What you may post, and what we will do about it.

You need an account to post a report or a photograph. You do not need one to read anything, and you do not need one to report something — see below.

One account per person. Keep your sign-in to yourself: anything posted from your account is treated as yours.

Your reports and photographs are your work. Posting them here gives us permission to show them on Switchback and in the app, and to make the thumbnails and offline copies that requires. It gives us nothing else — we do not sell them, and we do not license them on to anybody.

Post only what is yours to post. A photograph you took is yours; one you found is not.

Do not post:

• somebody else’s work, without their permission;
• somebody’s private information — an address, a phone number, a car registration, a face they did not agree to;
• abuse of a person, hate speech, or threats;
• sexual content;
• advertising;
• a route description you know to be wrong in a way that would put somebody in danger.

A report can be scathing about a trail. That is what the one-star reports are for, and they are the most useful ones on the site — the closed bridge and the washed-out ford get written down there. Being rude about the path is fine. Being cruel to a person is not.

Every report and every photograph has a Report control next to it, on the website and in the iPhone app. You do not need an account to use it, and you do not have to leave an email address — though we cannot answer you if you do not.

If you cannot reach the page, write to mazenbahgat@outlook.com and tell us what and where. For a copyright claim, tell us where the original is published.

A person reads it. Not a filter — there is no automatic classifier on this site, and we would rather say so than imply a machine is watching.

We answer within 5 days. Something that is dangerous or is somebody’s private information comes down faster than that, before we have finished deciding the rest.

The outcome is one of two things: we take it down, or we leave it up and tell you why. Reporting something does not remove it, and nothing is removed automatically however many reports it gets.

It is hidden, not destroyed. A removed report leaves a line on the trail page saying it was removed — the page does not pretend it was never written — and its rating stops counting toward the trail’s average. A removed photograph leaves the gallery, and you will see it marked as removed on your own profile. Photographs filed with a report come down with it.

We keep the record of what was removed and why, because a takedown that cannot be shown is one that cannot be checked. We can put it back, and we do when we got it wrong.

Write to mazenbahgat@outlook.com. Say what was removed and why you think it should not have been. A different person reads an appeal from the one who made the decision, wherever there is more than one of us to ask.

You can delete your own reports and photographs at any time. Deleting a report removes it and takes its rating out of the trail’s average.

The one exception is something we have already removed. While it is down you cannot edit or delete it, because deleting the record of a takedown and posting the same thing again is the same as never having had one. Write to us if you want it gone for good, or if you think we got it wrong.

We may suspend an account that keeps posting things that have to be removed. We will say why.

The routes, the ground under them and the weather over them are open data, used under the licences on the sources page. None of it is a guarantee that a path exists, is passable, or is safe. Read the reports, check the forecast, and make your own decision at the trailhead.

If these change in a way that affects what you may post, or what we do with a report, we will say so on this page and change the date at the top.