We’re Improving Leaderboard Accuracy ✅

[mal]

Good news! We’re updating our algorithms to make leaderboards more credible, and taking steps to proactively prevent suspicious efforts from appearing on leaderboards – so you can trust that the results you see are accurate. We're withholding from leaderboards any activities that appear incorrectly labeled (e.g. a bike ride getting uploaded as a run) or have faulty GPS data.

With these and other ongoing changes, we can better ensure your efforts will get the ranking they deserve and you can trust that the CR, KOM or QOM (plus all the other times on the leaderboard) are the real deal. These changes will be for all activities moving forward – we can’t yet capture past activities. And of course, you can still report an activity if you think there’s one the algorithm missed. Learn more about that here.

This is a big undertaking – we saw around 26,000 1-mile running splits that would have been faster than the world record last week! – and the work will be ongoing. Here’s how we’re committing to cleaning up leaderboards right now:

The Details 📝

✔️ There’s a new threshold for flagging: Activities with too much erroneous data will be automatically flagged – which means all segment efforts from those activities will be withheld from leaderboards.
✔️ We’re doubling down on catching bike rides (or downhill ski runs, car rides, etc.) marked as runs with new run-specific parameters that will flag activities based on their distance and pace data.

[Soren]

Thanks so much for this feedback, Ian. You're absolutely right that a 52mph speed up a slope should have been excluded. We are continually evaluating and improving the algorithm and I will pass this along to our team.

I'd also like to point out that if the person in question continually uploads activities as regular rides when they are using a motorized vehicle, please send us a support ticket so we can investigate, reach out, and take action if they don't correct their behavior. It is very useful if you also include:

• Links to activities that back up this claim
• Specific details about that activity that point to cheating
  • This can include all or some of the following: links to segments within the activity that are particularly troublesome, screenshots, zoomed in/highlighted portions of the analysis graph, comments on the activity indicating foul play, etc
• Links to and names of their Strava profile(s)
• Dates of uploads, if this is a relevant piece of evidence
• A timeline of events, if this is a relevant piece of information

The more evidence you can provide, the faster and better equipped we will be able to handle your request. Thanks once again!
 

[DannyDindia]

Your "algorithm" fails to automatically flag activities such as these:

https://www.strava.com/activities/9766107413
https://www.strava.com/activities/9362748285

There are thousands of activities like these - obviously made in a vehicle. They are easy to spot, and you don't need your users to find them for you. Unfortunately it looks like it's of no interest for you.

[Alex_Michel]

Soren, please stop patronizing us with copy/paste responses. Everyone here knows how to flag an activity. Telling users to flag activities, after you claim "We are continually evaluating and improving the algorithm and I will pass this along to our team." simply erodes trust in the integrity of leaderboard and your resolve to action user feedback.

Six months after the launch of your new and improved leaderboard that you are "continually evaluating and improving", and my local leaderboards are still cluttered with impossible feats. Like the first two activities on the following segment - recorded and uploaded after changes were deployed: 

https://www.strava.com/segments/22136894?filter=overall

No I won't flag them. Strava's AMAZING algorithm should take care of these glaring abuses of your terms of service (one of them, by a Strava approved PRO, btw.)

[Jan_Mantau]

The algorithm only works (if it works) for newly uploaded activities. Old activities have to be flagged manually.

[Alex_Michel]

It does not. I should have taken a screen cap. Positions 1 and 2 (now gone) were recorded and uploaded *after* alleged improvements were rolled out. They must have been flagged. Manually. By people. Not by 'algorithm'. Both were done by XC skiers, who uploaded their activity as a run. Well above word record 400m pace. At zero cadence, on snow, on a downhill.

Also, please scroll up or hit the 'Load more replies' button at the bottom to see multiple links to world record beating activities recorded and uploaded after summer 2023, when 'new and improved' algorithm was deployed.

[Ian]

Great to see that progress is being made, however, from recent experience the algorithms don't work as well as they should.  I just flagged someone who "walked" 8 miles in 24 minutes (top speed was 57 mph) and a few days ago I flagged a "mountain bike ride" that was doing up to 106 mph on a flat road (where the speed limit is 70 mph).  Yesterday I created a new segment on a bike path that runs next to a railway and when the leaderboard was compiled the top 5 places were all above 60 mph ! (I understand that some people like to monitor their commuting time - maybe there should be an activity of "vehicle" so these people don't feel the need to record it as a bike ride.  Clearly it wouldn't be appropriate for "vehicle" activities to have a leaderboard). 

[kimmo_ak]

Much appreciated and still waiting for the past activities Under AI control too (haven’t had much success flagging KOMs with one-minute/km pace segments and you know how annoying that can be 😄).

[zecanard]

This is great news, and long overdue. Hopefully, not being able to capture past activities “yet” means this is coming at some point.