Frequently asked questions

What is grnyte?

A climbing guidebook and logbook that nobody can read unless you invite them.

You start a region, put your sectors in it, and invite the people you climb with. Everything you add lives in that region: topos, GPS, photos, ascents. There's no public side of grnyte for any of it to leak into, so there's nothing for a search engine to index and nothing for a stranger to stumble onto.

Who can see my region?

The people you invited. Not other grnyte users, and not anyone holding a link.

What no app can do is stop one of them passing on what they see. If someone you invited decides to publish what they saw, that is their decision, not something a permission check can prevent. Invite accordingly, and remove anyone who stops belonging there.

However, grnyte isn't end-to-end encrypted. Your region is walled off from every other account down at the database level, but the server stores it in a form I could read, the same as almost every app on your phone. If a crag is sensitive enough that this matters to you, be careful what you type into a description field. It shouldn't stop you using grnyte.

Is there a public mode?

No. There's no button for it and I'm not planning one.

The public guidebook sites have to answer a much harder version of this question: once a crag is out, can it ever go back? Mostly they say no, and they're right to, because deleting the sector would delete everyone's logbook entries along with it. I never have to answer that one. There's nowhere here for a region to become public.

How many people fit in a region?

10 people. Ask and I'll raise it.

That is about the size of a group that actually climbs together, and a region that quietly drifts up to two hundred isn't private any more whatever the settings say. The other half of it is money. Fifty people syncing one region is real traffic, and that's the one place where grnyte could get expensive enough that I'd have to ask someone to help pay for it. Nobody is anywhere near that yet. Ask me and we'll sort it out.

How many regions can I start?

3 of your own. Joining somebody else's doesn't count, and there's no limit on those.

Anyone with an account can start a region, which without a cap is an open door for whatever scripts find the signup form. That covers every real case I can think of. If you're the exception, ask.

Is it free, and will that change?

Free, but I can't promise that forever.

grnyte isn't a business and I don't want it to become one. I pay for the hosting. If that ever gets past what I can comfortably cover I'll say so and ask for help with it, rather than quietly switching something off. What I won't do is take a feature you already use and put a price on it.

How do I get my data out?

Ask me and I'll get an export out for you.

Every site keeps routes and grades and ascents in its own shape, so a generic export gives you a file the next app can't read, and you've gained nothing. Tell me where you're going and I'll write the export to land there. If you only want a copy on your own disk, I'll zip your region and send it over.

How do I import what I already have?

Same answer, ask me. Importing has the same problem as exporting: every app keeps its data in its own shape, so anything claiming to import all of them falls over on the first real file.

Send me what you have. A spreadsheet, a database dump, whatever another app produced when you hit export. I'll look at it and tell you honestly whether I can turn it into a region.

How do I delete my account or my region?

Ask me and it's done. There's no delete button in the app yet.

What happens if you stop working on it?

I can't promise you forever. One person can't honestly promise that, so here's what I can say instead.

You'd hear from me long before anything switched off, and you'd get your region out in whatever form was useful to you. The code is on GitHub under the MIT license, so a group that wanted to keep running its own copy could already start today, without asking me. The thing I'm ruling out is grnyte going quiet with your guidebook still inside it.

Why not just use theCrag or The Topo?

Use them. For most climbing they're the better answer and they always will be.

A public database wants every route findable by every climber and kept there forever. That's the whole idea, and it's the right idea for the overwhelming majority of rock. Same goes for the public logbooks and their rankings.

grnyte is for the handful of cases where being findable is the problem. A crag on private land where a crowd would end the access. A project you haven't finished. An area the locals have quietly agreed not to write up. The other apps can't serve those.

Does it work offline?

Browsing, yes. Editing, no.

Install it to your home screen and whatever you've already opened stays readable with no signal, which is the situation at most of the boulders worth walking to. Logging an ascent or editing a route needs a connection. Do that on the drive home.

What if a crag here is on your land?

Write to me at report@grnyte.rocks with the crag and your interest in the land, and I'll take it down.

That answer is for landowners. Let me be plain about the rest of the page while I'm here: grnyte is a guidebook for places people already have permission to climb, and it doesn't check who owns the ground under a crag, because it can't.

I'd rather take an entry down than argue about it. There's no public copy of it anywhere else to chase afterwards.

Does anyone outside my region see my ascents?

No. There's no public log for one to appear in.

Your ascents show up for the members of the region you logged them in. They appear in no public list, feed, ranking or profile anywhere. That isn't a privacy setting you have to find and switch on, and it isn't something I could forget to apply when I build something new, because grnyte has no public side for anything to leak into.