From the website, an outing can be published: the trace page offers "Publish", then "Copy public link". Whoever receives that link needs no account. Until now they saw a map, the surface and the kennel's name. That was all: no distance, no time. And pasted into WhatsApp, the link showed nothing at all.
There was worse, and that is where this change starts. An outing almost always leaves from the kennel, and the kennel is your home. So the first and last points of a published trace told anyone with the link where you live.
What the person with the link sees
- The whole outing's figures: distance, moving time, average speed, elevation gain. A figure MushMate does not know is written "—", never 0.
- The day of the outing, and the kennel's name if its profile is public (Settings › "Public profile", as before).
- The map, without its first and last 500 m, with a sentence under the map that says so.
- An image, when the link is pasted into WhatsApp, Messenger, Slack or a social network: the route, the kennel, the day, the surface and the four figures.
What they never see
- The first 500 m and the last 500 m of the route. They are cut inside the database itself, before anything leaves the server. The link therefore cannot bring them back, even by digging through the page.
- Your older published traces are no exception: the cut also applies to everything published before today. There is nothing to republish.
- An outing under 1,000 m has no map at all, since once both ends are cut there is nothing left to draw. The page says so and keeps the figures.
- An outing imported from Strava is never public. That was already the case; the rule is now written where the figures become visible.
- The dogs on the team do not appear on the public page.
What it does not do
- Hide a stretch near the kennel in the middle of a loop. The cut follows the route: it removes the first and last 500 m travelled, not a circle around your house. If your loop comes back near home at kilometre 8, that stretch stays visible.
- Let you set the distance that is cut. It is 500 m for everyone.
- Publish from the phone. Publishing stays a website gesture, for the kennel owner only, and "Public traces" must first be turned on in Settings.
- Put the trace in search engines. The link is for sharing, not for indexing.
Three choices made against the obvious
Cutting along the route rather than around the kennel. The reflex would have been a circle around the kennel's address. But that circle protects nothing when the kennel's position is not filled in. And for outings that leave from a trailhead car park, the circle hides nothing useful. Cutting both ends of every trace works for everyone, with nothing to set. It has a cost, written just above: a stretch near your home in the middle of a loop stays visible.
Cutting in the database, not in the page. Hiding both ends on screen would have been simpler. But a public page is only one way of reading the data. The server no longer gives the full route to anyone.
Showing the whole outing's figures. The map is shorter than the outing: we could have shown the distance of what is drawn. We kept the real distance, because that is the outing you ran and the figures do not say where you live. The sentence under the map says why the two do not match.