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Hi everyone! We recently launched an upgraded auto-flagging system designed to catch over a third more “impossible” segment times before they even show up on leaderboards (eg. The “run” that looks suspiciously like a bike ride or the “ride” that was clearly recorded from an e-bike or a car). We’ve also retroactively applied the new system to 34 million existing run and ride leaderboards, removing 6.5M impossible activities that didn’t belong in the top 10.

Ensuring fairness and integrity on the leaderboards is a work in progress, and we’ll continue finding and cleaning up suspicious results from the past as our process improves. But these updates are a big step. They won’t just make leaderboards more accurate – they’ll make sure your own hard-earned efforts are properly recognized and ranked.

This sounds great - it's been frustrating to manually flag all those “runs” clearly done on wheels, fingers crossed that this really cleans up the leaderboards properly! 👍🙂

Any chance to expand the cleanup to Best Efforts? As suggested here: 

 


I’ll be interested to see how this works going forward.  Past iterations have been useless.  Hopefully this new system is much improved.  I do wonder though, seeing activities like this one (Anchorage, Hillside Park / Anchorage | Hike | Strava) that is obviously including a good portion in a vehicle at speeds up to nearly 60mph.  Why is this kind of activity not automatically flagged?  Is it because it doesn’t happen to cover any segments?  The auto-flagging system should be applied to activities in general and not just segments.  If you see a running activity that has a speed of 30+ mph, it should be auto-flagged.  It shouldn’t matter whether it is across a segment or not.  This would help catch more of the false activities.  It could be applied as activities are uploaded rather than having to analyze every segment result for millions of segments.  By analyzing a single activity as a whole, you are reducing the number of operations since you aren’t having to dive in an analyze the 10-30 segments they covered individually.  


I cant believe that it took this long! Seems like something has changed with the dev team, for the better! I still remember back in 2016 when they unexpectedly dropped support for many heart rate monitors because it was deemed 'too hard to maintain.' That coupled with a complete disregard to add a auto flag system caused me to lose faith in the platform. Seems like they have woken up from their slumber and I’m excited to see where this new super charged dev team takes us.


I hope this works.  In terms of cycling, I’d LOVE to see a way to ‘verify’ leaderboard times with colors.  If you post a time that includes power, heart rate, and cadence values, then your name should appear in a certain color.  If you post a time via the Strava app with NONE of those values, then your name should appear in a different color.  The coolest thing about Strava was the ability to compare your times to others and pros.  But with so many people on e-bikes or running the app while driving it has made leaderboards pretty much useless and insignificant.  (Frankly, I think if you ride with others you shouldn’t earn a PR because how is it a PERSONAL record when you’re sitting on the wheel of others?)  


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