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Comment by zakn | Hacker News Reader

There are already tons of sites devoted to hikes. Here's why I made hike.io:

- It's all about hikes. Detailed trail information, beautiful photos, full screen maps, and not much else.

- It's editable. Anyone can add new hikes or modify existing ones, without having to sign in. (It's contenteditable and goes through a review process, try it out!)

- It's free. No paywalls or ads. Ever.

- It's open. The site's data is available under Creative Commons. The code is open source (I used AngularJS and Sinatra: http://git.io/hike.io)

There are still things I want to do. For example, GPX support, trip reports, and obviously I need more hikes on the site, but I thought I'd get it out there anyway in order to get some feedback. Any thoughts?

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I like it a lot. No hikes in my area(Minneapolis), and I'm not enough of a hiking buff to know anything(though I would like to be). However, beautiful design and good functionality to it.

You say no paywalls or ads- what if this takes off? Just curious what you'd resort to.

That's a problem I'd love to have. I think the best way to keep a site like this going is through donations, but honestly have no idea whether that is feasible or not.

I really don't have problem with ads. As much as I love building things, there is a definite opportunity cost that comes with spending time in front of the computer that could be spent, you know, actually hiking with my family.

The overall design looks very nice so Google adsense type ads would take away from that.

Have you thought about getting individual trails "sponsored" by a local outfitter? In the info box on the left side you could have Sponsored by Joes Outfitters with a link to their site, and it would match the rest of the text so it wouldn't even be that noticeable.

Here's my concern with ads. Even if I managed a 2% CTR with a subtle ad, I'd still have 98% of my users carefully avoiding a part of the page that could be devoted to something else.

Someone mentioned affiliate links in a bibliography section. I could see that working because it's not intrusive, but you'd have to be careful not letting your sources be dictated by what's available on Amazon. I like donations because it keeps the financial goals of the site inline with creating the best experience.

I could see sponsorship links working, maybe on the homepage, or maybe in a separate /sponsors page. I'm not completely sure, it's a tricky problem.

The site is beautiful, and I really appreciate the open sourcing of the code. I teach high school kids how to develop websites with Angular and Ruby on Rails, and will point them to your git repo.

Quick question - how do you prevent spam?

Thanks! All changes go through a review process before they are pushed live. I get an email for each change and then can either accept or reject it.

I'm using Mailgun to do the mail stuff: https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/blob/master/server/util...

Hm. So how come you accepted this one? It's just a location, seems pretty useless: http://hike.io/hikes/vandelli

This one was just added by someone on HN. It's a bit like Wikipedia's stub articles. It's not that useful at the moment, but there's something here that should be expanded on in the future. Maybe I'll update it myself when I get some downtime.

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