Hi ​@yownos, welcome to the hub!

Tagging ​@-Charles- who might be able to answer / advise / comment. 

Thank you for the tag, ​@Jana_S! Your effort is appreciated.

And ​@yownos, welcome to Strava’s Community Hub! After reading your request, I want to make sure I correctly understand the details you’ve provided so that I do not provide incorrect information.

Are you able to link me to the two segments you are referring to so I can have a closer look? How to Get and Share Links From Strava

At first I thought you were describing unfair efforts on a Virtual Ride segment leaderboard, but upon re-reading your post I began to think you might be describing Virtual Ride activities that appear on non-virtual segment leaderboards. If you’re able to follow up with links to the two segments along with a few more details about the athlete(s) you’re referring to, I should be able to bring my understanding of the situation up to the same level as your own.

Let us know when you have a chance to respond!

Hi there,

Thanks for you reply . I’m sure the efforts are fair. Ranking them amongst real-life efforts is another story.

So, amongst other segments :

Camphin-en-Pévèle (aka Pavé Eddy Merckx or Pavé de la justice) - in the Top 15 : https://www.strava.com/segments/7010133?filter=overall

Combined sectors (Carrefour de l’Arbre + Gruson) - on the podium : https://www.strava.com/segments/609210?filter=overall
Hem - in the Top 5 : https://www.strava.com/segments/1541699?filter=overall

BTW (apparently unrelated to Rouvy), I see that a new user popped up claiming almost all CR along the Paris-Roubaix course, which TBH seems highly suspicious.

Cheers !

Thank you for the segments links, ​@yownos. Looking at these segments, I see that you are referring to Ride segments. Only activities which use the Ride sport type will match these segments. Activities which use the Virtual Ride sport type will not match these segments and instead are limited to matching Virtual Ride segments.

Looking at the top 5 athletes on each segment leaderboard, I have been unable to find obvious indicators that one of the athletes recorded their virtual ride using the Ride sport type, allowing their activity to be misclassified under the wrong sport type. However, if you see data that indicates this action took place, you have the ability to flag the athlete’s activity.

Please follow these steps to flag an activity:

1. Determine whether the activity really should be flagged. Please read our guidelines for the appropriate use of the flag tool.

2. Go to the segment page where you see the inaccurate segment time displayed.

3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the date (link) of the activity you wish to flag.

4. Once the activity in question has loaded, click the More Options icon (three dots) over to the left side of the activity page.

5. Select Flag from the menu that appears.

6. Select the appropriate reason for flagging the activity from the list - and please leave us as much detail as possible in the comments box - this will help us quickly and accurately resolve the problem.

Once you've flagged the ride or run, the athlete's times will be removed from the segment leaderboards for that activity. Once an activity has been flagged twice, the athlete in question will have to have the activity reviewed by Strava Support.

For more information see our article on how to remove an activity from the segment leaderboards.

​@-Charles- Here is one I found just a little further down the leaderboard.  Clearly a Rouvy ride: ROUVY - Group Ride: Vincourt to Gruson | France | Ride | Strava.  There may be others, but didn’t dig that much further down.  The person (Tibor Schimek | Strava Cyclist Profile) above has a long list of KOMs obtained using Rouvy rides on real-world segments.

When I looked into these segments two days ago there were many Rouvy users in the top 10, one even with a KOM. It seems these rides were flagged meanwhile.

It’s good that some have been flagged for sure, but hopefully the Strava techs can look into how Rouvy (or any other virtual ride for that matter) can be applied to a real-world segment.  This isn’t the first time this has come up and appears like it hasn’t been solved, at least not completely.  There should be obvious tags (such as the activity title saying ROUVY right up front) in the activity data that should be picked up when the activity is uploaded.

Thank you for the additional information. It looks like you are right! I did not originally observe the athletes you pointed out.

Sometimes athletes record their activities using multiple devices or upload their finished activity to multiple services which upload to their Strava account. If the sport type is not classified correctly on one of the athlete’s uploads, the activity will be matched against segments belonging to the incorrect sport type. As previously noted, it is necessary to use the correct sport type on activity uploads so that they are matched against segments of the correct sport type. Not doing so is a violation of our rules, as is uploading multiple public versions of a single activity.

In these situations, it is best to flag the offending activity to alert the activity owner to the problem. They may not see or acknowledge your first flag, so please be sure to flag their activities on at least two occasions before proceeding to the next option.

If the athlete becomes a habitual offender, please reach out to our support team so that we can address the issue further: How Do I Contact Strava Support?  When reaching out to our team, it is important to include specific evidence so that we are not left searching for information that supports your claims. We will want to review information such as:

• Links to activities that back up your claim
• Specific details about that activity that point to cheating
  • This can include all or some of the following: links to segments within the activity that are particularly troublesome, screenshots, zoomed in/highlighted portions of the analysis graph, comments on the activity indicating foul play, etc
• Links to and names of their Strava profile(s)
• Dates of uploads, if this is a relevant piece of evidence
• A timeline of events, if this is a relevant piece of information

The more evidence you can provide, the faster and better equipped we will be able to handle your request.

I will also speak with my team about the possibility of improvements to our machine learning algorithm so that virtual efforts on non-virtual leaderboards are automatically caught.

Hi,

Thanks for all your answers and comments. I had already flagged the most blatant one. I’ll make sure to follow the same procedure if I happen to find some more.

Cheers.