For a lot of activities it's pretty straightforward to detect when an activity is suspicious and probably should be flagged. Often it's not even intentional, just forgetting to stop the recording and get in the car can be enough to have a malicious activity. Including those activities in the segment boards is pretty annoying and could be prevented. Rather easily, actually. if a human can see it in an eye blink, a machine should be able too these days. That being said, how could such a feature be implemented? for each activity type, define some static rules: e.g. max speed for (e-)bike over certain value, or clearly two different AVG speed can be detected on segments that are not downhill.. And those are just simple suggestions. I bet based on the data available to Strava, if you do some big data analysis, I bet one could define some very accurate rules. Apply these rules to the recorded activity and mark it suspicious if needed If suspicious, do not include the recording into segment stats If suspicious, notify the user that the activity type might be wrong, or that the activity probably wasn't stopped.. It could even be suggested to adapt the recording with a prepared shortened activity. Allow the possibility to the owner of the activity to confirm the activity was correct. if so, this could be reported to Strava and manually be validated by Strava. Just like now other people have to report wrong data. It would make the flow inverse and much easier to follow up (if the rules defined above are well defined). when the activity is changed, re-evaluate the activity. There's a lot of benefit to such an approach. First of all, we the users won't be annoyed by all these wrongly recorded activities. We love Strava. We love Strava segments, but it's to not much use if the data in the segments is bogus. Reporting can be avoided. Turn the system around. Keep the good users happy 🙂 Secondly, for Strava itself, having quality data is key I would assume. So get the data filtered when it's entered. Data cleansing can be hard, as a software engineer I'm well aware of this, but when done good and early, it can be very, very rewarding.
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