There are a bunch of changes and new features coming to Bushwalk.com this coming week. They have been in the making for a while - and I have given a few previews. The forum remains mostly unchanged for now.
The main thing you will notice is that there will soon be a home page. Previously, going go bushwalk.com/ would send you to bushwalk.com/forum/ but there will be a home page there. Soon, you can then click through to the forum.
You can see the home page now https://bushwalk.com/?test
New Walks
We now have about 1700 walks documented and mapped. All have
*GPS download
*PDF map and notes download
*basic track notes
*Terrain profiles
*Lots of other stuff like weather, nearby walks, etc. Looks at the walks to see all the information
Coming soon to walks
*Tracknotes in other languages (early next year)
*App that works offline
*Ability for users to upload photos (in the next 3 weeks or so I hope - they need to be geocoded so we can attach them to the right walks at the right point)
*My whiteboard is pretty full -- but keep the ideas coming
Learn
There are a bunch of articles on general bushwalking gear/skills etc. Including some walk specific ones (eg see the overland track walk for article links)
Chat
Links to our happy community here
Dream
Links to our magazine, calendar and apps -- this is a mess at this stage -- will clean it up in a few months once we have the walks section all cleaned up.
Bugs
Yep they exist -- but let me know when you find any. The main ones causing me grief atm are
* the terrain profiles in walk PDFs have overlapping lines and maps when they shouldn't - I am rewriting this bit of code
* in the back end some walks can't be added yet (impacting adding the Great North Walk and some others). This is driving me crazy but I'm working on a fix.
Future of the Forum
I love our community and I am keen to keep this forum running.
I will update the colour scheme from the current green to match the branding of the rest of the website in the next little while (the red/orange and blue).
The software is getting clunky so I will need to do another upgrade (which then will break a few features that I need to deal with) then we can add the much needed like button and other stuff. This will also mean I need to migrate to a new server. I plan to do this over the summer and the forum will be in read-only mode of a day -- but will give you plenty of heads up.
I have made a few backend changes. Namely, the forum now sits behind a new load balancer and firewall -- this will improve speed and stability. I also updated the new member spam detection -- we get lots of attempted signups by spammers every day. Our amazing moderators (they really are amazing) have been dealing with a huge load as of late. This change will ease that burden (until the *&%$#! spammers work out how to get around these systems) -- but we will keep them out.
Please feel free to chat about the changes - the good the bad and the ugly.
Please also forgive me if I am slow to respond and get to all the changes -- there is only so much time in the day.
Happy walking
Matt
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)