Agree, some common sense on that and segments. eg I once forgot to turn off the Garmin and started driving home, got a lovely KOM but not exactly fair. I removed but not everybody does or even realises.

If anything there should either be something developed on strava's side to look at these things automatically and remove them on the likelihood that they're not legit (in the instance you described) or some kind of community moderation.

Thanks for this feedback, @Maybenaught. It looks like that instance that you noticed has since been removed from this leaderboard. We do have some efforts and options in place to help mitigate bad data. For example, we automatically exclude some efforts from some segment leaderboards, and these activities will not count toward other leaderboards on Strava at this time, including in Challenges and Clubs. The athlete community also has tools at hand to manually flag activities and remove them from leaderboards as well. If these options aren't able to help, you are also welcome to submit a request to our support team to further investigate these issues. 

We won't be able to detect every instance of bad data, and we're regularly working to improve how we can detect it to provide better quality data on Strava leaderboards. Thanks for posting here as it helps keep this point at top of mind, and feel free to use the athlete-facing tools available to address these issues. 

Thanks!

Diana Wee walked 137679 km (now Aug 9: 94896 km) in the first 8 days of August 2022 walking challenge  https://www.strava.com/challenges/August-Walking-Distance-Challenge-2022 

Why it seems so difficult (or impossible) for STRAVA to create some common sense algorithm and remove such members and "records" from the leaderboard. It happens all the time. And manually flagging activities of such members is not possible if the profile is private.

The same applies to segments: E-bike riders or car drivers cheat cyclists, cyclists cheat runners, runners cheat walkers, etc, etc. And it's that easy: just select a wrong (lower) activity type and you're in first place or KOM/QOM of a segment.

 It is November 10th... there have literally only been 240 hours in the month... surely that is some simple math algorithm that could determine if these results were out of line. ... I mean... or maybe not... but 10 days... 24 hours... I dunno.... maybe someone could have run 1720,000 hours this month... I'm not a scientist. 

I agree that it should be a very simple matter to come up with an algorhithm to identify implausible activities. I see instances all the time when someone forgets to end their ride and keeps recording on the drive home, or where the elevation gain on a ride would require a constant gradient in excess of 100%. It almost never fails that when you try to flag one of these activities the profile is private. Strava could easily come up with a simple set of parameters such as maximum speed, maximum elevation per mile, etc to identify these activities as implausible and prevent them from showing up on challege leaderboards. Instead of just automatically flagging the ride, the user could get an automated email first suggesting that they crop or correct their activity before it show up on the site.   

Now because fake data is allowed, strava challenges are just a joke. E.g. in October and November swimming challenge there are some impossible recordings. If there is no tool at strava to prohibit these appear on the leaderboard, these cheating recordings make ALL leaderboard to look like a joke.

It is really annoying to manually flag the activities, and also if we get "Flagging content is temporarily disabled. Please try again later.", it is impossible.

I have been a Strava user for almost 14 years now, I'm a paying subscriber now but you still do a very poor job with managing leaderboards, one of the most interesting and significant features in your mix.

You count on the community to do the clean up, OK, but I'm trying to flag people who forget their devices on and drive back home with their car and I can't do it more than 10 times. 

Also, you should estabilish parameters for oficial leaderboards. iPhone, Androids and anything that is not a proper GPS device is VERY inaccurate and gives KOM for people who is not even close. Oficial leaderboards should have HR and Power data, or at least one of them, and not accept phone devices. You want to play KOM for real, take it serious.

You should also be able to flag activities in vehicles or e-bikes that (either by ignorance or bad faith) end up in traditional bikers leaderboards. This is easy to do. We have AI and lots of smart coding and algorithms, why can't strava improve on something that is key to every rider? Work it out to improve value, many people are complaining about this. It's been years.