Strava Overload

Emphursis

Slowbike wrote:

Emphursis wrote:

I live in the middle of nowhere and have made quite a few short segments up steep slopes that take anything from 20 seconds to three minutes to get up. Why? Because Strava is for measuring yourself against your previous efforts.

Then surely they can just be private segments ... ?

Emphursis wrote:

I do agree that in many places there is an excess of segments with near identical start/end points, but in some cases there are perfectly valid reasons. I've created a new version of a couple of segments because they have dodgy endpoints (one ended just past a very narrow gate on a cycle path for instance).

Ah - I can understand that - perhaps you should be entitled to edit an existing segment that you didn't create if you met some sort of criteria - say in top 10% of riders or ridden x%age of the total rides...

I've noticed sometimes during the creation of a segment on Strava, being very careful with the start/end points that the resulting segment has different start/end points - perhaps it lines up with the nearest GPS record of that ride... ?

I could do, but that would also sort of defeat the point. I do have some private segments (half mile sprints outside my house), but if everyone were only to create private segments, there wouldn't be any at all.

slowbike

Emphursis wrote:

I could do, but that would also sort of defeat the point. I do have some private segments (half mile sprints outside my house), but if everyone were only to create private segments, there wouldn't be any at all.

It wouldn't need everyone to only create private segments - just the vast majority!

Another alternative would be to prevent users from creating public segments that overlap with another one for >X%age of the distance ...

And we could do with club segments too - semi-private ones that can be seen by fellow club members ...

adr82

I'd actually settle for being able to comment on segments. There are so many times where I've just wanted to ask "What the f*ck were you thinking when you created this?!"

Frannybobs

foiled wrote:

What Starava needs is a filter that will hide all segments less than x meters and a gradient of less than x %

Easy!

In fact I might suggest it to them

I have segments on my commute into work that are flat or fairly flat but I have them to see if my speed is progressing in the different sections. There's no reason why these should be any less important than the big bragging of a 15% gradient - I'm doing it for myself as a personal gauge on how I handle the various sections. Similar to mile splits but I do it from junction to junction so it's not affected by traffic lights etc. Everyone uses it for their own personal reason, mine is competition against myself, others to beat everyone else, but who's to say the "right" way to use it? Nobody. Just hide the segments you don't want to see - you only have to do it once.

deadhead1971

There are loads of reasons why so many Strava segments suck.
Oh, here's a blog post with 7 of them!

http://www.scarletfire.co.uk/2013/04/7-reasons-why-some-strava-segments-suck-do-yours

Agreed, the duplication issue is a nightmare. Everyone needs to learn to use the HIDE button more often, as this impacts on the "popular" segments that show up in the explorer view, and which become hidden by default when you're checking out your ride details.

How many of the other reasons wind you up too? ;-)

adr82

Frannybobs wrote:

I have segments on my commute into work that are flat or fairly flat but I have them to see if my speed is progressing in the different sections. There's no reason why these should be any less important than the big bragging of a 15% gradient - I'm doing it for myself as a personal gauge on how I handle the various sections. Similar to mile splits but I do it from junction to junction so it's not affected by traffic lights etc. Everyone uses it for their own personal reason, mine is competition against myself, others to beat everyone else, but who's to say the "right" way to use it? Nobody. Just hide the segments you don't want to see - you only have to do it once.

I don't agree. What you're describing is exactly what private segments are there to provide, namely a way to gauge your own performance without caring what anyone else is doing. Commuters are probably the #1 reason for the proliferation of stupid segments in cities because they create segments all over the place that only make sense to themselves. Just make them private - "you only have to do it once".

Unless of course you do actually happen to care about your performance relative to others...?

dee4life2005

Maybe in addition to the "mark as hazardous" flag they should utilise their hide segment feature in a more intelligent way. If a certain threshold of people that have completed a segment have marked it as hidden then Strava use this as an indicator of a pointless segment and automatically remove it. This should allow the strava community to automatically prune the junk segments.

They should also have some intelligent way of dealing with segment elevation data ... as there is quite alot of segments with duff elevation data, and it must use up quite a bit of their support time dealing with "can you sort out the elevation data on x,y,z segment" type requests. Even if they just used their own elevation data for created segments it would at least, probably, give a more consistent set of data for a given area.

hatch87

dee4life2005 wrote:

Maybe in addition to the "mark as hazardous" flag they should utilise their hide segment feature in a more intelligent way. If a certain threshold of people that have completed a segment have marked it as hidden then Strava use this as an indicator of a pointless segment and automatically remove it. This should allow the strava community to automatically prune the junk segments.

I'm sure it already does this. Before I started hiding segments I already had hidden segments automatically chosen by Strava. I guess once enough people hide them, it starts hiding them for everyone automatically.