Movement verification

A game about covering ground has to know the ground was covered. It does not have to know where you live, and MovenRun is built not to keep your route.

Why routes get checked

If a route that never happened could claim a cell, holding one would mean nothing, and the people it would stop rewarding first are the ones actually walking. Checking routes is what makes the map worth playing on.

What gets checked

Four checks run on every route: speed, accuracy, continuity, and whether the route repeats one already claimed. A route that passes counts toward a cell and XP. A route that fails is rejected and banks nothing. — Every route runs all four checks.

Speed. A route has to move at speeds a person moves at. Anything implying a vehicle is thrown out.
Accuracy. Individual positions that are too imprecise are dropped, and a route made mostly of poor fixes is rejected rather than guessed at.
Continuity. A route needs enough positions, close enough together in time, to describe someone actually travelling. A jump across town does not pass.
Not a repeat. Each route reduces to a fingerprint. Submitting the same movement twice is caught, as is a route overlapping one already counted.

The signal score

Every finished session gets a score out of 100 for how clean its GPS was, along with the reasons behind it. Steady accuracy, a realistic pace and a good density of positions push it up. Weak signal, sparse positions or a speed spike pull it down, and the summary names which applied.

The score is feedback rather than a gate. It does not change your XP, does not decide whether a cell is claimed, and does not affect anything you hold. It is there so you can tell the difference between a quiet session and a phone that had a bad time in a tunnel.

Over several sessions those scores build into a readiness view, which is a trend line rather than a verdict.

Your route is not kept

This is the part worth being exact about.

While a session runs, your positions live in memory on your device. They are used for two things: working out whether the movement was plausible, and working out which cells you crossed. When you leave the summary they are gone from your phone, unless you are signed in and the session could not be sent yet; then the route waits on your phone, for up to seven days, until it is sent. If you are signed in, the finished route is sent once to the MovenRun server to be checked there, and the server reads it in memory and discards it in the same way.

What is kept afterwards is the distance, the duration, which cells you touched, the signal score and its reasons. The server writes down no latitude or longitude, so it holds no history of where you went for anyone to read, lose or hand over. The fingerprint used to catch repeats is derived from the route and cannot be turned back into one.

The same rule holds everywhere else in the app. Cell names are invented rather than looked up, districts are assigned by identifier rather than by location, and the weekly recap is built from counts. Nothing in MovenRun resolves your position to a real address, neighbourhood or landmark.

Where the checking runs

The checks run on your device during the session. A server-side version of the same pipeline is built, and the app is built to send a signed-in session to it, so that what counts toward a shared map is verified somewhere a device cannot influence. That server is now running for early testing. Its results do not feed a shared map yet, because territory is not held on the server yet.