More conformation you are a dick.

I would not have thought it's a difficult question to answer yourself? People like having achievements in their lives. We can't all be Tour level riders. We can't all be global leaders in business. Many will struggle in other aspects of their lives. Climbing (or even topping) a leaderboard can, at the most basic of levels, be a personal pick-me-up that says hey, you've put a lot of work into your riding and here's validation of that effort. That little rush can carry over to other parts of their lives. Failing to climb a leaderboard (or getting pushed down one) due to others not applying similar levels of effort, can feel like one has been robbed.

To people kicking goals elsewhere, it's easy to dismiss those fixated on leaderboards as 'petty'. All power to them for not needing such validation, but they shouldn't scoff at those seeking a fair measurement of 'success'.

To others, perhaps the answer lies in handing responsibility back to the community. A 'flag pool', where qualified users (whatever that might mean) earn the right to vote on submitted flags. Minimum of 'x' votes required for a flag to be passed. There are enough users who care sufficiently to flag, so probably more than enough prepared to log in and review submissions.

The above suggestion is made in jest ... perhaps!

Funny just got a strava 7th overall notification for a ride I did that made me think of this thread. Looked at all the people above me and I was shocked to see all of them were from a 500 mile race. Look a little deeper and most or all are on recumbent bikes (one was a tandem).

What's the thought on that? Seems a dick move (hah) to flag them since it was a 500 mile ride that's a ton of work no matter how you look at it, but obviously they are inherently faster.

Interesting and hopefully that's a feature they're tweaking a bit. Riding a loop a little faster should not be getting an auto flag unless you were riding through some KOMs at a much higher rate maybe?

I digress, was there an appeal process? Curious if there was a way for you to say the ride was legit.

It doesn't look like there is an appeal process, but you can do some things to try to eliminate data issues to try to correct the problem: https://support.strava.com/...rticles/360061896712

I didn't want to go through the effort of these data correction things, mostly because I couldn't tell from the data where the problem was - I rode with power, didn't draft, and didn't see any blips in the data that would otherwise make it unreasonable.

What is more annoying is that Strava can't get the auto-flagging right on rides or runs that are obviously way past human capabilities - I see this more often than not, with people logging rides in cars or riding run segments on bikes, and very obviously too...Like this one:

https://www.strava.com/.../7744321618/overview This guy even got a video posted he did this "run" on a bike...

my scalding hot take is that Strava should wipe the leaderboards on all 2:00 or less segments of all attempts with older or low-end GPS devices or older phones. GPS accuracy has come a long way since the Edge 500 and iphone 4 days. I'm sure there would be some haters, but it's not hard to squeeze in an effort on such short segments.

When I see a fast time on a longer climb recorded with an iphone, it is almost always an ebiker.

I have occasionally used my 10 flags per day allowance over a couple of days to clean out a gravel road climb that is used for shuttling mountain bikers. Someone once threw a tantrum from having all their ride flagged notifications that they went nuclear and flagged all legitimate efforts and marked the steep uphill (ie, going less than 15km/hr) segment as "hazardous" so that it is not eligible for leaderboards anymore. Something about caring a lot to pretend that you don't care a lot about strava...

I'm confused. I'm seeing you as KOM. ???

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It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

Correct.

Because I flagged it.
The woman’s “effort” was removed.

I should have taken a screenshot before flagging it, to show her “effort” in 1st place.
My bad.

She was supposedly ~9 mph faster than me or anybody else had ever gone on that flat segment before.
Which is totally plausible. Shrug.

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float , hammer , and jog

OMG. Strava did NOT auto-flag this activity.



https://www.strava.com/activities/9430474951/overview


I mean, 416 miles in 14:40 moving time, avg 28.4 mph
(total elapsed time - 50 hours!!!!)
Several dozen KOM's.


UPDATE - Now, Strava DID just exclude 43 efforts.
Not sure if that was auto-detect, or somebody beat me to flagging it.

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float , hammer , and jog