Land and access

A pin is only worth chasing if you are allowed to be there. Every spot is checked against public data before a human ever sees it, and then a human looks at it on a map anyway.

What a spot has to pass

1. Inside the real boundary of the region it is drawn for, using the official regional council boundaries.
2. On land with public access, from the national public access dataset: conservation land, reserves and parks. Never private farmland.
3. On a formed walking track from the national tracks dataset, or, close to a town, on open ground in a park. Never a route through scrub.
4. At least 200 metres from a road, so a pin is a walk rather than a car park.
5. Not on water. Where a spot is open ground near a town rather than a formed track, it is thrown out if Land Information New Zealand's building outlines show a building within 60 metres of it. Track spots are not building-checked, because a formed track is where the public is entitled to be; what they get instead is the 200 metres above and a measured distance to the nearest building printed on the pin's page, so you can see it before you go.
6. Not on a site the district plan records as significant. That check runs against Christchurch City Council's district plan layer, which makes it a real automatic check in Canterbury today and nowhere else yet. Other regions are switched on as their councils' layers are added, and until a region's layer is in, the person looking at the map is the whole of that check.
7. The Department of Conservation's alerts for the nearest track are read automatically, and a closure rules the spot out.

Then it goes into a queue where it is looked at on a topographic map, on aerial photography, and with the track network drawn over the top, and it is confirmed or thrown out by a person. Nothing is ever raced that has not been looked at.

Places we keep out of

Some places are not ours to send strangers to. Where a district plan layer is wired in and records a site as significant, the draw refuses it. If a spot lands somewhere that matters to the people who look after that land, tell us and it comes off, no argument and no debate about whether the dataset said so.

Three classes of reserve are out entirely: nature reserves, scientific reserves and historic reserves. Walking into a nature reserve without a permit is an offence under the Reserves Act rather than a question of manners, so the game never sends anybody to one. They are excluded in the data wherever the class is recorded, and by the person looking at the map in every case. Wildlife sanctuaries and fenced or island sites under a biosecurity rule are out on the same footing.

Filming, and why it is fine here

A person filming themselves on a public track is not a commercial film shoot. Nobody is being charged, nothing is being sold, and there is no crew. If any part of this ever becomes commercial, meaning sponsorship, paid promotion, anything at all with money attached to the footage, then a concession from the Department of Conservation is required for filming on the land it manages, and getting one is our job, not yours.

Leave it as you found it

• Nothing is buried, hidden or left behind. There is no physical object at a pin, and there never will be. The proof is your video, not a stamp in a box.
• Stay on the track. A pin on a track is not an invitation to shortcut to it.
• Take your rubbish out, including the bit of paper you wrote the code on.
• Dogs: check first. Much conservation land does not allow them.
• Do not park across a gate to save a hundred metres.

Tell us a spot is wrong

If a pin is on your land, or on land you look after, or somewhere it plainly should not be: email jhustler@me.com. The report itself freezes the pin, the moment it lands, so nobody can take that day while we work out what went wrong in the data. You get an answer from a person normally within the hour and always within a day. If it is urgent, say so and it is treated that way. You do not need to prove anything first.

When a pin is moved we do not say why, and we do not say who asked. A reason is a map for anybody who wants to work out what is where, and it would put the person who told us in the middle of it. What we publish instead is the count: how many pins were moved that month, on the same page every month, so the number can be watched even though the cases cannot.

Where the data comes from

Public sources, read and never altered: Land Information New Zealand for localities, buildings and roads; the Outdoor Access Commission for public access land and the national tracks dataset; the Department of Conservation for tracks and alerts; Stats NZ for regional boundaries; and New Zealand's own national elevation model for the contours you see behind the pin. The contour drawing on the page is the real shape of the land around that spot.