I’ve been a Strava power user for almost 10 years, and there’s a lot I like about the app. But there are also a few things about it that drive me crazy.
You may or may not know that since 2021 I’ve been in the odd position of being the only Strava account able to create public Zwift segments. One would think I could get Strava to at least respond to my requests/input since I deal with Strava + Zwift more than just about anyone else, but so far that hasn’t been the case, with emails and support forum posts going unanswered.
So today, I’m screaming into the Strava void once again with a short list of simple ways Strava could improve its experience for the Zwift community. Let’s jump in!
#1: Disallow Segment Flagging
Strava lets users flag segments as hazardous. They explain it like this:
Flagging a segment as hazardous is a way for a Strava member to alert the community of potential concerns. A segment can be flagged as hazardous for reasons such as road construction or blind corners.
Seems sensible. But the problem is, Strava lets users flag virtual segments as hazardous as well, when of course virtual segments are by definition not hazardous.
The Volcano KOM and Hilly KOM Forward are current examples of flagged Zwift segments, although the flags may be removed when you read this.
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While a segment is flagged as hazardous, it is much less useful to users:
- Goals cannot be set on flagged segments.
- Achievements (PR, KOM, etc.) are not awarded for flagged segments.
- Leaderboard and rankings are removed for flagged segments unless you agree to the hazardous segment waiver, and you must agree to the waiver for each hazardous segment you want to view.
As icing on the cake, there appears to be no mechanism for telling Strava these hazardous flags are incorrect.
#2: Allow Shorter Virtual Segments
If you’ve ever wondered why no Strava segments exist for Innsbruck’s sprints, the Leg Snapper, some of the turn-to-turn sections of Alpe du Zwift, or other bits of Zwift road, this is why: Strava currently requires all segments (IRL or virtual) to be at least 500 meters long.
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I’ve written at length elsewhere why this restriction is goofy, so I won’t rehash it all here (see this Zwift Insider article and my post on Strava’s support forum). But there are lots of good reasons why Strava’s minimum length requirement makes no sense on Zwift.
#3: Automatically Remove Ridiculous Efforts from the Leaderboards
The tops of the leaderboards for some Zwift segments are just silly, and anyone can see at a glance that the efforts aren’t legit. So why can’t Strava remove them?
Here’s a perfect example: Watopia’s Sprint Reverse:
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Yes, Strava could easily go down a big rabbit hole trying to verify efforts, turning this into a massive project where certain legitimate efforts could potentially be flagged. I’m not pushing for that level of performance verification. I’m just pushing for Strava to implement a few simple idiot tests such as:
- Holding over 100km/hr on a flat road? DQ.
- More than (for example) 50% faster than the current top 50 times? DQ.
- Matching current top 50 times, but with much lower power? DQ.
- Superhuman wattage like this #2 rider’s 1400W for 3 minutes? DQ.
#4: Overlay Zwift Map for Zwift Activities
ZwiftMap for Strava is a free extension that overlays Zwift’s maps onto your Zwift activities. But it only works on the desktop (browser) version of Strava. Here’s what my ride in France looks like:
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Strava knows when an activity comes from Zwift (Zwift’s name is included in the file). Why not overlay Zwift’s maps onto the activities? These overlays give Zwifters a clearer view of their activity since it’s much easier to understand your ride when it is overlayed on Zwift’s accurate map vs an unrelated South Pacific island.
And One More…
I know I said there were four ideas, but here’s one more for good measure: Strava’s “Hide the start and end points of activities no matter where they happen” privacy control shouldn’t apply to Zwift activities. And yet it does!
This is another topic I’ve written about in detail previously, so I’ll just link to that post instead of including it all here.
Wrapping It Up
I don’t think these feature requests or fixes are big asks in terms of development time, and implementing them would improve the Strava experience for all Zwifters.
So come on, Strava. Our fingers are poised on the kudos button… but you gotta earn it first!
Your Thoughts
Agree with my suggestions? Got a few of your own? Share below!
#2 headline should read shorter, not longer
Great article, everything makes sense. I love the Zwift map idea, I hate cycling in the strava sea. Isnt the best way of removing ridiculous times to disallow non smart Trainer times?
Hate the unrealistic KOMs. They definitely need to fix that.
Hello Eric, With regards to your third point, here is what Strava had to say on the matter when I logged this very issue, about Watopia Sprint Reverse, in November last year: “Please note that virtual activity data can be adversely affected by the rider’s defined weight, as well as other factors within the virtual space not enforceable by Strava. This includes areas of an activity where a rider jumps from one Zwift ‘world’ to another, which may result in truncated segment times. We won’t have any control over that data as those jumps come directly from Zwift.” Yes, they… Read more »
While that response from Strava technically makes sense, they’re just admitting that they’re not willing or don’t have the personnel available to police segments. I get it – there are bagillions of segments all over the world – but applying simple ‘rules’ to every segment no matter where it is would, in theory, make bogus times much easier to police. There’s no reason why someone taking a flat KOM at 55mph with no heart rate or power data shoudn’t be automatically ignored by Strava.
Hi Eric, yes these are all good ideas, but unfortunately Strava doesn’t seem to care too much about improving their product as they do about raising their subscription, maybe because they have no competition. Along side your ideas, here are 2 other ones: 1- Ability to mark a Virtual Ride as a “RACE” (only supported on IRL Rides), 2- Use AI to Filter KOMs on Segments (goes along with your #3).
They removed this feature. In the past it was possible to mark a Zwift race as a race.
The only good thing Strava serves me is being the central hub for updating my activities across Zwift, Garmin, and my Apple Watch; and this is all free. The premium service doesn’t provide much valuable analysis that I can’t get off Garmin.
Climb Portal Segments: Why is there one for starting in France and one for Watopia. The climb is the same regardless of the starting world.
Because the segments have to be mapped onto “real world GPS” positions, and you arrive onto the climb from different locations. You can see this quite well on statshunters (they didn’t used to show up on the strava heat map itself, but for some reason as of the last couple of months they now are there for me too … which is further irritating to be honest …)
The map overlay thing seems like a no-brainer. Also, doesn’t seem like it would take a lot of resources to make that happen. The segment piece for virtual segments seems like something that’s doable as well. Cmon Strava!!
How dare you call my 139mph sprint “ridiculous”!!!!
I wouldn’t be surprised if people are flagging virtual segments due to rampant fakery since it shuts down bogus PRs.
Agree. I’m also not happy about removing public segment creation from the public. Eric is of course well intended! But assigning this role to one individual is a silly way of limiting the volume of segments that became a problem initially. Give each strava user some limited number of zwift segments they’re allowed to create (5, 10?), or other constraint, and let’s go back to distributing this function as it is in outdoor riding. Much more interesting when segments are owned by users rather than the current very limited set.
I’m much happier with Eric’s sensible segments than having a thousand segments per ride, half of which were called something as descriptive as “Big gear only”
Yeah, I remember the bad old days of essentially going through and favoriting Eric’s segments and ignoring/hiding all the others just so that things weren’t such a mess.
Segments were a complete mess when everybody could create their own public version of each climb. This unnecessarily slows down Strava for no benefit and its much better with a more concise list although I do think Zwift Insider have created some unnecessary ones.
I think some of the fast times on sprints can also be caused by the Teleport feature.
To be fair, riding through, up and over a very active volcano is hazardous.
The maps are a huge annoyance for me. Strava friends who don’t use Zwift get the idea that it’s ridiculous to ride out into the ocean. It should be an easy fix on the Strava side.
I wish Zwift would tag rides as banded, and then Strava would eliminate efforts from those rides from leaderboards. Even people who are trying to be honest don’t know what to do with the unrealistic PRs they get from banded group rides (I know you can mark them as private but that’s not super obvious).
100%
Climb portals at other grade than 100% should not exclude all other segments from same ride
Because of the lack of interaction between Zwift and Strava this would be difficult as I suspect the agreement was Zwift put a flag in the FIT file and the Strava read the Fit file.
Ideally Strava should have implemented different co-ordinates for the various percentages and then that way they wouldn’t show up on the same leaderboards.
I guess Zwift implemented it as they have as its easier for them this way and they don’t really care about how stuff works on other platforms.
What happens when ‘late joining’ an event and it places you exactly on and over a sprint segment?
Probably the same as what happens if you start riding halfway through a segment in real life – it only counts if you do the whole segment.
This is an issue Strava have had for years. Auto flagging of dodgy KOMs is not hard and certain types of activity ie Virtual shouldn’t need segments flagging. It’s down to priority. I run a bit too and the amount of people who can do world record 400m, 1k, 1 mile, 5k etc. is phenomenal. If anyone breaks a world record then it’s an autoflag. Sorry Mo Farah/MVDP
Yeah, it’s no different than IRL Strava segments where the KOM is broken by someone who forgot to turn of their Garmin while riding home in a car. It’s not auto-detected at all, when you would think it would be easy setting up rules for bikes going 80 km/h up an 8% gradient… but they don’t care.
In an ideal world there would be far grater integration between Strava and Zwift whereby all the maps would automatically be visible to everybody and accurate Strava sections for the Routs and all times sections were included by Strava using more accurate start and finish points so these are consistent which isn’t possible when you create a section from an uploaded ride. Unfortunately this probably won’t happen as both companies have their own road maps and things they consider to be important to them which won’t suit everybody and we all have our own set of things we want changed… Read more »
Please add the IRL NYC Central Park “Engineers Gate Sprinters Sprint” to the Zwift map 🙂
Strava doesn’t care about leaderboard cheats, they only care about how much $$ they can pull in from the people who don’t care about the leaderboard cheats.
Strava once mapped me going Mach 3.3 IRL. I shared it with my fighter jet pilot friend.
After this came out, the radio tower climb was flagged as too dangerous.
And the Innsbruck KOM as well (https://www.strava.com/segments/18397965). I’ve already put in a support request to have it unflagged.
Strava gives one person the power to create Zwift segments and won’t even respond to their emails? That’s honestly just kind of sad. Thanks for trucking along even without the support you need, Eric!
You make so many good points here. In my day job I’m at the whim of a website we use for daily business and I’ve learned that no matter how logical your input is, or how patient you are, feedback is often thrown into a pile and forgotten about. Meanwhile, that company spends so much time and effort making constant “improvements” and changes that actually make the user experience worse or at best add nothing. Fixing old problems is always pushed to the back of the line while flashy new stuff is prioritized to gain new users. Everything you’ve placed… Read more »
Allow us to remove bikes from our garage! Sell them back for a small amount of drops.
Looks like the NYC KOM that you link to from that segment page has also now been flagged as hazardous.
I’m mostly okay with Strava… It’s lightyears ahead of the Zwift Companion App! Please do an article on improving the Zwift Companion App! Better feed sorting options. Larger “Ride On” buttons on the feed. Be able to see the full title of a Zwifter’s ride.
When you want to flag a segment on Strava, your choices are between “there is a hazard on the segment” or “there is hate speech in the segment name.” When you select the hazard option, a second menu opens up giving you eleven options for reasons why the segment should be flagged. The second option on the list is “False or invalid times on the leaderboard.” It’s not exactly a hazard, but it does make it appear that the flagging of virtual segments is probably being done for the right reason. Strava just has it buried in the wrong menu… Read more »
I did a little bit of sleuthing just now. I went to the “Sprint Reverse” segment leaderboard and flagged the RIDES with the bogus sprint times. Two of the three that I tried to flag were successfully flagged. I chose the “other” option for a reason and put in “unrealistic sprint speed on sprint reverse segment.” The rides were flagged and were immediately removed from the segment leaderboards. So, it’ll take a bit of work, but the Zwift community does appear to have the power to clean up the bogus KOM’s themselves if they wanted to. I have no idea… Read more »
I think if you have a ride flagged you can appeal and if successful Strava will allow it to be visible again and then from that point people can’t flag it again. Its a feature to stop bullies constantly flagging somebodies activities for no reason.
Hmmm. They will override a flag that is applied for a valid reason to stop people flagging activities for invalid reasons. I wonder if they beat their dogs when they behave in order to get them to stop misbehaving.
It’s the other way round – you can get your ride unflagged and when it’s reported you can’t do that a 2nd time.
You have to contact strava support and hope for the best (source: own experience, took about a week)
Does anybody know whether Veloviewer plans to add a Zwift Climb Portal Leaderboard? Is this technically feasible? Apologies if this has already been covered elsewhere.
It’s more my decision than Veloviewer’s, I suppose. I haven’t done it because every climb has both a Watopia and France version, so it seems odd/messy to have a leaderboard with two versions of each climb.
It’s super weird to me to try and hold Strava responsible for the (lack of) performance verification of data provided by Zwift. I think these arrows should be directed towards Zwift, but evidently they prioritise “fun in the game” over maintaining a sense of performance realism. It wouldn’t have been my choice, but it seems entirely deliberate. Agree with the other points though.
Eric, the thing I really hate is Strava refuses to separate outdoor and virtual rides in yearly total. Should be really easy to have 2 columns, or a separate tab like they have for cycling and running now.
The Innsbruck KOM segment has been flagged as hazardous too.
#3 applies IRL as well.
I agree with removing the ‘More than (for example) 50% faster than the current top 50 times? So yesterday I rode the Innsbruck Zwift route… the one with the lovely 1400 ft climb… in the pic I’m T. Jones… as you can see a valiant effort which I was pretty happy with… my time in the same range as the leading times… so as I was steaming down the decent so.eone posted a time of 15 mins!!! Seriously 7 mins faster than anyone else mind-blowing… so yeah ban those times or give me the equipment they use… perhaps add a… Read more »
Everybody can buy an ebike nowadays!😉