This release is about the interactive maps that spactators and the safety crew watch while a race is running. On Safemap a switched-off device raises an alarm again, the distance-to-track chart shows the real distance, and the tracking map stays exactly where you put it — even with hundreds of devices on it. Billing and payment get better: users who have paid by card once can pay by SEPA, PayPal, or Link.

What's new

A switched-off device raises an alert

In Safemap, a tracker that someone manually switches off raises a Power off alert again. The alarm had gone quiet: the device's own power-off report was written as a plain offline event, which the Safemap does not watch, so a participant shutting down their device produced nothing on the dashboard while the Tracker Management said "Power off".

The position and battery level the device sends with it now reach the track and the alarm, so you see where the device was switched off and how much charge it had left. A power-off you commanded yourself still stays silent in safemap.

Know how far off the track someone really is

Safemap's "Distance to Track" chart now measures every location. Until now it read zero for every location inside the set mapping corridor and only showed a number once a participant left it, so the line sat flat and then jumped by a hundred metres in a single sample. Every reading is now measured against the nearest piece of the route, and the chart draws the mapping distance next to the readings so you can tell a participant at an aid station from one who is genuinely off course.

The same release makes the Safemap much lighter with large fields. The shadow track is loaded once instead of on every poll, each poll only fetches the points that are actually new, and participant rows read the latest position instead of rebuilding a whole track. Events with hundreds of devices stay responsive, and replays no longer pull megabytes per refresh.

Log in without leaving Safemap

When you share a Safemap with Load Safemap without login, anyone opening the link sees it read-only. A new Log in to manage alarms notice appears, and takes users straight back to the Safemap afterwards, with the alarm assignment controls in place. No more opening a second tab to get your own dashboard back.

The public view also stops exposing who owns the event: creator and editor identities are no longer sent to anonymous visitors. The Safemap documentation describes the public read-only mode and the login link.

No more accidental shutdowns

In Tracker Management, sending Shut down or Change the backend server now opens a dialog that names the command, tells you how many devices it will reach, and sends nothing until you type confirm. Every other command still goes out in one click.

This came from a real mix-up: Shut down and Reboot sit next to each other in the list of commands, and a shut-down device cannot be woken over the air — someone has to collect it and switch it on by hand. The messages documentation has a new section on critical commands.

Pay by SEPA, PayPal or Link once you have paid by card

Checkout offers more than cards now. Everyone starts on card payment, and once you have completed one successful card payment, your next checkout shows the full set — card, SEPA direct debit, PayPal and Link. If SEPA disappeared for you recently, this brings it back.

Registration and leaderboard links that work on a phone

In the event editor, the external registration and external leaderboard fields now accept https:// links only, and tell you right in the field when an URL is rejected instead of failing silently. An http:// link looked fine in the browser but did nothing in RACEMAP app, because both Android and iOS block unencrypted pages — so organisers could hand a button that never opened. Existing links are upgraded automatically.

The tracking map opens live, not where you left it

The live map no longer drops you back into a remembered instant replay position while an event is running. Scrubbing back and reloading used to return you to the past timestamp and keep playing from there — and on a tracking map reused for a new date, a viewer who had watched the previous run came back to an empty map with every device apparently disconnected. A stored time position is now restored only for events that have finished, which is where resuming a replay is useful in the first place. The remembered view page now spells out all three cases.

Bibs with stray spaces sort where they belong

Start numbers and names are trimmed of leading and trailing spaces on every import path, so a bib that arrives as " 77" is stored as 77. A single leading space used to push a bib out of the numeric order entirely, collecting all padded numbers in a block in front of everyone else — in the participant list, in the bulk sort and in the player navigation panel. Existing participants are cleaned up as well, and the participants API reference now states the trimming when syncing from their own system.

Help requests from the app reach the right role

The Contact screen in RACEMAP tracking app no longer asks people to classify themselves as spectator, participant or organiser. It asks what went wrong — cannot register, cannot find my dot on the map, something else — and routes the mail from there. Event lookup searches published and unlisted events alike, so a participant finds your event even when it is not listed, and the mail lands with the event's support address rather than a generic inbox; child events now fall back to the parent event's address instead of being misrouted.

Every message also carries what you would otherwise have to ask for: whether the sender is registered for the event and with which start number, and what their phone's location permission actually allows. 

Other changes

• A warning against swapping the shadow track of a running event