The corridor
A corridor of 30 metres forms around every route you ride. That is the base area of any ride. Where you went, a band is left behind that is wide enough to cover the road and the pavement beside it.
The corridor is built from the recorded points, not from the road network. Cyclaim does not know which street you were on, only where you were.
Closed loops
Ride a lap and close it, and you get more than the corridor: everything it encloses comes with it. A lap around a block takes the block, a lap around a neighbourhood takes the neighbourhood.
The rule in so many words: a loop counts when you close it within one ride.
Two rides that together enclose an area do not fill it. Not even when both ends sit in ground that is already yours. In practice: leave the recording running through a break if you want to close a lap. Two separate files are two rides, even if you rode them in one go.
Whoever was there last owns it
If somebody rides through your ground after you, the part they rode through is theirs. There is no defending, no advantage from riding early and no way to hold an area. All that counts is who was there last.
What matters is the timestamp of the ride, not of the upload. A ride from yesterday, uploaded today, does not beat a ride from this morning.
A ride ends where the movement ends. If the recording sits at the destination for a while with the device still running, the ride counts up to the last point at which you moved, not up to the press of the stop button. Otherwise simply leaving a device running would produce a later timestamp and take somebody else's ground with it. Your area does not change, only the end time and the duration.
Solo, global and the friends mode
There are two views of the same rides, and what changes between them is the question you ask of them.
Solo answers: where have I actually been? Every ride you have ever uploaded stays on this map. Solo ground only grows. You never lose it, not even where somebody else has long since taken over.
Global answers: who owns the ground right now? This is where everybody rides against everybody, where the most recent visit decides, and where you can lose.
Alongside them sits the friends mode: the same map, but your friends' rides are on it too, in the same colour. It has no contest and no ranking, it just shows the ground the lot of you have covered.
Rides older than 30 days
A ride that is more than 30 days old at the time of upload is accepted and stored. It counts towards your solo ground and your statistics, but it takes nobody's ground away.
The reason: otherwise recordings could be hoarded and played out in one go. Somebody holding back every file for half a year and uploading the lot on a single day would have an advantage over everyone who uploads as they ride, and that advantage has nothing to do with cycling.
When somebody deletes their account
Deleting an account takes its rides with it. The ground it had taken from other people does not become ownerless: it falls back to whoever rode there before.
The same single rule applies here too. The most recent remaining visit wins.
What makes a ride valid
You upload your rides as a GPX file. To be scored, a file has to meet a handful of conditions. These limits are published because there is something you can do about it when you hit one.
Four of them come without a number:
- The file has to be valid GPX.
- Every track point needs a timestamp.
- The timestamps have to ascend.
- No timestamp may lie in the future. Usually that is a device clock set wrong.
If one of these is broken, the app tells you which. The remaining limits are numbers:
- The file is at most
- 20 MB
- The ride has at least
- 2 track points
- The ride has at most
- 100,000 track points
- The ride is at least
- 500 m long
- The ride is at most
- 1,000 km long
- The ride lasts at most
- 48 hours
- A break within the recording lasts at most
- 6 hours
The plausibility check
On top of that, every ride is checked for whether it is plausible as a bike ride. Which checks those are and where their limits sit is not published. If a ride fails, the app only reports that it could not be scored.
That is not an oversight. If those limits were known, an invented ride could be cut to fit them. Ride honestly and you will not meet them.
What deliberately does not apply
The most important section on this page. This is where the things sit that have been considered and rejected for a reason.
Loops across several rides do not fill
Only a loop closed within one ride is filled. Several rides that together enclose an area do not fill it.
The reason: an area enclosed that way was never ridden. It has no real time of visit, yet under "whoever was there last owns it" it would still take something away from somebody who did ride there. Within a single ride this is harmless, because the loop is one continuous effort with one clear timestamp.
An area only ever belongs to one party
Even when two people rode the same tour together, the ground falls to one of them. Shared ownership is planned but not yet decided.
There is no search for people
Friend requests run exclusively through a friend code that you pass on yourself. There is no directory of names and no lookup by email address. Such a query would be an oracle about who is registered here.
"Anonymous" means your name is not shown
If you set your display name to be non-public in the settings, only your friends still see it. Your colour on the map stays. So it remains visible that somebody in particular rides there, just not who. The map cannot promise more than that technically, and this page therefore does not promise more.