Private Leaderboard Classification

[Jeremy]

When my PR on a segment is from a private ride, it would nice to see the "private/virtual classification" on the leaderboard (i.e. where would I be if I made the ride public). Maybe it would be as simple an indicator in the leaderboard (i.e. my PR is better then all the times up to this position, even if I'm not on the leaderboard because of private rides); or maybe it would actually be as complicated as showing the leaderboard re-ordered as if the ride was public.

[Soren]

​​Thanks for submitting your idea. It has been reviewed by our moderation team and is now open to voting. I do want to point out that the word "virtual" may be interpreted differently and associated with our virtual ride/run segments. Is there any other word you might want to substitute this with?

[Jeremy]

Maybe “private leaderboard classification”? Naming stuff is hard.

[Soren]

I absolutely agree, that's why I didn't suggest anything myself 🙊 I'm going to edit your subject with that word instead. Thank you!

[afromm88]

I have my settings such that I default post my activities privately. However, if I have an amazing effort or result and get into the top ten on the leaderboard for a segment, like any self-respecting Strava user, I won't hesitate to post it.  Of course, I don't always notice when my time would achieve a top ten result.  I suggest a symbol next to the segment effort, similar to a crown or trophy, that indicates "this effort would make the leaderboard if it were public".  This symbol would only be visible to the person posting the activity, even if their privacy settings were such that their followers could see it. 

I'm no graphic designer but potentially a good symbol would be the appropriate trophy or crown but colored black or grey, rather than the standard yellow.  

[SETM]

I also want to participate in leaderboards and local legends without have to set privacy control to public. 

I have my settings to followers since I am OK with sharing images, maps, heart rate, comments, etc with my followers but not everyone else.

To show up on leaderboard you should not need anything else than maybe the persons profile name, age, weight, speed, distance, height (elevation), segment, and activity type.

One idea could be to add an option for private and followers privacy settings that when enabled allows only these specific data needed for leaderboards and local legends as an addition to the current privacy control selected

[Jan_Mantau]

@SETM Leaderboard positions must be verifiable by the community therefore not public rides shouldn't appear in the public leaderboard. But if they are visible to followers maybe the idea from @Jeremy can be expanded to them.

[danw]

I don't care enough about Joe Bloggs knowing I am faster than him to be willing to sacrifice my privacy in order to have my name appear above his on a leaderboard. But I would still like the motivation of knowing how I compare with the rest of the community so a "private" leaderboard and local hero status, in addition to the public ones, would be a welcome addition.

My suspicion, unfortunately, is that so many people would opt out of public sharing if they enabled this feature that the leaderboards as a whole would become devoid of any activity and therefore completely pointless. That's why, given the choice, I would consider allowing private activities to feature on public leaderboards (if those users wanted them to) with the map and other activity details simply being hidden. The activities would still be validated by Strava's internal algorithms (which would work a lot better if some basic GPS and HR data-quality criteria were imposed on new activities in order for them to qualify) and I would probably accept the few anomalous segment efforts that would fall through that net as a fair price to pay to protect people's privacy. Sharing some very generic information about the segment and the activity that it was recorded in such as "this segment was completed during the 7th km of a 56 minute 10 km run" could be made a requirement of adding private runs to the public leaderboard so that other users still have some useful context about the effort in the absence of a full activity map and all the other details that the owner has chosen to keep private. The key to making this work will be Strava sorting out their data validation issues and then - and this might be the hard part - convincing everyone else that they have done this!

There's a lot to consider in all of this and what I've suggested above definitely won't be the perfect answer for everyone - many Strava users clearly have different priorities to myself when it comes to the balance between data privacy and leaderboard validity. But in today's day and age there must be a way to make Strava's most famous and most popular feature work a little better than it currently does for privacy-conscious users.

[Jane]

Hello.

We wanted to let you know that your idea submission from August, 2022 regarding private leaderboard classification has received little support from the Community, and will not be added to our Product Roadmap in the foreseeable future.  The idea submission will be archived.  

Please note that your feedback is valuable to Strava. As stated in our Community Idea Guidelines, we receive many idea submissions each week, and realistically, there may be various reasons that prevent us from including an idea on our Product Roadmap.  

We want to thank you for taking the time to submit your idea and we look forward to your continued contributions to the Strava Community.