Major and chaotic update on bikemap.net !

Important note to my visitors.

Yesterday, the website I use to map & publish my bike routes (www.bikemap.net) underwent a major “update” and, as it usually happens, became very bugged and unstable, which triggered a massive protest among users. I’m very thankful to the persons responsible for this useless chaos.

So far, route edit functions, download links for .kml and .gpx files, specific user’s routes map view have been lost, and mixed multilingual labels for route descriptors appeared on embedded route maps. I didn’t have time to investigate further, but there are probably many more bugs, as reported on the forum by other bikemap.net’s users.

Earlier today, unwanted ad banners were displayed at the top of embedded maps, which has been of much concern to numerous users who dislike this alienating, brainwashing and stupid modern time poison. Apparently, this problem has been settled now – thanks for that.

Fortunately enough, it seems that all my routes have survived, although a few errors for which I’m not responsible have appeared in some of them (Geneva to Santiago de Compostela and Geneva to Sevilla) : in several sectors of these two itineraries, the mapped route “jumped” to another nearby road or went mad several times around a town, with many dead-ends and turn-backs. In the end, this adds several tens or hundreds of km to the original route. Neverteless, these itineraries can still be used as a reference to prepare a journey or (when the download function will be restored) downloaded into a GPS – one just has to ignore the obviously faulty sections.

This unannounced and badly prepared update has been a sad surprise for lots of users and certainly caused the loss of many hours of work to us all. I sincerely hope that the situation on bikemap.net will evolve positively and that all essential functions of the website can be restored without delay.

I’m very sorry about all this and thank my visitors for their understanding regarding this ridiculous and avoidable issue.