AFAIK outsider support is fine if it's support everyone else is entitled to.
It depends. At the route planning stage, asking locals for advice is accepted. James sort advice from local riders for his route on one of the TCR rides.
Asking other riders in the same event tho goes against self sufficiency.
Publicly requesting it on a forum or social media I would suggest is against the spirit of the rules, if not also the letter.
There's also the question of receiving unsolicited advice. What happens if someone moans on social media "Ugh, can't find a nice route between a and b, that doesn't involve this section of horrible road"
To which someone replies unsolicited "try going via x, and then take the y road up to z".
It's also like if you are in the middle of a race, have a mechanical and tweet out "bugger, need to find a bike shop. This is all I need" and someone you don't know replies "There's a bike shop in the next village at $place"
Are we supposed to ignore this? What if we'd found that bike shop already and were heading there when we saw the message. Or if we didn't see the message but were going there? Where is the line drawn?
It's the same with how trail magic is accepted, as long as you haven't summoned it. If some dot watcher wants to stand by the side of the road and give out water and mars bars to a few riders going past, that is generally accepted as long as you don't know them, and as long as you haven't summoned it.
Tho if you listen to the panel at Look Mum No Hands on the wheel suckers podcast, there is some discussion that those at the front tend to be a lot stricter about this than those at the back.
So if you got a secret gratis consultation with some route boffin then that might be questionable, but since you're asking on a public forum everyone can use then I think that's OK.
According to the letter of the rules, if someone opened a LLC route making consultancy firm and charged a nominal 50p rate for a consultation, this would amount to a 'commercially available service' and then would be 100% kosher... In these circumstances we just have to make a judgement on whether the activity is within the spirit of the event.
There's companies specialising in training for ultra races, how long until we get route consultancy companies too...
My opinion is that last year's controls offered several route choice options but this year there's a binary choice: riders will either go clockwise, or anti-clockwise, or, I suppose, ride a longer route with more climb, for extra fun.
I wonder if this reflects general consensus from the dotwatching community that the event was hard to follow in terms of who was in the lead and who wasn't due to no easy to see route.
J