Keeping Leaderbords Clean

I absolutely agree with you. Leaderboards are the most valuable treasure of Strava. But they are still (!) not able to keep them clean from Eletric aided bikers. And there are a lot of them who give a fuss about the correct activity type. So sometimes I have to flag a dozen or more actives. This is a service which is very time-consuming. It is a service that keeps Strava attractive for serious riders. But Strava does not seem to be interested in correct leaderboards. Why do long strava members (I am here since 2013!) with a big follower-base also have those limits in flagging false rides?

Hi willz,

Thank you for your post and for bringing up this topic.  I agree with @tranquillity that segment leaderboards are a valuable treasure on Strava.  As mentioned, we do provide the activity flag tool so Athletes can flag an activity when they find invalid data.  We don't however, want this process to be burdensome, or expect Athletes to flag a large number of activities on a daily basis.  Here are a few points I hope you find helpful:

1) We do have an automatic tool that screens and removes many invalid efforts so they do not appear on segment leaderboards.  It does not catch everything, but we are continually making refinements and improvements.

2)  If you notice a Strava Athlete who repeatedly uploads invalid data (for example an E-bike ride or vehicle data) and is continuing to do so in spite of flags being placed on their activities, please report that Athlete Profile to Strava Support.

3) If you notice a segment leaderboard where many of top efforts appear invalid, it's likely the problem is with the segment itself, not with any of the activities.  Some types of segments do not work well with our segment matching algorithms.  You can read about that here, and here.  In those cases, we ask that you please don't flag those activities. We provide detailed guidelines about when we recommend using the activity flag in this article.  Please look for the information under the heading "Should this activity be flagged"

Hi Jane,

If only your colleagues in support were so courteous and helpful.

When Strava depends so heavily on its users to protect one of it's most valuable assets, it would be nice if users weren't actively hampered from doing so.

Unfortunately huge numbers of invalid efforts escape the automatic tools and everything else falls to users to correct. Perhaps if we could hear more about how these tools are performing, but from experience there is a constant flow of really obviously invalid activities that should be picked up automatically but aren't.

This is an interesting and important topic. The leader boards were the main reason I joined and continue to subscribe to Strava.
It rather frustrates me when I see so much attention being paid to new fringe features and sports and then I look at the only activity ahead of me on a particular segment is so clearly someone on an e-bike or where someone is driving home and forgotten to switch their garmin off.  
I realise that automatically detecting these isn’t especially easy programmatically but this is the bread and butter of Strava so all I would ask is that administrators pay utmost attention to the problem.

In the days of AI wouldnt it be fairly easy for Strava to just remove completely unrealistic times? I.e. on a running segment match the segment vs the world athletics world record on closest distance and just remove those that are below - unless the user is actually confirmed to be Usain Bolt. There should be no times under this given WR on any running leaderboard. If you as a user do get your record deleted that user then have to show its validity instead of others trying to report whats wrong.