Trailforks 2023 Development Updates
Words: Trailforks Trevor
Disclosure: Trailforks is Pinkbike's sister company and also owned by Outside Inc.
We've been hard at work in 2023 improving Trailforks with new features and refinements along with bug fixes. While we spend a lot of development time maintaining the platform, tweaking backend systems to be more efficient, optimizing database and other boring stuff, we have also continued to add a lot of new features. Many of these features are for everyday users, while others are built specifically for trail associations.
Here is a list of some of the changes we've made in 2023. But first, three big milestones Trailforks recently hit.
650,000 trails mapped
3,000,000 trail reports added
60,000,000 Ridelogs recorded
We have expanded our internal curation team which added 40,000 new trails. Contributing to the 102,000 total new trails added in 2023.
Website Updates
• 3D Maps on the website and app. View the trails, routes and all map layers in 3D.
• New website search - Better & faster search, with our unique search UI, provides a great overview of results with filtering options. Search is geo-location aware, showing you nearby results or results in the context of the current map. The result: more relevant content in the search results.
• Summit Tracker - Whether you’re on a mission to tag all 58 of Colorado’s 14,000 foot peaks, ski all the summits in your state, or tally how many times you ride your local hill, you can now keep count with the Trailforks summit Tracker.
To track summits, simply record your ride, backcountry ski tour, or adventure of choice in the Trailforks app (or on linked Garmin device). We’ll document all your summits, show how you stack up against others, and unearth new places to explore.
• Major Activity Feed improvements - A new personalized "following" feed. Follow friends, regions & trails. Many new feed items added along with new features like "high five" and share to followers. Also a new notification system to keep track of updates.
The new notifications system is much better than the old dashboard, has many more types of notifications and has a drop-down pane when clicked.
Of note, there are now new notifications for most all content related actions: issue status changes, issues assigned, content approval, content rejected, content rejected notes.
The Activity Feeds are also now viewable in the Android app for the first time. This is brand new and still under development.
• Trail Reports Map feature to visually pan around the map and view recent trail reports & conditions within the map view.
• Fullscreen Map improvements - When any map is made fullscreen, the search button will always be available and all searching will provide search results based upon the current viewable map. Clicking search results will automatically pan the map to the location, allowing the user to select the trail detail page if desired, and not automatically navigating to the trail detail page. A new quick menu has also been provided in the top left, for quick navigation to some of the more common map pages.
• Sign In With Google on Website & App - Faster & easier login
• Highlight Top Trails - Trailforks will periodically calculate the top 3 trails for each trail system, and highlight them automatically on the map.
• Regions friends visited count - Periodically we analyze which regions your friends have rode. This then powers a new map layer showing these friend counts with the region markers on the map. So when you're going on a roadtrip and wondering which riding areas or towns to stop at, let your friends past activity help you decide!
• Trail Connection Route Discovery - Have you ever wanted to find a route that includes 2 or more specific trails? This is now possible with the new "Routes by Trail Finder" in the "Routes" menu. Select as many trails as you want on the map, and search for all routes that include all the selected trails.
• Follow system improvements - The activity feed now has a card that appears with follow suggestions. And you can now also follow Youtube Channels.
We also added the ability to connect your Google Contacts to help find your friends on Trailforks to follow.
• Garmin Connect integration - With the click of a button sync a route or trail you find on Trailforks to your Garmin Connect account.
• Youtube Shorts - Shorts are detected and separated to new dedicated pages. Also a Shorts Player to view MTB shorts in a stream.
• Feature tour tooltips - 6 pages now have a feature tours to help educate about the robust Trailforks features.
• Signup & login security - Much work was done improving the security checks to stop spammers and scammers along with improved moderation tools.
• Wahoo integration - Allow users to sync routes from their Trailforks account directly to the Wahoo ELEMNT Bike Computers and ELEMNT Companion App.
More Trail Association Focused Features
• Track individual workers in reports - New work tracking feature, allows trail associations to keep track of volunteer work hours, create full volunteer work reports, and export the data.
• Issue Tracking for Trail Reports - Create and assign users to a trail report. Assigned users can then provide status updates on trail issues. Administrators can manage and track issue progress via our new issue management pages.
• Trail sign contest - System to submit and vote on photos for a contest. We will use this again!
• New region stats for admins - Pageview statistics for a region and the combined totals of all the content in that region. Only admins can view from a regions admin page.
• More Web
• Show Bikereg events on Trailforks events section and featured events on the map.
• Add new 'missing trails' layer to map for contributors
• Unverified trail filter
• Region trail reports, reports can be attached to a region rather than a trail
• @mention users in trail report description and comments. user receives a new notification
• Route plan widget
• POI winter/season option
• Replace many old Google maps with Mapbox
• Show Route Turn-by-turn directions on route detail page
• Set trail status to open when "planned" flag removed
• Add Gravel, Fatbike & road to Route Finder activities
• Routes layer on map hover highlight. Only show the highlighted route
• Log meters worked on in trail work report
• Save current map state when adding another trail
• Discover Map now shows videos and Outside articles
• Updated Activity Recordings layer with better data and more coverage
• Improve region markers on dense areas of the map to not clutter
• New help knowledgebase
Mobile App Updates
• Rebuilt GPS Ride Recording - Ride recording has been completely redesigned to our own in-house native code. We used to rely on a 3rd party geolocation plugin. The save Ridelog form is also rebuilt along with the upload of your ride to a background task for more reliable & faster activity saving.
• Mapbox 10 Upgrade & 3D maps - This was a major code change to migrate to this new version of our mapping framework. It did bring some cool new features like 3D maps to the app.
• Rebuilt Navigation UI for Android - The entire navigation UI including header, tabs, menu, map sheets and bars is new on Android. These new developments provide a smoother user experience and sets up a better foundation to build new app features going into the future.
• Optimized background data syncing - Downloading of regions is much faster & reliable now and happens in the background, even if the app is not active. Same goes for syncing of all other data, moved to background tasks. The settings and sync screens have also been rebuilt. This might not sound like a fancy new feature, but its major re-architecture work that improves the basic functions of the app. Maintaining our commitment to have as much of the app work offline as possible.
• App tooltips - We built a framework to start adding tooltips to educate users on features of the app. We've added a couple tooltips to start with more coming in the future.
• Waypoints - Last year we added personal Waypoints to the website. Now these customizable waypoints are synced to both the Android and iOS apps. You can also add and edit waypoints in the app.
More App
• Trails with a "Closed" trail status show as faint on the map
• Do not show trail name label layer on areas which have not been downloaded yet. To reduce some user confusion with trails not on the map.
• Improve the cold boot speed of the app on Android.
• Option in settings to manually toggle dark mode separate from OS default. More screens in the app are getting dark mode support over time.
• Fixes to the Discover screen
• More checks and warnings if a user try's to record their ride with battery saving modes enabled
• Private toggle on trail reports
• Native photo view with zoom
• Fix deeplinks
• Flaky & inconsistent location compass mode fixed
• Refactored login & signup screen with Google & Apple login
• Show photos on POI detail page
• Rebuilt settings screens
• View your notifications and message inbox in the app
• Gaia Topo Basemap
Coming Soon to The App
• Traildar - Proximity alerts on the map. Place a Traildar point on the map at an intersection or point of interest. Then as you ride get audio and haptic feedback when you near that point.
• Basic Location Sharing - This has been a long time coming and is just the first step. Share your location with a friend via a link. Open the link in the app to view the location or on the website and watch it auto-update. The early version of this is already rolling out in Beta on Android.
Trailforks Platform
Health of the platform is strong as Trailforks website & app usage continue to grow. Contributions by our amazing community of local admins, ambassadors and power users remained strong in 2023. We also added over 40k trails from staff this year.
We recently have on-boarded more dedicated customer support and have hired another community & social manager. We are growing the development team as well.
We also soft launched an affiliate program for trail associations.
We have a lot of exciting things coming in 2024. As we've been laying the foundations through app-refactoring, we are now able to focus more on adding new features.
If you are with a trail association and want to learn more about the benefits of Trailforks, click here.
Thank you to our users for their continued support whether it's being a Trailforks Pro subscriber, a contributor of content to the map, or just a regular user contributing ridelogs and trail reports.
Happy Trails
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