Let us choose whether to approve followers or not, instead of having public or private profiles

[TrueDisciple]

Ok, here's the problem, which is also explained on another idea about leaderboards. A lot of the leaderboards have a bunch of fake activities on them, whether on purpose or not.

For example, a runner might get in their car and start driving without turning off their activity recording. And then a Segment has an unrealistic speed on it, and a new Crown etc. Another person can click on their profile and report that activity for review, but not if the person's profile is set to private. 

So instead of choosing whether our profiles are public or private, I'm suggesting that we could be given the option to choose whether we want to approve followers or not.

That way, we can approve followers only if we trust them. And then any activities we want to keep private, such as rides that reveal where we live or ones with pictures of our kids, we just set to Followers only.

I'm also suggesting, like I did on the other thread, that only activities marked as visible to Everyone would be counted for Segments and Leaderboards.

But the biggest thing is a slight change, and letting us approve followers rather than have a completely private profile. This would really help with all the unrealistic (hidden) activities on the leaderboards. And it would restore the integrity of the leaderboards so they actually mean something.

If you like this idea, please give it a thumbs-up! 🙂

[LandonE]

I agree, this would be a good feature to help with moderating leaderboards and would still keep a balance between privacy and access to leaderboards.

[Soren]

Thanks for submitting your idea. It has been reviewed by our moderation team and is now open to voting.

[kamoshika]

I came here to suggest the same thing for a slightly different reason. It would be great to be able to make my profile page public so anyone can easily see any activities that I've chosen to make available to everyone, without giving up control over who follows me and can then see all of my activities. I'm taking part in a big bikepacking race soon, and I'd love to be able to make my rides public so anyone can see them (if nothing else so that the race organisers and volunteer dotwatchers can see a more detailed GPS track for me than the one offered by the race trackers) but I don't want to have no say over who follows me and sees everything. Basically, make it so that users can allow public access to their profile page which would show them only activities that have been made available to everyone.

[zecanard]

I think profiles should always show public activities at the very least, along with basic information like About Me, and maybe achievements from public activities. I don’t get why Strava allows us to make our profile page entirely private, including public activities. That privacy setting should exist to protect Followers-only information, plus things like the activity calendar (the activity circles and bar chart).