Help

Frequently asked questions

Who this is for: anyone with a specific question about how OCMD Explorer works, where its information comes from, or why it did something unexpected. Last updated: 2026-08-30

Contents

Using the guide

Do I need an account? No. An account carries your game progress and pins between devices and does nothing else. Every guide, every page, the trip planner, sharing and the whole game work signed out.

Do I need to install an app? No. This is a website. Your browser may offer to add it to your home screen — that is the same site in a different frame, not a separate app.

Does it track my location? No, and it never asks. "Home base" is a street you pick from a list. The guide has no access to your device's position.

Why does everything ask me for a street? Because Ocean City is one street long. The island runs Inlet to Delaware and everything on it is nth Street, so "how far is that" has a real answer once the guide knows where you are staying. Set it once and distances everywhere become walking minutes from you.

Why does it say "~15 min walk" instead of a real time? Because it is a straight-line distance at 3 mph, not a route. The "~" is there because the number is a floor — the real walk is a little longer. The guide will not print a precision it does not have.

Why did it stop giving me minutes for somewhere far away? Past about 45 minutes the guide switches to distance. "68 min walk" is a number nobody should act on, and quoting it would imply somebody had checked the route.

Why is the Today page so short in February? Because not much is open in February. The guide would rather show you four true things than pad the page to look busy.

Where the information comes from

Who writes this? The guide is written and maintained as an authored corpus — 193 places, 533 people, 2,401 dated facts. It is not scraped and it does not aggregate reviews.

Are these reviews? Can I leave one? No, and no. There are no ratings and no review counts anywhere in the guide. Where you see a place recommended, that is an editorial judgement with a name behind it, not an average of strangers.

How do I know a fact is true? Every record carries where it came from, when it was last checked, and how confident the guide is. Look for the source line at the foot of a fact. Colophon & sources lists everything the guide is built on.

Why does this place have no opening hours? Because we have not verified them. The guide will show you nothing rather than a guess — an absent fact is a question, a wrong fact is an answer, and a wrong opening time is how somebody drives across the island to a locked door.

Something here is wrong. How do I say so? Every page carries a "tell us what changed" control. Corrections are published rather than quietly applied — the guide keeps a corrections record, and an item that has been changed says when and what.

Why does a news item say you did not verify it yourselves? Because that item rests on someone else's reporting, and the guide says so plainly rather than presenting it as its own. That line is a feature, not an apology: it is the reason you can trust the items that do not carry it.

Trips, pins and sharing

Where is my trip stored? In your browser. Not on a server, and not attached to an account unless you sign in.

Will I lose my trip? Closing the tab is fine. Clearing your browser data will lose it. Signing in carries it between devices.

How does sharing work without an account? The entire itinerary is encoded into the link. Nothing is stored on our side — the link is the trip. Anyone you send it to opens your exact plan.

Can I edit a trip someone shared with me? Yes. Opening a shared link gives you your own copy to change.

Offline and signal

Does the guide work with no signal? Substantially, if you visited Offline pack while you had signal. Your pinned trip, recently-read pages, the district you are in, and search all keep working.

Why did the "open now" badge disappear offline? Because it would be lying. A cached "Open now" from Tuesday is wrong on Thursday. Offline, the guide shows season hours instead, which do not go stale.

Why is there no forecast? The forecast comes from the National Weather Service, live. If it is unreachable, the guide shows nothing rather than a stale temperature. Everything else on the page still works.

Accounts and the game

What are Sand Dollars? The guide's score. You earn them from trivia, check-ins, badges and stamps. They buy nothing and cost nothing — there is no purchase anywhere in this guide.

Is the trivia made up? No. Questions are drawn from the same corpus as the rest of the guide, and each one can point at the record it came from. Answering them teaches you the actual town.

What is the Gull-dex? A field guide to the gulls, as a collection. Identify the one that stole your fries, and collect the regulars — plus the winter-only rarities that are only in town for part of the year. Some entries are deliberate gotchas: several birds people call seagulls are terns or pelicans, and the dex says so.

Do I lose my game progress if I don't sign in? It stays in that browser. It will not follow you to another device, and clearing browser data clears it.

Accessibility

Does it work with a screen reader? Yes, and that is tested rather than assumed. Every map and diagram carries a text equivalent that contains the same information in words — not a caption describing that a map exists, the actual content of it.

Can I use it without a mouse? Yes. Every interactive control is keyboard-reachable, and focus is visible.

Can I make the text bigger? Yes — Settings has text size, dark mode and a colour-vision adjustment. All three apply before the page paints, so nothing flashes.

Does the guide say which beach entrances are accessible? Yes. The beach access records carry whether a street has a beach wheelchair, boarded walkways to the sand, or seasonal roll-out mats — taken from the town's own chart, and footnoted where the town footnotes it.

Money and advertising

Is any of this paid placement? Advertising exists and is labelled where it appears. It is separated from the editorial recommendations by a firewall: there are categories that cannot be advertised against at all — accessibility, safety, heritage and emergency information — and that is enforced in the code rather than by policy. Nothing can be sold that cannot be named.

Does anything cost money? No. Nothing in the guide is behind a payment.