining this also resets any other suggestions that were separately building toward their own 90-day trigger, the same way responding to each one would — you're vouching for the hike as a whole, not one suggestion at a time. It doesn't reach into suggestions filed afterward; those still count once they go unanswered long enough.

Spam does not count toward any of this: suggestions an admin has hidden apply no pressure at all, and neither does a suggestion from an account that was too new when it was filed — that suggestion never gains standing, even once the account has aged.

Even after a hike is adopted, you remain its creator, permanently.

You stay on the record

Handing a hike on is not the same as losing it. The hike page keeps a permanent list of everyone who has maintained it — not just whoever holds it today. Once your name is on that list, nothing removes it: not a transfer you chose, not an adoption after you went quiet. That is true whether you are still a member or not.