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Introduction

What the Deathspot UG API is, who it's for, and the principles behind it.

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Deathspot UG is a community-led danger map of Uganda. It’s a Waze for danger: people pin places where others have been attacked or killed, the community confirms whether each spot is still dangerous, and volunteer moderators keep the map honest.

The same HTTP API that powers the public map is open to developers. You can use it to:

  • Read the map: every approved spot, with severity, category, time of day and sources.
  • Report spots from your own app, bot or form.
  • Confirm or deny spots so warnings stay current.
  • Flag problems for moderators.
  • Search spots and places in real time, with the danger spots near any place.
  • Check a route before a trip and list the danger spots along it.

Quickstart

Make your first calls with curl in five minutes. Start →

API reference

Every endpoint, parameter and response, with code samples. Browse →

Core concepts

Moderation, community status, flags and verification. Learn →

Recipes

Route checks, nearby alerts and live maps in your own app. Build →

At a glance

Base URL https://deathspot.org. Locally: http://localhost:3000. Self-hosted: your own domain.
Format JSON requests and responses. Send Content-Type: application/json on POST.
Authentication None. The public API is anonymous.
Coverage Uganda only: latitude −1.6 to 4.3, longitude 29.5 to 35.1
Rate limits Per visitor, e.g. 5 reports/hour, with RateLimit-* headers. See Rate limits.
Spec OpenAPI 3.1 in developer-docs/src/api/openapi.yaml

Principles

Anonymous by design. There are no public accounts. Visitors are told apart by a salted, non-reversible hash of their IP address and user agent. It’s used only to allow one vote per spot and to enforce rate limits, and it’s never exposed through the API.

Warnings, not evidence. Reports are community submitted and can be wrong. Show the spot’s status and moderator_verified flag, and link to its source_url, so people can judge for themselves.

Not a replacement for the police. If your app lets people report spots, also point them to the emergency lines: 999 or 112, and the National Emergency Call Centre on 0800 199 399.

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