Links on Strava

Why We Made These Changes

At the end of 2024, we temporarily removed links in response to a surge in harmful spam that targeted Strava users with fraudulent and misleading content. These attacks put our community at risk, so we immediately took action to protect athletes from scams and malicious intent. 

We’ve been hard at work improving our spam detection systems to keep Strava a trusted space for users. With our upgraded machine learning model, we can better detect and block suspicious activity, so you can share links in the places that matter most. 

We appreciate your patience as we assessed the best steps for our Community moving forward!

Who Can Share Links and Where

Anyone on Strava can add links to the following areas: 

• Athlete Profile
• Club Description 
• Event Descriptions
• Activity Descriptions

Please note that ONLY admins of Verified Clubs will be able to post links in Club posts.

Using links can be helpful in displaying race details, linking to a personal tracking page, or even showing off your favorite run soundtrack.

Best Practices for Using Links (For Verified Athletes & Clubs):

• Similar to other organizations, we ask that Verified Athletes use their profile for important links. This is similar to the “Link in bio” feature available on other platforms.
• While links to external websites are limited, all athletes can use Strava links. Please continue to promote your club and events using links.
• For Verified Clubs, only Club admins will be able to use links in Club posts. If your club allows members to post in their Club, those users will not be able to use links.

FAQs

Will I be able to post links in other areas of Strava?

We’ll continue to monitor and reassess to ensure links remain both a valuable and safe tool for community engagement.

• Links that were restored for verified athletes and clubs in December will remain on the platform. 
• For non-verified users, any previously shared links will not be reinstated across any surfaces.

Do I have to be a subscriber to post links?

No, any Strava user can post links in the spaces listed above.

What about non-links that were removed? Can I start using [word].[word] format again? Will that content come back? 

We will not be bringing back text that was unintentionally identified and removed as a link. 

Moving forward, certain text combinations may get identified and removed as a link if it is formatted similarly to a URL. 

Why aren’t you bringing back all links to all surfaces?

Our goal is to nurture sharing and engagement across our platform in an organic, helpful, and least disruptive manner. To do this, we are re-enabling link sharing across some of the most engaging parts of Strava where this can be the most meaningful - on your profile, in club descriptions, event descriptions, and your activity descriptions. We think this is where links should live and can help our community stay connected.

We are moving to this approach in line with broader user expectations.

Can anyone post links in club posts moving forward?

We will only allow admins of Verified Clubs to post links in club posts moving forward.

With all respect, not recovering links for any users except of the verified few is a bad decision. My yearly subscription has renewed only a few weeks ago, I wish I had known this before that. 😠

And to be clear - I totally understand that mistakes and accidents can happen. I work in IT and incidents like this are part of that. But I absolutely cannot imagine that we'd delete our customers’ data and months after that, we'd simply announce that we won't reinstate the data. That's just not acceptable. Oh and by the way, Strava is our customer too. And I suppose Strava needs to feel confident that we wouldn't do any such thing - and if a similar incident happened, that we'd work our asses off to fix that, as quickly as possible. (And we would of course - because that's the only professional thing to do! And because it's basic decency, too.)

​@Jane, ​@Marya, please bring this up with the management. Strava seriously cannot treat customers this way.

Strava, please, don’t enshittify like most other platforms! You’re the last social network I can use, because there is relatively few ads and other slop, but this whole links situation is right up there.

Even if I ignore how this whole situation was handled, the plan you outlined above leaves many open questions.

Can we use links in posts? - not club posts, but regular feed posts. As of right now, creating posts doesn’t work at all (returns HTTP 500).

Why is the filtering of links implemented so poorly? The UI on both the web and in the app lets you freely submit content with links and then it silently strips them. Do I need to explain why this is wrong?

Moving forward, certain text combinations may get identified and removed as a link if it is formatted similarly to a URL. 

What do you mean “similarly to a URL”? A string can either be a valid URL or not. Just like your code currently converts pasted URLs into clickable links once submitted, it can recognize URLs and reject them *before* submitting the content. Anything that’s not currently recognized as an URL and converted to a link doesn’t need to removed because it can’t make any harm since it won’t be clickable, right?

Why there need to be two classes of profiles and clubs? (verified vs unverified) If you want to build communities then give people the opportunity to share and communicate freely and the tools to enforce their own community’s rules by themselves. Don’t turn strava into another platform where communication flows one way from “verified content creators” to “followers”. Almost no one on strava is verified so you’re effectively limiting everyone’s communication.

There’s about hundred ways to handle “surge in harmful spam that targeted Strava users with fraudulent and misleading content” but deploying a fuzzy “machine learning model” that can’t even detect URLs correctly to out right delete users’ content isn’t one of them.

With respect, your long term fan and paying user,
Jen

Exactly!!!! Jen you went through so many heads with this talk. Strava fixing stuff without fixing stuff but adding features that takes space on screen while all we want is what was taken.

Is there a need to constantly say:

LINKS IN POSTS

LINKS IN POSTS

LINKS IN POSTS

LINKS IN POSTS

LINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTSLINKS IN POSTS

So many arguments and talks about one feature that was taken away.

Again, links in posts.

Thank you.

“any previously shared links will not be reinstated across any surfaces.”

Tell us you deleted our data without saying explicitly you deleted our data because you’re amateurs 👎