….why?
I can see maybe flagging a segment if the time is way out – i.e. obviously done in a car, or a faulty GPS giving big jumps in the time.

But I got an email today saying that 3 full rides/activities of mine from last year had been flagged. They were in June, August and September, and all up on Haldon where I ride a lot. No real unusual activity, a couple of KOM times, but on trails that I was already 1st or 2nd on, so not a big surprise. Some off-piste trails on there, but ones that are ridden by quite a few people.

A case of someone trying to knock me off the top, so they could get the KOM? Couldn’t be a mistake to have 3 rides flagged in one day!

Anyway, I clicked the ‘these are legit, honest’ button. So we’ll see if they get flagged again.

tiny genitals syndrome….

our local racer/strava policeman flags peoples rides if they are faster than he thinks they are, then goes to check the GPS finished in the right place etc. 😉

Is the same person currently running second to your KOMs?

A rider not wanting the off-piste to be obviously visible to the proletariat?

Keep getting segments reported as dangerous for no reason which I guess is down to the same thing. Sad people with nothing better to do

@ Martinhutch – not that I can tell.

@ pixelmix – Maybe, but they’re all pretty well ridden. I ride with most of the bods who build up there, and a few of them are on Strava themselves. I assume they’d say something rather than just flag a ride!

I was mostly confused by the fact that all three rides were from 5+ months ago.

I’ve flagged a couple of segments where they were offroad trails but crossing roads a couple of times (poor visibility crossings at that).

I’ve flagged a couple too. Both of which go through a staggered road junction that is used by hundreds of shift workers 3 times a day, and also goes past my daughters school.

Idiots.

I’ve just had my 2nd Flagging for my SDW ride a couple of years ago! It doesnt give any description as to why the ride was flagged? Nothing dangerous with it AFAICS:
http://www.strava.com/activities/21946877/segments/391990357

activity has been removed from leaderboards due to this. I’m not fussed about leaderboards, just really getting on my nerves that someone keeps flagging it with no reason given 👿
Have emailed Strava as to why.. no response yet.

Got a reply from Strava:

“Sorry for the inconvenience. I’ve removed the flag from your activity, and it can’t be re-flagged by another user.

It was flagged by another athlete who thought that there was some bad GPS data during the activity. However, I reviewed the activity and thought that everything looked great – nice ride!”

There are some odd people out there on Strava…

With digital EPO and the like, I guess you can’t blame people for being suspicious from time to time.

Do Strava have any way of spotting digitally ‘enhanced’ rides? Bit of a pointless exercise flagging them otherwise.

They shouldn’t allow flagging of rides without a reason given. And then the flag should be reviewed before any activities are removed.

Yes I know that would make more work for themselves.

IMO

With digital EPO and the like, I guess you can’t blame people for being suspicious from time to time.

You can absolutely blame them. It’s a bit of harmless fun on strava, not the downhill world cup. Why would anyone get their knickers in a twist about another person’s times.

martinhutch – Member
Do Strava have any way of spotting digitally ‘enhanced’ rides? Bit of a pointless exercise flagging them otherwise.

Yup, you can find little blips in the speed every so often iirc

I was mostly confused by the fact that all three rides were from 5+ months ago.

I was going for a ride locally a few weeks back, there was a reasonable hill and I knew there were some segments, so I checked it out, in the name of targeted interval training of course. The KOM time wasn’t unrealistic, it was about a year old, but when I looked into it, it was a 50 mile ride at 15mph – the whole thing, the speed trace was a flat line. Really odd. Flagged that.

The second place one was a bloke who’d averaged 12mph on a ride, except for a brief stint at over 40mph on this 11% climb. Flagged that too.

In the event I didn’t even break the top 10, but at least the KOM is now genuine, don’t see why you wouldn’t flag things frankly. Flagging legit rides because they’re slightly quicker than you is stupid, although it seems pretty odd the user has the definitive say over whether it’s real or not!

However unless it’s someone you follow then it’s likely the only way you’ll come across it is when you look at a segment leaderboard, which could be years after the ride was done. There’s a bloke with a blisteringly fast time up Winterfold from 2007, seems spurious, but can’t prove it, so it remains a target!

I was mostly confused by the fact that all three rides were from 5+ months ago.

I flagged someone on a section of singletrack that ran alongside a road – the KOM had an average speed of 28mph and the rest of his ride was on the road, so I thought that the chances are it wasn’t legit.

Do Strava have any way of spotting digitally ‘enhanced’ rides? Bit of a pointless exercise flagging them otherwise.

I was flagged almost immediately on Sunday because Strava was running on my drive home after a ride. Saying that, I did claim several KOMs in the process which probably sent iPhone alert shockwaves through the rather competitive IoW road-riding community.

People seriously scour the site looking for odd times???

I look at my times, my mates times and maybe the top 5 to see what’s realistic (assuming I’m not in it).

People seriously scour the site looking for odd times???

I don’t but after uploading a ride, and your checking times you do spot them.

The second place one was a bloke who’d averaged 12mph on a ride, except for a brief stint at over 40mph on this 11% climb. Flagged that too.

I’ll do the same, its pretty obvious when some one has recorded the drive home.

People seriously scour the site looking for odd times???

Not sure. You’d hope there’s a search engine looking for anomalies.

I look at my times, my mates times and maybe the top 5 to see what’s realistic (assuming I’m not in it).

The only times I’ve flagged anything I’ve been doing exactly that.

People seriously scour the site looking for odd times???

No, if I come 3rd in a segment, I look at the top two, which periodically will show errors. Veloviewer makes it obvious too often, by showing your variance from the KOM.

There’s a local segment thats been flagged twice it runs parallel to a stretch of the M4 and hence got called “M4 Climb” some silly bugger keeps flagging this innocuous little segment as dangerous (see), like the roadies of Berkshire are TTing on a motorway FFS…

I seldom look at the top times on any segment, its not an area of the leaderboards I normally inhabit, but I suppose there must be some who still treat Strava as “Serious” competition rather than a basic training tool/performance benchmark…

A good friend is seriously into the fully faired recumbent bicycles and gets all his Strava times flagged by vigilant roadies. It is a rocket ship but there no rules that Strava times have to be set on a UCI approved machine…

The KOM time wasn’t unrealistic, it was about a year old, but when I looked into it, it was a 50 mile ride at 15mph – the whole thing, the speed trace was a flat line. Really odd. Flagged that.

i imported some GPX files from mapmyride into strava and it applied the average speed to the entire ride. I deleted it as it had bagged a few improbable KoM’s

Must be the same thing then, was odd!

I suppose there must be some who still treat Strava as “Serious” competition rather than a basic training tool/performance benchmark…

It’s not so much taking it too seriously, but if I’m second on a segment, and the KOM was someone who left their GPS running when they hopped in the car, there’s a button there, why wouldn’t you flag it?

There’s a local segment thats been flagged twice it runs parallel to a stretch of the M4 and hence got called “M4 Climb” some silly bugger keeps flagging this innocuous little segment as dangerous (see), like the roadies of Berkshire are TTing on a motorway FFS…

This was flagged as dangerous near me – it’s an A-road between two roundabouts, 0.6 miles, slightly downhill, very wide, perfect visibility. Couldn’t be less dangerous FFS! Unflagged at the moment, but keeps coming and going!

can anyone explain why this happens?

how can the average be more than the max speed?

Going back to the original question,

Flagging activities on Strava…. ….why?

I can see maybe flagging a segment if the time is way out – i.e. obviously done in a car, or a faulty GPS giving big jumps in the time.

But I got an email today saying that 3 full rides/activities of mine from last year had been flagged

AFAIK, you can’t flag a segment of someone’s ride, so if you think there’s a blip in their data, you can only flag the whole ride.

I’ve just noticed I have a data blip giving me an unrealistic KOM on a tiny climb in the middle of an otherwise kosher ride. Guess I should really set the ride as private. Bit annoying as the rest of the data looks fine and I set quite a few decent PRs!

I’ve had a run flagged, which was fair enough as it was done on my MTB and I’d selected the wrong activity 😳

I’d certainly flag someone else’s activity if I thought it was clearly incorrect.

Strava can remove a single segment from a ride if you ask them, the whole ride doesn’t have to be removed.

dirtyrider, silly short segments or bad gps data from the segment maker can make all the segment data wrong.
Try making the seg again, if you have a reliable gps device and see what happens.

Dirtyrider, the length (or lack thereof) of that segment is going to cause problems. It might also be that Strava uses the max speed from your GPS but the average is calculated when it corrects your data using its maps.

Elliot100, the whole ride gets flagged, but Strava support can unmatch individual segments – they took out one segment from a road ride of mine where GPS blips had given me a max speed of about 120 right over some blokes new segment. I bet he had a shock when the leaderboard popped up!

Ask support if they can do the same, the couple of times I’ve contacted them they’ve been really helpful.

can anyone explain why this happens?

Because it’s a ridiculously short segment anomolies tend to stand out. I’d guess that the GPS points were almost (or even more than) as far appart as the length of the segment, and IIRC STRAVA doesnt interpolate between points to determine a start/finish, just picks the nearest.

So average speed between two points on the GPS trace would give the ‘max’ speed, then strava takes the time taken between those and the length of the segment and claculates an average which will be higher if the GPS points were outside the segment.

strava (and all the other websites) are a waste of time.

the best trails are the best because no-one else knows about them.

some of my favourite cheeky trails are getting hammered this year. why? Strava.

who gives a toss why someone flags a ‘ride’ on the internet.

ride bikes, drink brown booze, and forget the internet for just 10 minutes.

Thanks lightman + timb34, I shall ask them.

the best trails are the best because no-one else knows about them.

Why? Is that like liking bands because no one else does?

wbss – Member – Block User – Quote
strava (and all the other websites) are a waste of time.

the best trails are the best because no-one else knows about them.

some of my favourite cheeky trails are getting hammered this year. why? Strava.

who gives a toss why someone flags a ‘ride’ on the internet.

ride bikes, drink brown booze, and forget the internet for just 10 minutes.

POSTED 6 MINUTES AGO # REPORT-POST

its a shame you didnt take your own advice 4 mins ago…

some of my favourite cheeky trails are getting hammered this year. why? Strava.

Not because other people are riding them?

They obviously weren’t that cheeky if enough people knew about them to end up on Strava

strava (and all the other websites) are a waste of time.

the best trails are the best because no-one else knows about them.

That also assumes that Strava only applies to MTB rides.

Here’s a similar one which got flagged as hazardous, despite being one of the safest road segments around http://www.strava.com/segments/3629113 – oh, and this one http://www.strava.com/segments/2830685 and this one http://www.strava.com/segments/2830687 which are the same road going the other way http://goo.gl/maps/1LzNL

Strava haven’t responded to requests to unflag it, so somebody made a new segment http://www.strava.com/segments/5532454 😉