Route Author Terms

These terms are between you (“the Author”) and Routekeepers (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2026/707131/07, a private company incorporated in South Africa and trading as Routekeepers (“the Platform”, “we”) and apply to every route guide you publish with us. You accept them each time you send a guide for review, and we record the version you accepted with the date.

They sit alongside our Terms of Service, which cover you as a rider. Where the two overlap on the same subject, these terms apply to your guides.

A route guide is your guide to riding a public-road route — the recorded line, the grade, the warnings, the notes, and any photos you add. The roads are public and anyone may ride them. A guide grants nobody access, permission or entry to anything, and neither you nor we may describe it as if it did.

This is the difference between a route guide and a farm permit, and it is the whole reason the two are kept apart. A permit buys a rider onto someone's land. A guide gives them your knowledge of a road they were already allowed to ride.

The two declarations you tick when you submit — that the route is on public roads, and that the work is your own — form part of this agreement.

You keep the copyright in your track, your photos and your words. Nothing here transfers ownership.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to store your guide, show it on the Platform, and deliver it to riders who download it. You may withdraw a guide at any time, and we will stop offering it. The licence continues for people who have already downloaded it, because what they have is permanent (section 6) — we cannot take back a file somebody already holds.

You confirm you have the right to grant that licence for everything in the guide, including any photo you did not take yourself.

Most guides go up as soon as you publish them. A few are held for us to look at first — an automatic check flags them — and you'll get an email saying so. That is us being careful rather than you having done something wrong, and it usually takes a day or two.

We read guides after they go up as well as before. We may decline a guide, take one down, or send it back with what needs fixing, and we don't have to give a reason beyond the one we give you.

We may correct obvious errors — a typo, a mislabelled town. Anything that changes what you actually said, we ask you about first.

Your guide is published free. Riders download it for nothing, and you are not paid for it — there is no price, no share, no credit and no balance held for you, and no payment of any kind is owed to you now or later.

What you get is the credit for the work. Your name goes on the guide and stays on it, every rider who downloads it sees who wrote it and how many guides you have published, and their ratings are attached to your name. If being paid is what you are after, this is not that, and we would rather you knew before you spent an evening writing it up.

If we ever decide to pay authors, that is a change to these terms and we will put it to you for acceptance. We are not promising it.

A download is permanent and covers every future update to that guide. If you re-route it, add a warning or mark a road closed, everyone who has it gets the new version.

This matters more than it sounds: a rider who downloaded your guide in March and rides it in September has to meet the road as it is now, not as it was. Keeping a guide current is the main thing being an author asks of you.

Anyone can report a guide, including a landowner who has no account with us. That channel is open on purpose and it is one click from every guide.

A report that a route crosses private land takes the guide down immediately, before we investigate rather than after. We would rather be wrong about your guide for a week than knowingly hand out a route across someone's farm for a day.

While a guide is suspended, people who already have it keep it, with a warning shown on the page. We will tell you what was reported and give you a chance to answer before we decide.

Reports about accuracy or a closed road are handled the same way but without the immediate suspension — we come to you first.

Riders accept, as a condition of downloading it, that they may not redistribute your guide, resell it, or use it to build a competing guide over the same route. Free to take is not free to republish. Every file we deliver is marked so a leaked copy can be traced to the account that took it.

We enforce that as a term of their download — by warning, then account suspension.

The road is public and the line is not ownable. Someone who rides the same road and records their own track owes you nothing, however similar it looks, and we will not stop them publishing it. That is the law and it is also fair.

What is protected is your photographs, your written notes, and your guide as a compilation. What we can give you beyond that is a head start, not a monopoly.

Riders rely on your warnings and your notes when they are out on the road. Publish what you actually found, keep it current when you learn something has changed, and don't publish a route you have not ridden.

You indemnify us against a claim that a route you published crosses private land without permission, and against a claim that the work in it is not yours to publish. Nothing in this section makes you responsible for how another rider rides.

You can withdraw a guide at any time. Riders who already have it keep it, and nothing else is affected.

We may remove a guide, or stop you publishing, for a breach of these terms, a repeated accuracy problem, or a confirmed private-land report. Where we close an account for a serious breach — publishing someone else's work as your own, or a route you knew crossed private land — the guides published from it come down with it.

We may update these terms; a material change is put to you for acceptance the next time you submit a guide, and we'll tell you what changed. The version you accepted is recorded against each of your submissions with the date and time.

Disputes: we try good-faith resolution first (legal@routekeepers.co.za); failing that, the South African courts. Governing law is the Republic of South Africa.