On my local hill, the MTB trails have been maintained and upgraded over the years, i.e. got their lines slightly changed and features added. Hence, the existing Strava segments and leaderboards aren't relevant anymore because the trails are now different, often longer. How should one go about this? Add new segments on top of the existing ones? Will this make a mess? How could the old segments be removed (not sure I can find their creators and make them do it)? Many thanks!
Answered
How to keep a Strava segment updated if the trail line changes?
+1Best answer by anchskier
The first question I would pose would be whether you feel the accomplishments of people on the “old” segment are no longer valid? Did they not post the fastest times on the segment when it was in place? Should that accomplishment be deleted because the trail changed at some point later?
My feeling is to leave the segment as it is since those people earned those spots and that hasn’t changed. If there is a new routing of the trail, you can try to create a new segment for the new route and see how that works. Unfortunately, it often does become a bit of a mess because there will usually be enough overlap, especially with the start/end points, where both the old and new segments will match both old and new rides. This often results in erroneous results in the segments.
One idea that has been posted before was to see if they can put an end date on a segment so it won’t match new rides now that the route has changed and then be able to put a start date on a new segment that would follow the new routing so only new rides would match it. So far, this hasn’t been implemented, but might be worth supporting if you agree. This would preserve the accomplishments of people who legitimately earned them on the old routing while allowing people to properly see their results on the new routing. Here is a link to one such idea: Add a way to address historical, inaccurate segment times on changed/re-routed trails | Community
+28The first question I would pose would be whether you feel the accomplishments of people on the “old” segment are no longer valid? Did they not post the fastest times on the segment when it was in place? Should that accomplishment be deleted because the trail changed at some point later?
My feeling is to leave the segment as it is since those people earned those spots and that hasn’t changed. If there is a new routing of the trail, you can try to create a new segment for the new route and see how that works. Unfortunately, it often does become a bit of a mess because there will usually be enough overlap, especially with the start/end points, where both the old and new segments will match both old and new rides. This often results in erroneous results in the segments.
One idea that has been posted before was to see if they can put an end date on a segment so it won’t match new rides now that the route has changed and then be able to put a start date on a new segment that would follow the new routing so only new rides would match it. So far, this hasn’t been implemented, but might be worth supporting if you agree. This would preserve the accomplishments of people who legitimately earned them on the old routing while allowing people to properly see their results on the new routing. Here is a link to one such idea: Add a way to address historical, inaccurate segment times on changed/re-routed trails | Community
+1Thanks a lot for your answer and for directing me to that segment retirement thread! I knew such a discussion must be out there somewhere but couldn’t find it by myself.
I’m with you on all your points, including that one about preserving historic accomplishments. My name comes up on those trails’ leaderboards too so of course I’d like to keep that.
Looking at message timestamps in that other discussion I guess my next question would be how come this hasn’t been implemented yet. I’ll add my support/upvote, sure, but is there anything else one can do to speed it up?
For me the segments are one of Strava’s killer features, it’s frustrating to see them lose their value on the trails that are the most alive and evolving, of all things.
+28Thanks a lot for your answer and for directing me to that segment retirement thread! I knew such a discussion must be out there somewhere but couldn’t find it by myself.
I’m with you on all your points, including that one about preserving historic accomplishments. My name comes up on those trails’ leaderboards too so of course I’d like to keep that.
Looking at message timestamps in that other discussion I guess my next question would be how come this hasn’t been implemented yet. I’ll add my support/upvote, sure, but is there anything else one can do to speed it up?
For me the segments are one of Strava’s killer features, it’s frustrating to see them lose their value on the trails that are the most alive and evolving, of all things.
There are a ton of ideas that come in through these forums and there are only so many things that Strava can or does want to implement. It isn’t a first come, first served situation either, so just because it has been around longer than other ideas doesn’t meant they will do it sooner. We, as users, need to provide a convincing enough argument for the addition of features to hopefully convince the developers to make changes. While something like this makes sense to use as mountain bikers, you have to consider the wider view of Strava as a whole. Mountain bikers riding trails that have been rerouted makes of a tiny fraction of their user base as a whole. Biking is only one of many, many different activities people use and pay Strava for and mountain biking on those kinds of trails is only a small subset of that one activity. It could also be a more difficult back-end change to make since it would impact how segment matching is done in their software and how leaderboards are managed.
+1Yeah, having seen the feature request list there and the number of votes that this one has got compared to others, I’m not expecting Strava to jump on it tomorrow either. Agree that the context is much wider from their point of view.
I do think however that MTB is far from being the only Strava sport where such route/segment evolution is occurring. Think road cycling, hiking, skiing… Roads, trails, slopes - over time they all tend to get rebuilt or new variants added. And those are high budget sports practiced by high value users.
So I think it’s more about realizing that since Strava is here to stay, such features also become important. In the early days no one needed this, sure, but the app needs to be able to adapt if the world that it serves changes. Maybe that’s a way to put it if we’re talking arguments.
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