MushMate has counted your kilometres for a long time. It also knows how to compare them: a page ranks kennels by cumulative distance, per calendar year or all-time. It has existed for months.

The problem is that you had to know its address.

The defect, measured

Looking for the links that led to that page, we found exactly one in the whole application. It lived on the Chronos screen — itself filed under the "More" group, collapsed by default, invisible to a breeding-focused kennel and hidden from the vet and guide roles.

In other words: depending on your profile, there was no path at all. Not a difficult path — none.

The second link, the one on the dashboard, had gone the day before along with the "Trophies" card, which we had removed to declutter the home screen. The comment we left in the code said the leaderboard was still "reachable from Club". It wasn't true. Nobody had checked, because writing a reassuring sentence costs less than testing one.

What changes

A path. The Club tab now carries the link to the public leaderboard, in both of its states — whether or not your kennel belongs to a club. It is precisely the kennel with no club that had no other way of getting there.

And the word is typeable. On desktop, ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) opens quick search: typing "leaderboard" takes you straight there. It is a last-minute addition, and we owe it to a question — "where is the path, again?". The question was its own answer: the path existed, but the WORD was written nowhere in the navigation, and people look for a word before they look for a menu.

One single name. The page was called "Mileage leaderboard", the setting "Community leaderboard", and the help text asked you to turn on "Public leaderboard" in Settings — a label that existed nowhere. You were hunting for a word that wasn't written on any screen. All three now say the same thing, in all five languages.

Your kennel, where it belongs. At the top of the page: your rank, your kilometres, your sessions, your medal — and your row highlighted in the table. If your kennel isn't enrolled, the page says so and takes you to the switch, instead of leaving you to search for your name in a list it isn't in.

Your milestones have a date. "500 km passed on 8 Sept.", with a "New" chip while it is recent. Until now a medal changed colour in silence, between two screen openings: it had always been there since the last time you looked. That is why a trophy was never noticed.

What others see — and what they never will

If your kennel is enrolled in the public leaderboard, others see: its name, its region, its cumulative kilometres and its session count. That is all, and it is exactly what you see of them.

Never leaves your kennel: your dogs, their names, their weights, their body condition scores, their health records, your training plans, your GPS tracks, your rations, your notes, your tasks, your team messages.

One thing we did not state clearly enough, and should have: that switch does not govern this leaderboard alone. It also opens your per-route times on Chronos, and your dogs' race record when another kennel looks at a pedigree they appear in. The text under the switch says so now. It didn't before — it talked about "sprint & mid", which matched nothing.

We took the opportunity to fix another text that lied. The "Public profile" setting announced "otherwise no leaderboard". That was false: that setting has never had the slightest influence on the leaderboard. What it actually does is decide whether a track you publish carries your kennel's name or stays anonymous. That is what it says now.

What it does not do — and that is not "not yet"

Nothing appears on your home screen. No trophy card coming back, no "you passed 500 km" line in "To handle now". That is deliberate, and it is probably the most counter-intuitive decision in this batch: "To handle now" is a list of actions — weigh a dog, score a body condition, recompute a load. A list of actions containing an entry with nothing to do teaches you to stop reading the list. Passing a milestone isn't something you do: it's something you notice.

One question stays open, and we did not want to settle it alone: a milestone crossing is neither an action nor a state — it is a dated event. Possibly the only object that would legitimately belong on a home screen on those grounds. It is on the record, waiting for a decision — not for a workaround.

Nothing at the end of a run either. No notification, no congratulation banner when you put the sled away.

Mobile still has no path to the leaderboard. We held it back rather than forgot it: two other work streams are currently writing the same translation files, and our mobile validation chain cannot run until a tool version is aligned. Shipping mobile code nobody has watched run would be exactly the mistake our own rules forbid.

The page stays out of search engines. It is shared by link, it is not indexed. That choice does not change.

Two decisions taken against the obvious

We did not put the Trophies card back on the home screen, even though that is the obvious answer to "we can't see the trophies". Two reasons. First: we had just removed it, after two work streams spent unstacking that screen, and undoing on Wednesday what you did on Monday is not a decision, it's an oscillation. The second is more embarrassing — that card showed the same number twice. A kennel in its first season necessarily has "season" equal to "all-time": every newcomer saw two identical medals, one under the other. That defect was still alive on your dogs' profiles, where the same card is mounted. It is fixed where it lives, so in both places at once.

We did not store milestone dates in the database. The obvious move would have been a "last notified milestone" column. We compute it instead, by walking your sessions. Why: on release day, a fresh column would have announced a three-year-old milestone to every kennel, all at the same moment. A party for an anniversary nobody was expecting. The derived date, by contrast, is true retroactively and cannot drift out of sync with the mileage on screen.

The public leaderboard is switched on under Settings → My kennel → Public leaderboard. It is off by default, and it will stay that way: nobody appears without having decided to.