Limit how many Clubs a single user can join to reduce "club spamming"

[mattalexg]

There is a subset of users who seem to join as many Clubs as they can, which results in many/most public Club leaderboards being cluttered with activity by people with no real relationship to the club (e.g. a regional/city-oriented Club whose leaderboard is always dominated by activity from other countries).

For example, the user currently topping the neighborhood running group I was just looking at is a member of around 575 Clubs and records activity exclusively in a different state. I am not sure why these users do this, but it degrades the overall Clubs experience for everyone.

Clubs should not have to be made Private to avoid this, as that places an undue moderation burden on the Club admins and discourages organic community growth. There needs to be a middle ground for Clubs that are in between the small, tightly-managed Private groups of real-life friends on one end, versus national & worldwide "free-for-all" public Clubs on the other.

It would help reduce the impact of these "club spammers" if Strava were to cap the number of public, leaderboard-enabled Clubs each user is allowed to join, and retroactively remove users from all but that number of Clubs if they are already over the limit.

Users could still be free to join as many Private & partner/brand-oriented Public Clubs as they want. 

[GabrielF]

I have joined a couple "local" clubs to help keep in touch with fellow cyclists in my community. That was the idea anyway. The club spammers have largely ruined the experience. The leaderboards are just a list of club spammers. The club's posts and recent activities are not local, I often can't even read them because I don't know the language. Some of the spammers have so many club memberships that their profile page cannot be loaded in a browser, so I can't even block them. I've heard from some small club admins that they don't have the bandwidth to keep up with inspecting and kicking a never ending supply of club spammers. So the club has to be public without requiring approvals. We need some automated way to address spammers. Requiring admin approval for every applicant does not scale. I think limiting the number of clubs users are allowed to join is the bare minimum Starva should do. Please cap the number of clubs! If not to address spammers, at least do it to fix the users with broken profile pages that can't load in some browsers. 

There is another approach that can help with clubs that are trying to keep things local. What if there was a new option to restrict members based on location. That is, applicants can only apply to be a member of "My Hometown Strava Club" if they have uploaded an activity within x miles of My Hometown. On the admin side, when creating or editing a club, I would enable/disable this new distance restriction. If it is enabled, I drop a pin on a map and set how many miles from that pin members must be. Say I pick 50 miles. Later, when a new applicant tries to join "My Hometown Strava Club", their Strava activities are then scanned for any GPS coords within 50 miles of the club's pin. If no activities fall within 50 miles of the club's pin, they are rejected. My local club has an automated way to actually keep things local! So if someone local wants in but can't join, all they have to do is record an activity closer to the pin. Say my buddy recently moved away but wants to join to keep up with the old crew. As long as anything in their Strava activity history is within 50 miles of the pin, no problem, they can still join. 

Another idea; by default, new clubs don't have a leaderboard. Make club leaderboards opt in.  It seems to me that club spammers do what they do primarily to show up on as many leaderboards as possible. So if my club doesn't have a leaderboard, there is no reason for a spammer to join. That way only performance oriented and competitive clubs have to deal with spammers.