About

Why Mapetanque.be?

Mapetanque.be was born of a simple observation: no website made it easy to find the freely accessible pétanque courts in Belgium. And yet there are more than 1,700 of them.

Now you can find a court near you, or near any address, in a matter of seconds, see what it looks like, get directions and share it with your friends.

An open-source project built on open data

Mapetanque.be's code is open, and so is the data it uses:

• OpenStreetMap for the courts and their locations
• Mapillary for the photos of the courts

But Mapetanque.be doesn't just draw on these databases: it also contributes to them. Every court reported to me is added to OpenStreetMap, and every photo I receive is published on Mapillary before appearing here. What is collected for this site therefore benefits everyone.

Your data

In short: no advertising cookies, no account, and nothing is passed on to anyone. Your language and display preferences stay on your device.

What is stored when you…

• rate a court: the rating alone. A hashed fingerprint (IP address + court + month), which cannot be traced back to you and changes every month, prevents you from rating the same court more than once.
• send a photo: the photo, shrunk and stripped of its metadata (no device model, no GPS; only the date it was taken is kept, because Mapillary requires it). It is placed at the court, not where you are. Your optional first name or nickname is only used to credit you. The photo waits on a European server for me to check it, for 30 days at most. If I keep it, it is published on Mapillary under a CC BY-SA licence, with faces and licence plates blurred. Otherwise, it is deleted.
• write a review: the text, your optional first name or nickname, the site language and your rating. A random identifier kept by your browser lets a new review replace your previous one. Reviews are published after moderation; a rejected or replaced review is deleted after 30 days.
• report a court or an error: the location and your comment, deleted within a year at the latest.

To limit abuse, a hashed fingerprint of your IP address counts your uploads for the day; it is erased after a few days.

The site is hosted by GitHub Pages and uploads go through Cloudflare, which keep their own technical logs. To have a photo or review removed: mapetanque@outlook.be.

Who am I?

Born in Liège and still living in the area, I've been playing pétanque since I was a child: first on holiday in the south of France, then briefly in a club in Vottem. These days I mostly play with friends on public courts, and it was this search for the perfect court that gave rise to this site.