Erroneous Challenge Leaderboards

[mercerkg]

Update from Strava

July 2, 2024:

Hello! Thanks to all who have commented and provided feedback. We're listening, and we recently made an update that will improve the accuracy of Challenge leaderboards that contain walk and hike activities.

We know leaderboard integrity matters and we will continue to iterate on improvements.

Could I also flag up a (possible) issue with the challenge leaderboards?

Some of the challenges seem to have implausible achievements that do not tally with profile data. For example, in the February run climb challenge there are several athletes with tens of thousands of metres of climbing at the top of the leaderboard. These figures don't correlate at all with the activities recorded in open profiles and I thought I would flag it up.

[Jane]

Hello @anchskier 

Thanks for your reply and the feedback.  We do have a system in place to catch and block invalid efforts on Segment and Challenge leaderboards, however it doesn't catch everything.  If you notice invalid efforts and you're not able to flag the activity(s), the best thing to do is to to  submit a support ticket and include the link to the Athlete's profile page.  Or, if there seem to be many invalid efforts at the top of a Challenge leaderboard, send us the link to the Challenge in question.  We'll be happy to take a look and investigate further.

[Jane]

Hello @mercerkg 

Thanks for posting about this.  If you are noticing invalid activities appearing on Challenge or segment leaderboards, please use the activity flag tool. Flagging an activity will remove it from leaderboards.

[mercerkg]

Thank you for replying.

I don't think this is a solution for the leaderboard problem. I don't have access to everyone's activity to flag an activity and (to be honest) have no interest in policing any errors or fraud.

However, there's an athlete on the run climbing challenge for march who is flagged as climbing in excess of 40000 metres but their open profile indicates consistent running in the less than 1000m climb per week and no recent week has a mysterious achievement of 35000m+ to account for this.

I'm not identifying them because:
1- It's not about an individual
2- Strava profile looks like it gives a different result to the leaderboard
3- It's easy to find an example on the leaderboard if you're inclined

It looks like (?!) the leaderboard has pulled data across erroneously (unless there's a hidden activity with 35000m of climbing (but I'd be putting this on my feed if I did it or correct the elevation if I didn't!)).

I'm not, personally, invested in the top of the leaderboard but it would be nice if the person who really climbed the most in March knew this and wasn't gazzumped by a data error.