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Community Grade

The community grade is a difficulty rating assigned by climbers themselves. Once enough votes accumulate, the community grade replaces the author’s grade everywhere: in rankings, sorting, and filters.

Only a user who has already logged an ascent on a route can vote. Without an ascent, voting is unavailable.

The community grade is recalculated on the backend immediately after each vote or vote removal.

Rules:

  1. Minimum threshold — at least 3 votes for a single grade are required. If there are fewer votes, the author’s grade is used.
  2. Majority wins — the grade with the most votes wins.
  3. Tie — if multiple grades received the same number of votes, the lower one is chosen.
  4. Rollback — if votes are removed and the count drops below the threshold again, the community grade is cleared and the author’s original grade is used.

The route screen has a tab with a vote distribution chart. It shows how votes are spread across grades. Only grades that received at least one vote are shown, plus one neighboring grade on each side. If there are no votes at all, the tab shows an empty state.

In the ascents list, a small badge appears next to each user’s name showing their personal grade and an arrow indicating how it compares to the displayed grade of the route:

BadgeMeaning
↑↑grade is 2+ steps higher
grade is 1 step higher
grade matches
grade is 1 step lower
↓↓grade is 2+ steps lower

The backend stores both the author’s grade and the community grade on each route:

  • grade — the original grade set by the author
  • community_grade — the community grade