Trailforks Hits 3 Big Milestones & Updates on New Features, Including Multi-Activity Support
We were hard at work in 2019 improving Trailforks with new features and refinements along with fixing many bugs. While we spend a lot of development time fixing bugs, tweaking backend systems to be more efficient, optimizing database and other boring stuff, we have also continued to add a lot of new features. Some for everyday riders , and others for backend trail association use.
Here is a list of some of the changes we've made in 2019. But first, three big milestones we've hit.
Milestones
1. Trailforks in September passed 200,000 trails mapped, with 60,000 added in 2019 alone!
How many MTB trails are there in the world? We hope to find out! Instead of starting to plateau or slow down, the number of trails added monthly is increasing!
2. The second big milestone is Trailforks passed its 5 year Pinkbike launch anniversary.
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3. The third milestone is we passed 1.5 million app downloads in September!
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Website
• Maps switched from Google to Mapbox with a ton of new functionality.
This article details the many new map functions.
Activity Types
• It's not a big secret that Trailforks is expanding to accommodate a wide range of trail activity types outside our primary mountain bike focus. This has long been requested by users from other activities and from trail associations that manage trails for multiple user groups.
We have decided to go the path of one app to rule them all, rather than creating separate apps for each separate activity. As many users switch often between activities and there is value from a navigation and mapping perspective in seeing other activities trails. Also the name "Trailforks" is a neutral name, nothing that limits it to just mountain biking.
For the foreseeable future mountain biking will still be the main focus and some of the features will only work with mountain biking in mind. But this past winter we've tried to change much of our database, codebase and UI to accommodate trails and users from other activity types. And have been tweaking and improving the multi-activity support all of 2019 as local admins and new user groups start to add their trail data.
We have a big task ahead, mapping the trails for other sports! We want to have a decent amount of hiking, moto, and ski trails mapped before we release the new functionality fully to the public. So we need the help of locals and our awesome Trailforks contributors to map their local non-biking trails and to edit the existing trails adding info about what other activities a trail supports.
• New welcome homepage that first-time visitors see. Also a Why Contribute to Trailforks page for users from different activity types.
• Starting October 17, we are detecting other people you rode with for ridelogs. We also detect other athletes that rode similar rides during the same time you did. Both these help with a new suggested friends to follow feature.
Click to reveal others that rode during the same time. There is a profile setting to opt-out of ridelog matching.
You can still manually tag friends you rode with, but now this is made easier with the matching.
On your profile settings page there is a link to the new find friends tool.
• The ridelog badge system was expanded this year, in the spring we generated thousands of generic badges for regions around the world. So you can earn various badges in each region. Local admins can also create their own custom badges. One of the most fun generic badges is the "Completionist" series, where you have to ride every trail in an area to complete.
• A special badge for donating Trail Karma was created.
• More pages that linked to Pinkbike are being transferred to Trailforks itself, this includes your profile settings pages.
• The Trailforks login and register pages are also now on Trailforks itself rather than Pinkbike.
• New video page on Trailforks, rather than linked to Pinkbike video pages.
• Better Pinkbike article linking to regions and trails using the new Pinkbike news tags system.
• Trail merging tool (demo).
• Detailed admin audit log, can be viewed by specific region or trail.
• Save default map home location on Nearby page.
• Admin tool to bulk edit a regions trails activity type data.
• Admin tool to bulk edit trails closure settings.
• New POI types added.
• Custom land owner polygon data moved from deprecated Google Fusion tables to our own Postgres database. Region admins can send us local land owner polygon data that we can include in this map layer.
• Share popup for routes & trails with new QR Code option.
• Summary of recent ride data for a trail, can let you know if people are still riding a trail and if it's worth checking out.
• Contours option for satellite basemap.
• Tool helping users rate trails they've ridden. This page lists trails you've ridden, based on ridelog data. You then can 5-star rate the trails from here.
https://www.trailforks.com/contribute/trailrating/
• Embeddable widgets converted to use Mapbox.
• More personal ridelog statistics.
• New global search page.
• Fix issue with photos with gps data not showing on the map.
• Admin option to view region bounding boxes & routing areas.
• New routes block on regions page.
• "My Rides" tab on region & trail ridelogs page. To view your rides in that region or for a specific trail.
• New basemap layers for 3D Maps.
• Dimension data for TTF POIs.
• New trail fields for adaptive mountain bikers.
• Gravel grinder routes page.
• QR Code generator tool.
• Top riders in region page with new year and activity type filters.
• Information block indicating your ridelogs in the import queue.
• If you disconnect Strava, we now warn that your data will be deleted unless you choose to keep it.
• Right click map to view elevation and a link to share a marker of that spot.
• Map option to show which trails need more contributions. Help add detail to the map!
• Charts for trail work reports. Track which areas and which users have logged the most trail work.
PLUS:
• Add multi-activity support to print map tool.
• Better duplicate ridelog detection.
• Switch admin email notifications to use user subscribe system.
• Re-submit rejected content. Change reject vote.
• Show proper trail association for region & trails based on users current activity type.
• Trail restricted access field.
• Trail reference number field, shown in trail title.
• Increase Strava ride import efficiency
• Improve elevation data and graphs, smooth & clean data. Running internal elevation service.
App
• Show grade on elevation graph.
Here we represent the grade data with different colors and different height bars. The color and height of the grade bars are directly proportional to the absolute grade. The grade bars can extend above or below to represent if this is an uphill or downhill section of trail.
• New My Ridelogs page to browse your past rides and rides from people you follow.
• New ridelog detail page.
• Edit ridelog details in-app.
• Trails wishlist moved to main menu along with wishlisted routes & regions as "My Wishlist".
• Auto-select nearby trail on add report and add photo forms if trail selection is empty and photo exif has GPS data.
• New share modal with QR Code sharing
• App notifications for trail reports you subscribe too.
PLUS:
• Upgrade to newer Android SDK with on-demand app permissions.
• Different trail difficulty, popularity & trail association per activity type.
• View past events.
• New POI types.
Infrastructure
• We finally updated some old legacy code so we could update to PHP 7, which offers much performance improvements.
• We are in the process of upgrading many of our servers and adding more capacity.
Improved latency to less than 20ms page generation times
• Long-time staff member Brent Hillier stepped away this September to pursue his outdoor education career. We want to thank Brent for his years of devotion to the Trailforks project. Helping it grow and reach more people while hearing the concerns of trail associations.
• We've added a new staff member, Mark Holloway who was previously an ambassador and active contributor. He is helping us communicate with trail associations, manage content and respond to email support.
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Author Info:
Must Read This Week
Actually the reason I'm here is coz I'm a wannabe bike nerd and the writing is generally pretty good, which isn't very common. So kudos to PB and its contributors.
One feature request: when I build a route, I wish there was a way for the system to recognize an obvious connections along roads. Currently it sends you all over the place!
Example: www.trailforks.com/trails/supersonic/tour
But I would REALLY like to see an Apple Watch version - while it is less important for my local trails, when I’m visiting somewhere, I hate stopping to pull out my phone at trail junctions. I just can’t justify a standalone garmin to strap to my bar, so would be awesome to just glance at my wrist.
(And what is up with people downvoting Apple Watch requests?? )
Edit: Crap - looks like I only had a trial period on LandGlide! Bummer. There is one called Hunting Points on IOS that is free though.
Further to that, your quote "Trailforks is also much easier to show these parcels than iMapBC." is what we fear when people use the layer in a map. The idea of something easy doesn't necessarily mean it is correct.
Please see the quote from the LTSA website for ParcelMap (the eventual authoritative source when CADASTRE is retired):
"ParcelMap BC is a regularly-updated research tool, intended to facilitate searching parcels of land in the province using a representative online map as a precursor to the standard practice of confirmation with authoritative sources and conducting due diligence through a professional consultation."
help.ltsa.ca/parcelmap-bc
As I mentioned, the best recourse is to take the data off the map which puts the onus back to the user to make sure they do their own due diligence when determining surface ownership.
Quite frankly, land ownership information is quite possibly the most difficult data to collect and interpret. Issues with positional accuracy and attribution are one thing, but getting the data is yet another thing. GeoBC and LTSA work with all levels of government to attempt to retrieve the data. Historically, the province didn't collect the data in all areas. ParcelMap BC is the first attempt to do so, and that only started a couple years ago. The data is only as good as the organization that has collected it. So, for example, let's say Squamish just started to collect the data in 2010, but they only had enough funding to collect newly submitted plans, then they may not have collected older existing plans. Also, methodology on how each organization collected their data can vary widely. Maybe they lost their funding and haven't updated the data in a couple years, so when the ParcelMap BC folks came and asked for the data, there may have been a lot of missing or erroneous data. They only tried and true way to be confident is LTSA research.
I am only touching on just some of the many issues facing the spatial representation that ParcelMap BC provides.
So, in practice, I generally wouldn't put the data on a map for someone who will use it and assume it is correct. When they ask "how do I know who owns the land", I send them to the LTSA and wash my hands of it all. That is the best legal approach. Again, I don't want to assume the responsibility (or the cost) of doing the work where a service is set up to provide it. I use the data, but I am not the owner of the data.
If it is imperative that the data is on the map, it should contain a usage statement of some kind to indicate that it is the users responsibility to make sure they understand who owns the land before entering it.
Mark & Trevor do an amazing job with the support side, especially with all the silly questions we keep asking in the Trailforks Admin/Ambassador forums.
Oh and good luck to Brent with his next adventures!
Also, why are you using local servers!? What a nightmare (as is php5)
The real friday fails
PS: I'm in charge of aprox 100 database servers across several regions, 42 of them on-prem on different data-centers, the rest a mix of EC2 & different flavours of RDS, with +50TB of data moving around on a daily basis (backups, client data, DR, etc, etc)
We do it this way because it's what we know, it's WAY cheaper, and it's WAY faster than the cloud.
We've found we could build more performant servers and for cheaper than the best that cloud offerings like AWS can offer. We do use CDNs though.
@radek Thats really cheaper than something you could set up on AWS? Thats surprising.
1. You start recording in the trailforks app and stop when you are done.
2. It will figure out your ride length, climb, time, etc
3. It will process what trails you rode and give you a time and stats on how you rode each trail
4. It will determine if you reached any achievements or badges and will award those.
5. If you choose you can have your ride sent to strava where strava will process your ride for their segments.
Love Trailforks and use it all the time, it's the best thing to happen to mountain biking since the dropper post. Keep up the good work!
This would be moot if LastPass gave you the ability to link logins, but I don't think that's an option.
One thing on my wishlist would be the ability to do a "regional conditions report".
For instance- I rode Paskapoo Slopes in Calgary yesterday, on a route taking in probably 15 different trails. Rather than selecting a handful (or all!) for a bulk trail report, why not have a regional option as well, for use where conditions are common throughout a trail network.
Also- yesterday the trails were a mix of "snow packed", and "melt freeze cycle"- it would be nice to be able to select a couple of descriptors rather than just one.
Finally- there is often a big discrepancy between the elevation gain/loss that GAIA shows on my iPhone, versus what is shown on TF should I upload a route. TF always indicates much more in cumulative elevation- (good for the ego!) but in some cases at least, I can say that TF is definitely overstating it.
Keep up the great work!
What's up with the app making requests to google and facebook? They don't really need to collect more data on me.
question/request when will breweries and restaurants be added as a POI so we can tag our FAV post ride places?
Well they are their, but not the location?
I'm the Trailforks admin for your area. If you need any help on getting your trails on the system, please feel free to give me a shout.
Managed to put it up on there, but do not own a smart phone or take one riding with me!
Will every one be happy when surgical implanted phones are a thing?
And also here: What is a Regional Admin? www.trailforks.com/help/view/64
"The expectations of a regional admin are they will oversee the content confirmation, quality and curation for their region. We much rather have locals doing this rather than Trailforks staff, as a local knows their area and politics better. Regional admins are usually members of the local trail association board of directors. But the system will work regardless of how active a regional admin chooses to be, it might just mean updates and new content take longer to be approved and could result in some bad data falling through the cracks. But that’s the power of a crowd-sourced wiki like database, any missing, incorrect or sensitive data can be revised by anyone."