[cyberpanther]

I created a Strava segment in my neighborhood and started to monitor it. I quickly found a couple cheaters and flagged them. Some I could tell some were just bad GPS data, such as riding a bike in a lake. I usually take mine down if the GPS is totally off. However, some were definitely blatant cheating, such as cycling at 80 mph when the road speed is 40mph.

[kenned3]

I gave up on Strava long ago and now only use it to "benchmark" myself. How well did i do on this ride vs the last time i took this trip?

The cheating on Strava is just shameful. you often see people with impressive KOM scores, but then check their ride history and it is pathetic and clear they cheated. Someone with 3 rides and an average speed of just 8km/h posting a 55KM climb up a 6 Degree incline? Sure...

As the other guy posted, strava's DEV's need to do more to stop this. Cross-reference the KOM with the rider's history.. or even just exclude things that are simply not possible??

I've had my GPS mess up, and sometimes post that i was traveling hundreds of KM/h and flagged those trips myself.. I would think that an average speed of 833 km/h should be a red flag for strava as well, but it wasnt?

Lastly, i fail to understand the whole point of cheating in the first place. Great, you got KOM on something, and everyone saw this, knows you cheated and so?

[smackeyacky]

I gave up on it, but for a different reason. Strava is basically "done" in that all the roads have been ridden tens of thousands (and even hundreds of thousands) of times. Take away the cheating and the ranking on climbs just becomes ossified over time. It basically started out as a fun activity and turned into a public performance that nobody else cared about.

There are plenty of other apps out there you can use to track your personal progress that don't have the "social" bit attached.

[notacoward]

Dealing with fakers is one of the key problems for any service like Strava. I have a set of ten segments that I do around town, and I constantly see bike times posted as running. I think most are accidents (e.g. forgot to change the activity type on their watch) but I've noticed some folks who seem more deliberate about it. BTW it's really not hard to tell. I've even seen a couple of times that were people in their cars, but those were even more obviously accidents.

To their credit, Strava tends to be really good about taking down times once they're flagged. OTOH, one of my own runs got flagged once, and the weird thing is that it wasn't even a particularly good time or anomalous in any way. If somebody wants to erase one of my below-average runs from the record, I think I'm good with that. :D

[nradov]

The thing is that Strava doesn't even try to automatically flag activities that are obviously fake or cheating. Their developers just seem completely lazy or incompetent. Like it should be trivial to automatically flag any activity that is significantly faster than the world record for that distance.

[hackflip]

I'm always loading my bike/skis/etc into my car after a ride and forgetting to turn off Strava for the drive home.

[jimmux]

My commute goes past a velodrome that sits next to a short, steep hill. Every day there were new times on that hill that would be difficult for some cars to achieve. It was pretty obvious that many people forget to turn it off, and never bother to trim the data.