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news
Strava to flag suspicious dataStrava to automatically flag suspicious activities in hopes to improve leaderboard accuracy
Justice for the leaderboards! Strava has announced a new algorithm that will automatically flag activities with “too much erroneous data”, so you don’t have to wake up to that dreaded “Uh oh” email just to find that your crown has been stolen by someone going over 120km/h on a 'bicycle'.
In a post this week, the popular platform for sharing any activity, from rides and runs to skiing, has revealed that it is “updating its algorithm to make leaderboards more credible, and taking steps to proactively prevent suspicious efforts from appearing on leaderboards”.
“We know. There's nothing worse than scoping out the leaderboard for a segment you want to tackle only to see the CR, KOM or QOM is 65 MPH and thinking to yourself, ‘That must have been a car’,” said the company.
Strava also announced that it will be withholding from leaderboards any activities that have faulty GPS data or appear incorrectly labelled (we’ve all gone for a run and forgot to switch the app to a bike ride…).
Strava said: “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.”
Spurious data and counterfeit activities have long plagued people using the app. road.cc has in the past has received a number of emails informing us of people losing their KOM/QOMs to seemingly impossible rides.
Last year, on our live blog we told the familiar story of how a member of the road.cc team lost a KOM to someone who 'cycled' from Newcastle to London in six hours, with an average speed of 90km/h and hitting a max speed of 157km/h.
> I lost my Strava KOM to someone who 'cycled' from London to Newcastle in six hours
And just a few months before that, long-distance cyclist, world record breaker and road.cc contributor Matt Page spotted a trend of losing his KOMs to 'riders' hitting law-breaking speeds on motorcycles on the roads of Wales.
“Perhaps Powys Police should start checking Strava for those who flout speed limits. Multiple times each weekend I get ‘Uh Oh’ emails, so far the record is 180kph. I have no idea why motorcyclists have started using Strava, but I hope Mr Horton will sometime get what he deserves,” he wrote on Twitter, with the screenshot of the new KOM holder with a motorbike as their profile picture, and a max speed of 161km/hr on the ride.
Perhaps @DyfedPowys should start checking @Strava for those who flout speed limits. Multiple times each weekend I get "Uh Oh" emails, so far the record is 180kph. I have no idea why motorcyclists have started using Strava, but I hope Mr Horton will sometime get what he deserves. pic.twitter.com/0Qhio77dKy
— Matt Page (@mattpage24) September 19, 2022
Back in September, we had asked Strava what more could they be doing to stop people from using the platform in this way, and they said: “Being part of the Strava community is a commitment to respect: we respect each other, ourselves and the rules. When we all share mutual respect, we all win. Read our community standards here.
“That means that we rely on our global community to help us monitor the integrity of our segments and leaderboards. We ask our athletes to flag anything that doesn’t match our community standards – including mechanical cheating – which will be addressed.”
“Strava values sportsmanship and fair play, and we want members of our community to earn spots on the leaderboards through clear and safe competition.”
> Strava KOMS are being hijacked by motorbikers going as fast as 112mph
If Strava gets its algorithm right, cyclists who swear by the app could finally breath a sigh of relief. According to its new policies, there will be a new threshold for flagging and if it deems an activity to be suspicious enough, all segment efforts from those activities will be withheld from leaderboards until the activity gets verified.
Strava also said that it is “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”.
But what if I’m actually that good, you ask? Well, Strava says that it will do its best not to automatically flag you. The company said that it’ll make sure that none of Tadej Pogačar's efforts at the upcoming Tour de France get flagged automatically, although his ridiculous showing at the Oude Kwaremont KOM at this year’s Tour of Flanders, smashing the previous record by 11 seconds, did get flagged.
> Tadej Pogačar uploads Tour of Flanders win to Strava... gets flagged
If you’re secretly the next Merckx and one of your ‘true’ activities does get flagged, let us know…
Adwitiya joined road.cc in 2023 as a news writer after completing his masters in journalism from Cardiff University. His dissertation focused on active travel, which soon threw him into the deep end of covering everything related to the two-wheeled tool, and now cycling is as big a part of his life as guitars and football. He has previously covered local and national politics for Voice Cymru, and also likes to write about science, tech and the environment, if he can find the time. Living right next to the Taff trail in the Welsh capital, you can find him trying to tackle the brutal climbs in the valleys.
Latest Comments
- hawkinspeter 0 sec ago
Ridiculed or is it just jealousy?
- belugabob 10 min 58 sec ago
I had to double-take the headline... https://www.kentonline.co.uk/sandwich/news/takeaway-driver-19-who-left-e...
- Rendel Harris 25 min 55 sec ago
Thank goodness for that. I don't suppose anyone would want you to. You certainly behave like one though.
- Eton Rifle 33 min 37 sec ago
You do see some utterly ridiculous examples of car use....
- Eton Rifle 55 min 54 sec ago
Exactly. Every road death is a tragedy but this is at the "twat deserved it" end of the spectrum, looking at the state of that car.
- Rendel Harris 1 hour 3 min ago
I'm not the editor of this article, nor indeed of anything on this website. One would have thought that didn't require explaining.
- Eton Rifle 1 hour 3 min ago
I think the answer is in your question. I genuinely didn't know he was married to her. It does kinda explain it. Disappointing, nevertheless.
- Daclu Trelub 5 hours 49 min ago
In a perfect world, we'd have a measure of how easily distracted someone is, as part of their driving test....
- Sredlums 6 hours 16 min ago
These products are nothing but ridiculously expensive and superfluous, and they bring nothing but bragging rights....
Add new comment
41 comments
It's about time they made an effort to clean up the leaderboards. I'm no KOMer (though it's nice to get a trophy every now and then), but if you look at the top 10 of any segment they are usually full of trash - it would be a full time job to clean them up. It's often not even intentional - people do a casual bike ride then drive off in their car picking up KOMs as they go, somone on our club ride got a bad GPS track and did 120kmh up a hill ... these are all so obvious it's shocking really they've never done this automatically (given segments were the original point of the app!)
Will this work? I am an overweight and unfit forty something and strava has asked me if some of my rides were e-bike rides, and those are just me tracking rides/mileage while commuting.
I'm a saddo that does a bit of this because I can't be bothered to take the juice to be competive racing. When I tried to get a local KOM, I found that after about an hour of posting the ride hat I had been 'flagged'. Most disgruntled after my effort, I took to messaging the person whom I had taken the KOM from, as it can only be them right?, but to my surprise he knew nothing about it. So Stava must of flagged it, although it doesn't actually say who did or why. I thought to myself that if can do it once, I'll do it again, i tried the next day and am now second!!. 😅
If your ride and KOM was genuineyou can appeal and send Strava your GPX file to prove it was not fake
Why would you need to send it to Strava, they will have already had it in order to flag it in the first place?
They request it. I have done this when I had a KOM flagged, I appealed and they asked for the original file taken directly from my Garmin. I don't know if thats to prove you havent manipulated the data which is possible with a text editor in windows.
People take Strava far too seriously......I suspect a lot of top times are dodgy, so what? It's not an official competition, so lighten up.....
Very true. If they wanted a real compition they would enter a Cat 4 race and understand where they really are in equal conditions. Blatant cheating by riding in, or on, vehicles which aren't human powered aside, there are also factors such as bunch rides, wind/ gale direction and motor pacing to consider.
People subscribe to Strava, so if they are paying for a product is it not fair to expect it to be fit for the purpose in which its designed?
There are so many more important things in the world right now (so people like to bang on about) So why cant people also enjoy things which make them feel better or are we all expected to just continue living with the woes of life eating at us instead?
What an utterly strange take. Strava has all these things because people like them and clearly care about them. If you don't thats fine but others do and they are paying for a service that doesn't even do basic stuff to stop cheats.
You can apply your logic to almost anything in life. Made a shit cake? Don't worry, you're not on bake off so lighten up. Crap day at work? Don't worry, there will be another one tomorrow that might be better. Lighten up.
I don't really care about Strava but I don't have any issue with those who do and I don't think its massively unfair for them to expect them to take some simple precautions to improve it.
KOM, QOM? Better just call it MOM, monarch of the mountain / motored up the mountain.
I think the 'mountain' bit is the really dodgy bit of the name.
LGBTQOM too then if we're getting all woke
Wot no Furry of the Mountain?
What does 'woke' mean?
I don't like something but I can't be bothered to explain or can't explain why.
Or in your case IDIOT.
You come on without knowing me and throw abuse about. And you call me an idiot 😗😗
Never ceases to amaze me how ironically thin skinned people who think it is hilarious to chuck LGBT around thinking it is funny or call everything woke are.
If i was being abusive I would have called you far worse. Your post is idiotic, ergo you are an idiot.
And if I am gay would that be ok? If I see it all as silly nonsense having all these things being so PC even if I'm gay and proud to be so?
Are you?
Indeed.
Well, care to tells us "off the back" because I am.
Yes. Are you? Or are you the im offended by proxy type?
Er... I think he already said that...
I gave up flagging the e-MTBers in the top ten on one of my local climbs, if you flagged one activity the preceding activity with 4 or 5 top ten worthy efforts would just pop up instead.
It might be better in future if riders were forced to select road/MTB/eMTB etc. because at the moment I think it just defaults to 'ride'? I don't really believe the e-MTBers around me really care about taking top tens on a road climb 🙄
With more and more ebikes on the road the KOM/QOM (as in going uphill - none of the flat pish) is pretty much pointless now.
Why I would say you must have 2 measurable dynamics. An ebike might get up a hill fast but youre power and heart rate would most likely give you away
Even that wouldn't stop a determined cheat. I did some experiments on a local 18% hill with my road bike and my (legal 250W) road ebike using my HRM and power meter: climbing at the same pace my heart rate was around 170 on the road bike and 150 on the ebike and my power output was around 450W on the road bike (it's a short climb!) and 250W on the ebike. The power difference would seem to seem a good way of spotting a cheat but I could, if I wished, simply change my weight on Strava to make the watts per kilo look realistic. I could also, if I wanted, turn the power assist down to the level of a strong tailwind so it would look realistic but still give me the extra 50W needed for a KOM.
Asking for heartrate and power data would weed out people zooming up hills on illegal 1000W fatbikes on the throttle but identifying people using legal PAS bikes would be a lot harder. Besides which it might not be a good commercial decision for Strava: the main reason a lot of people have paid accounts is to participate in the leaderboards and go for KOMs, faced with a requirement to buy a power meter and an HRM one suspects many might decide it wasn't worth it.
A lot of bikes come fitted with power meters these days. It isnt the ultra expensive item it once was. HRM can be picked up for a few quid. An apple watch or similar can also do the job so its not a big ask.
You will still get the determined who go out their way to cheat. Thats never going to change and that can be tackled later down the line but to dismiss doing anything just because of them is a bit dumb when the vast majority of fake KOMS are taken by cars or motorbikes. It wont get everyone but it will sort out the vast majority.
If anyone is still suspicious of those other possibly ebike rides you can can flag it yourself still. Sometimes they are easy to spot if the rider has a sudden super human burst of accleleration or 99% or previous rides are not in line with this new found athletisim where before they were taking twice as long. Things like that are taken into consideration when Strava looks at flagging rides. Did they do the same ride 20 times before and this is 200% quicker than anything they did previously for example.
I agree it's not the expensive item it once was (a 4iiii Precision single side for R7000 105 can be had from Wiggle right now in 170mm for less than £200), but it's a bit of a stretch to say "a lot of bikes come fitted with power meters these days." A few bikes do, a lot don't.
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