Changelog | Detourmap

August 17, 2026 Waterfalls, caves, volcanoes, ghost towns

The map has two layers, Nature and Archaeological, and nobody has ever searched for either of those words. They search for waterfalls, caves, volcanoes, beaches, ghost towns and macabre sites — so those six now have pages of their own, worldwide and per country. 184 country pages, from 559 beaches in Spain and 547 ghost towns in the United States down to the countries with a dozen caves.
The information was always there and was being thrown away. Every place is fetched from Wikidata as a fine kind — waterfall, cave, volcanic, abandoned — and folded into the coarse layer before the data ever shipped. Now the fine kind travels with it, so the atlas can answer a narrower question without carrying a single extra place.
A sub-kind page only exists where it is genuinely a different list: at least eight entries, and no more than 70% of its parent. A country whose archaeological sites are almost all ancient ruins does not get an "ancient ruins" page, because that is the page it already had under another name.
The six addresses are not new either. They were live category pages until last July and have been redirecting ever since, so this brings back URLs rather than inventing them.

August 17, 2026 Every page says what it knows

The guide pages carried a list and very little else. Each one now opens with a strip of facts worked out from the places on it — how many there are, the oldest and its date, how many rank as little known, how many nearby cities have a page of their own — and ends with the questions that page can actually answer.
That is 2,935 questions and answers across 695 pages, every one of them computed rather than written: the best known place in a country, how many archaeological sites it holds, the oldest thing within reach of a city, how a city page measures its radius, and where all of it comes from. They are marked up as schema.org FAQPage, so an assistant that quotes this atlas quotes something true and checkable. The index also answers the question the site had stopped answering: why the castles and museums went.
Nothing here is prose hand-written about a country. A sentence composed 177 times is either generic or wrong, and the dataset can already say something specific and true about each one. One thing it could not say properly: the oldest place on the map is the Sudbury Basin, an impact crater, and the year formatter rendered it as “1850000000 BC”. Deep time now reads the way a geologist says it, 1.85 billion years ago.

August 17, 2026 Text at full strength

The copy here was too faint, and the light theme is where it was worst. A place card’s description was drawn at 60% of the text colour, which measures 4.4:1 against the card — under the 4.5:1 floor for text that size. The founding year was at 40%, or 2.5:1. Both now read at the same strength as the rest of the card, and the description at full strength, because a paragraph dimmed inside a panel that is already glass is dimmed twice.
The two worst things on the site were not text colours at all. The counts under Nature and Archaeological on the index were painted in the categories’ own map colours, which are tuned to glow on near-black: on a white card they measured 1.7:1 and 2.1:1, fainter than the floor for a decorative line, let alone for a number you are meant to read. A category keeps its map colour on the map and now has a second, darker one for text on paper.
Links measured 3.9:1 on a guide page, because the mint had been darkened against white when most of them actually sit on the page, which is a shade of blue. Every text colour was then measured against all four surfaces it can land on, card, panel, page and bare background, in both themes: ~2,500 rendered elements across the index, a country guide and the ranking now clear the floor, and nothing is dimmer than 4.5:1 except the “·” between two facts.

August 17, 2026 Everest was missing

Mount Everest was not on this map. Neither were K2, Kanchenjunga, the Matterhorn, Uluru, Machu Picchu, Plitvice, the Serengeti, Kakadu, Table Mountain or Ben Nevis — 141 famous places in all, absent since the first day. They are here now, and Everest lands where you would expect it: first.
It was not a judgement call, it was a bug, and an invisible one. The dataset is fetched from Wikidata one kind of place at a time, in bands by how many Wikipedia editions cover a place — and the first band of every kind, everything with fifteen or more, was asked for without a sort. There are far more of those than one query returns, so Wikidata sent back an arbitrary selection and the most famous places on Earth were exactly as likely to be dropped as anything else. Nothing failed; they simply never arrived. That band is sorted now, so a rebuild cannot lose them again.
The other direction: 67 places left the map, because they were never Nature or Archaeology. Seven airports were filed as landscape — the busiest ones are built on artificial islands, and an island is a landform as far as Wikidata is concerned. A long line of house museums and galleries sat under Archaeological: the Anne Frank House, the Wallace Collection, Sir John Soane’s Museum. Richmond Park is a park.
What deliberately did not move, in case it looks like an oversight: Villa Jovis, the Roman Baths at Bath, the London Mithraeum and Su Nuraxi all run a museum, and all stay under Archaeological, because the thing itself is the ancient one. An automatic rule for this proposed 847 moves led by Abu Simbel, Mesa Verde and Machu Picchu’s neighbours — it was thrown away and the list was made by hand.
Dataset: 40,703 places across 231 countries.

August 17, 2026 Words, not glyphs

The panel on the map has no icons left. Surprise, Near me, Browse and the game are words now, and the little pictures that used to sit beside them are gone — as are the last stray arrows on the Wikipedia links. The site had already given up its emoji and its flags; this is the rest of the same idea. A dot on this map is a place, and nothing else on screen should look like one.

August 16, 2026 A game: where on Earth is this?

There is now a game — UniqueGuessr. One photograph, no name: tap the world map where you think it is. A tap within 25 km is a direct hit and worth 5,000; after that the score falls away with the distance, so landing in the right country still counts for something and the wrong continent does not. The reveal names the place, draws the line from your tap to it, and links you into the map and its Wikipedia article.
It can ask about every place on the map — 38,505 of them. Not quite every: 2,124 are things nobody can put a pin in, and they are out. The Bay of Bengal, the Gulf of Aden, the Sea of Azov and the other seas and gulfs, whose photograph is a beach and whose coordinate is a centroid a thousand kilometres from anywhere you could aim; the rivers and the deserts, for the same reason at a different scale; and the shipwrecks, whose photograph is of the ship rather than of a place.
Seven places in ten here are ones almost nobody has heard of, so an even draw would be an unnamed ruin nearly every round. Instead the draw is weighted by fame: a quarter of rounds come from the 282 most famous places, a quarter from the next 1,200, a quarter from the 9,700 after that, and a quarter from the 27,000 in the tail. Everything is reachable — the famous end just comes up as often as the deep end does.
The board is the same night chart as the map, with two changes: no place names anywhere — a label beside the answer is not a hint, it is the answer — and brighter land, because on a board with no dots the coastline is the only thing you have to go on.
Your rounds, average and best are kept in your own browser and nowhere else. Sharing a session copies the score and a row of blocks, never the places, so it spoils nothing.
And the whole site now has a light mode — the sun in the corner of the map, the game and every page. The night chart is still what Detourmap is and still what you get by default; the day chart is the same drawing on paper, with a proper deep-blue sea on the game board so the coastlines actually read. Your choice is remembered.

August 16, 2026 A smaller map, on purpose

Detourmap now carries two kinds of place and nothing else: Nature — parks, mountains, waterfalls, caves, volcanoes and coves — and Archaeological — ancient ruins, tombs, ghost towns, shipwrecks, catacombs, mines, battlefields and crash sites. 40,629 places across 231 countries, where a week ago there were 111,955.
What left: castles and monuments, churches and temples, museums and galleries, gardens, theme parks and zoos. Those are the places a guidebook already tells you about, and there were enough of them to bury the ones it doesn’t. What is left is what nature made and what people left behind.
The map draws all of it at once. Pressing a country to reveal its places went with the rest — everything is on screen from the first frame, and zooming in only pulls the dots apart. The one filter left is fame, from Iconic down to Hidden gem.
The guide followed the map, so every number on the site finally agrees: 892 pages instead of 2,654, with the pages for the kinds that left redirecting to where they belong rather than going dead. The open data, the MCP server and the game all read the same cut.
Nothing was thrown away. The wider atlas still exists behind the scenes, and if this turns out to be the wrong call it comes back.

July 31, 2026 Every city gets its own page

The guide stopped at the country, so there was no page that could answer what is worth seeing in Rome — only what is worth seeing in Italy. There are now 1,226 city pages: Rome holds 1,057, London 1,089, Paris 949. Every country page now has a By city row, and each city links on to its neighbours.
A city page shows everything within reach of the centre, and the reach grows with the city: 30 km around a million-person capital, 8 km around a small town. So Paris includes Versailles, the way anyone planning a trip would mean it.
Population is not the bar — eight places worth the detour nearby is. That is how Longyearbyen (2,417 people), Fira on Santorini, Gruyères and the Vysoké Tatry each earned a page, and why 44,390 places are now reachable by the town you would actually be standing in.
A border city files under its own country even when the places across the line outnumber its own. Sorting by whichever country held the most nearby places had put Xiamen in Taiwan, Brazzaville in DR Congo and Aqaba in Israel — every border town is outnumbered by its neighbour.

July 27, 2026 Press a country

The zoomed-out map is no longer empty — and it still isn’t cluttered. What it shows before you press anything is the places no country can show you: islands, wrecks, lighthouses, the microstates too small for a world map to draw. Hover any of them for its story. Everything standing on a country waits until that country is pressed, so a press always lands on the country you aimed at.
Those island dots have their own switch: Ocean dots, on the panel’s stats line. Off leaves the world view to the countries alone, and the setting is remembered.
Press a country and you now get everything it holds, at once — all 366 places in Bosnia, all 7,808 in Italy — instead of the famous ones first and the rest uncovered by zooming. Pressing is the request to see the place; the tail shouldn’t be hidden behind a zoom nobody knows they have to perform. (The hidden-gem half arrives a second or two later: it’s a separate download, and only a press pays for it.)
Every dot on the map is now exactly the same size, whatever its fame. A hidden gem used to be drawn smaller than an icon at most zooms, which is a strange thing for an atlas whose whole point is the tail — the obscure ones should look every bit as worth clicking. Fame still decides when a place appears as you zoom in; it no longer decides how big it is.
The count bubbles are gone: the countries themselves are the way in now. Hover one and it lights up, named, with how many places it holds; press it and its dots appear. Every country with places is pressable — the bubbles only ever covered the 113 biggest, because 350 floating chips would have buried the map.
The world view reads as a density map while you decide: each country carries a tint scaled to how much is waiting inside it. Switch a layer off and the tint reprices — countries with nothing left go dark and stop responding to a press.
A handful of places are filed under countries no map can draw (Ancient Rome, the Soviet Union — about 2% of the atlas). They are still one Surprise, one Near me or one search away from the guide, they just aren’t pressable on the map.

July 26, 2026 One panel, one typeface

Everything that used to float over the map now lives in one panel down the left — the title, Surprise, Near me, Browse, the layers and the fame ranking, as sections of a single sheet of glass, with the two filter sections folded away until you want them. The filter panel that sat on the right is gone: it took the widest part of the chart and got in the way of the place cards. Same composition as Castlemap and TrainRouter.
One typeface, everywhere: the serif display face is retired and every heading — on the map and across the 945 guide pages — now shares the site’s sans. One fewer webfont for your browser to fetch, and the family finally looks like a family.
On a phone the map is now the page: a slim bar carries the name, and one tap on it brings up the controls.
The “hover a dot” hint and the Wikidata credit moved to a faint strip along the bottom, out of the panel.

July 20, 2026 Simpler map, a lot more of it: seven layers, 115k places

The eighteen layers are now seven, grouped for clarity: Built landmarks (castles, forts, palaces, monuments, statues, towers, lighthouses, bridges), Ruins & the uncanny (ancient sites plus the eerie tail — ghost towns, shipwrecks, catacombs, mines, battlefields, crash sites), Nature & landscapes, Sacred sites, Museums & culture, Parks & cemeteries (gardens together with park-like graveyards), and Fun & leisure (theme parks, zoos, aquariums). Every old link still works — /waterfalls/, /monuments/ and the rest redirect to their new home.
The map now carries 114,958 places across 376 countries, up from 80,712. The big change: a place no longer needs an English Wikipedia article — if it’s covered in three or more languages and has an English name and a photo, it’s in. That let in tens of thousands of landmarks only the local Wikipedias had written up: Staraya Ladoga Fortress, the Visigothic church of Santa Comba de Bande, Castello di Otranto, back-country dolmens and menhirs.
Twelve new kinds of place, folded into the eight layers: opera houses and historic theatres, grand libraries and observatories, town squares and piers, heritage mines (Wieliczka, Hashima), battlefields, Roman baths, capes, bays and monumental old trees.

July 20, 2026 A new layer: Art & alternative

New layer: Art & alternative — 1,489 sculptures, sculpture gardens, murals, pavilions and model villages: Michelangelo’s David, the Little Mermaid, the Trevi Fountain, Manneken Pis, the Capitoline Wolf and Wall Street’s Charging Bull. Statues and war memorials stay under Monuments; this layer is for the art you go out of your way for.
Turned the fame floor down across the rest of the map too, so thousands more little-known places surface — obscure sculptures, back-road chapels, small-town museums, storied cemeteries, quiet fortresses and ruins that were sitting just under the old cutoff. Every one still earns its pin the same way: a photograph and a Wikipedia article behind it.
Dataset: 80,712 places across 361 countries, up from 71,763.

July 19, 2026 Launch day: Near me, plane wrecks & military heritage

Every place now carries a rank within its own layer, not just worldwide: a pinned card reads “Iconic · #1 worldwide · #1 of 2,608 in Towers & lighthouses”, and the layer and country pages number their lists — the #1 castle in Norway is now literally numbered. The open data grew a kind_rank column (CSV + GeoJSON) and the MCP server returns it too.
A full category audit moved 29 places to their right layer: the Giza pyramid complex had been filed under Macabre & curious — Wikidata types it a necropolis — and is Ancient & megalithic now, along with 13 more tomb-field digs; the Statue of Liberty leaves Towers & lighthouses for Monuments & statues; Iguazú National Park and ten more national parks move from Parks & gardens to Natural wonders; and two living churches escape the graveyard layer. Sedlec Ossuary and the catacombs stay exactly where they belong.
The national “most famous” crowns got pickier: an island or a city-scale entry can no longer take a country’s title — that fame stays inside its own layer, where an island leading the natural wonders is exactly right. 30 crowns moved to places you can actually stand at: Thailand’s from Ko Samui to the Grand Palace, Chile’s from Easter Island to the moai themselves, the UAE’s from Palm Jumeirah to the Dubai Fountain, Palau’s to Jellyfish Lake, Haiti’s to Sans-Souci Palace. A handful of historical states that were quietly posing as countries left the page too. (Socotra keeps Yemen’s crown on purpose — some islands are the destination.)
New layer: Military heritage — 1,028 bunkers, coastal batteries, flak towers, Martello towers and closed bases worldwide: the Oscarsborg Fortress that sank the Blücher, the Dora 1 submarine pens in Trondheim, Željava Air Base under a Croatian mountain, Camp Century under the Greenland ice, the Führerbunker. Only places history has finished with — active installations are excluded on principle (a closure date or “former” on Wikidata is required, and the ones that are secretly still open get blocked by hand). The other half of mr seed oils’ Discord ask.
New kind of place: historical plane-crash sites. 392 pre-1990 aviation wrecks, crash sites and memorials join the Macabre & curious layer — from the Vickers Viking wreck on Mistberget north of Oslo to the 1972 Andes crash site, the Hindenburg field at Lakehurst and the Superga basilica. Newer crashes stay off the map on purpose: old wrecks are heritage, recent ones are grief. Asked for by mr seed oils on Discord — who was right that a wreck had gone missing; it turned out crash sites had never been fetched at all. Along the way the same bug (no country on the Wikidata item) turned up on the wreck of the Blücher in the Oslofjord — it now files under Norway.
New: Near me. Press the button next to Surprise me, allow location, and the map draws a ring around you — 25, 50, 100 or 200 km — shows every place inside it at once, and lists the closest first. Asked for by Nimet in the Product Hunt comments this morning; shipped the same day. Thanks, Nimet.
Detourmap launched on Product Hunt.

July 18, 2026 Launch eve

The most-famous ranking learned to ignore whole islands and territories: 49 region-scale entries (Crete, Bali, Jan Mayen, a country’s own main island…) were riding bot-written Wikipedia stubs past real landmarks, so Norway’s crown read “Jan Mayen” and Spain’s “Mallorca”. The crowns are now Geirangerfjord, the Sagrada Família, Neuschwanstein Castle, the Parthenon — 228 countries and territories ranked.
Fame-ranking cleanup: 177 entries that weren’t really “places worth a detour” are gone — living cities that ride Wikidata’s archaeological-site tag (Athens was ranked the world’s #1 ancient site), continental deserts pinned to one country (the Sahara filed under Sudan), multi-country seas and lakes, and dependent territories. The most famous place on the map is now the Eiffel Tower, as it should be. Dataset: 70,343 places across 348 countries.
New page: the most famous place in every country — the single best-known place in each of 229 present-day countries and territories, on one ranked list.
The globe now greets you with country bubbles from the very first view — before, there was nothing to press until you zoomed in.
Fixed on phones: closing a place card took two taps. A tap set a phantom “hover” under the pin; now a tap only pins, and one tap on the close button closes.
Rewrote the copy on every page in a plainer voice, and dropped the Beta badge.
The four sister atlases now link here, and Detourmap links all four back.
New, quieter social card.
The map can now live on your page too — see Embed the map.
Pinned cards now load each place’s full Wikipedia lead (a header bug had silently blocked it), and long stories expand with a tap — Read more.
The whole dataset is now downloadable (CSV & GeoJSON, CC0), and AI assistants can query it live over the MCP server.

July 15, 2026 The guide, castles, and a quality pass

The guide: ~1,100 static pages — every country and every kind, readable without the map (or JavaScript).
Castles, fortresses and palaces became their own layer, and every card now carries a short description.
The dataset settled at 70,520 places across 350 countries after a quality pass that dropped mis-tagged landmasses and “places” the size of countries.

July 14, 2026 Three versions in one day

Detourmap went live in the morning: ~32,000 places on one night map.
By afternoon: a spinnable globe, dots that reveal by fame as you zoom, and a split dataset so the world view paints fast.
By evening: 63,500 places, now including museums, gardens, theme parks and other attractions.