Every race track now explains itself
If you opened a race track page yesterday — say the Amstel Run in Amsterdam — you got a line drawing of the route, a table headed "Leaderboard", and the words "No runs yet". That is the whole page. It tells you nothing about where the course goes, what it is like to fly, or whether it is the one you should try first. And for a track nobody has raced yet, which is most of them, it is a page about an absence.
That has been the quiet problem with the whole race catalogue: the pages were built to display results, so a track without results had nothing to display.
The route, in words
Every one of the nineteen curated tracks now has a written description — what the line actually is, which landmarks it threads, and what makes it hard. The Amstel Run goes up the open water of the Amstel rather than across the canal belt, canal houses standing in a wall on either bank. The Bosphorus Crossing is 9.3 km of strait with Europe on one side and Asia on the other, and it is decided by battery management, not top speed. Centro Storico puts eleven-metre rings between medieval streets and almost nobody sets a clean lap first try.
These are hand-written per track, not generated from a template. Nineteen pages spun out of one sentence pattern would read like filler, and it would be filler.
Course profile and how to fly it
Under the description sits the course profile: length, timed gates, the average spacing between them, how high the rings sit above the ground, how wide they are, which craft suits the course, which lap modes it supports, and the coordinates of the start arch. All of it comes straight from the same track data the game flies, so it can never drift out of sync with the course you actually race.
Then a section on how to fly it — advice specific to that route, followed by the mechanics that apply everywhere: the clock starts when you cross the golden arch, there is no countdown, flying back through it restarts the attempt, gates count in order, and straying more than 3 km off course ends the run. On canyon tracks it also tells you plainly that you need Realistic mode, because without the 3D buildings there is nothing to thread.
An honest activity summary
The standings block is new too. Instead of a bare table, the page now says how many timed runs have been flown by how many pilots, what the record is, what average speed that record implies over the distance, who set it and when, and — once there is a field to speak of — the average and median pilot best, so you know what a respectable time even looks like. Where there are no runs at all, it says so, and says what taking the first one means.
Each page also links onward now: other tracks in the same city first, then other courses in the same discipline, and back to the full race catalogue.
Player-built tracks are in the catalogue now
There is a track editor in the game, and what people lay out with it races exactly like the curated courses — same clock, same leaderboard, same records. But the public catalogue did not know they existed. Worse, the most-flown track on the whole site is a player track: ElbRing, a 22-gate canyon lap of the Hamburg harbour, holding more finishes than any curated course. Its page returned "Track not found".
That is fixed. The hub now has a Community tracks section after the curated disciplines, and every player track has a working page with its schematic, course profile, leaderboard and records, credited to whoever built it. They stay in their own section deliberately: nobody has vetted those routes, and lumping them in with the curated ones would promise a quality we have not checked.
One rule worth stating plainly, since it decides what search engines see: a community track is not indexed until it has actually been flown — at least two pilots and five finishes. A track with no description and no runs is a thin page, and a name typed by a stranger is not something we hand a slot in Google on our domain. Fly it and it earns the slot.
Rate the tracks you've flown
Every track page now carries pilot ratings: one to five stars, plus as much or as little text as you want to leave. The average, the spread across star counts and the written reviews sit under the activity block.
One rule shapes the whole thing: you can only rate a track you have finished. Not signed in, or never crossed that finish line? You can read the ratings, but the form is not there for you. A rating from someone who never flew the course tells nobody anything, and requiring a run happens to be the cheapest spam filter there is — you cannot brigade a track without actually flying it.
There is no separate comment thread, deliberately. A review is a comment with a number attached; adding a second stream of text would mean a second thing to moderate for what is, today, a small amount of traffic. If reviews fill up, comments can follow.
Reviews go through the same abuse-report path as every other user-made thing on the site — a report link on each one, auto-hidden after three separate people flag it, straight into the moderation queue. A hidden review disappears from the list and stops counting toward the average; being moderated shouldn't leave your star still pulling the score down. Player-built tracks got the same report link while we were in there.
One last decision that only search engines will notice: the star markup that can put a rating into a Google result is only emitted once a track has three or more ratings. Below that the average is shown to you and not to the crawler. Star markup backed by a single rating is what gets rich results taken away, not granted.
Two smaller fixes rode along. Canyon tracks were showing a blank chip where their discipline should be, and the page titles were built by title-casing the URL slug — so the Amstel Run was announcing itself to search engines as "Amsterdam Canal Canyon". Both now use the real names.