dddavid

as is their use of apostrophes

Wolfvegas

I have a tablet, how do I start a segment? Go to the start and then start my ride! total noob here

bikerjp

Didn't really see that, but didn't delve either.

RecceDG

www.raceshape.com

Strava rocks.

DG

veloviewer

English have never been my strong point! Please email me (link on the website) with any corrections that I can make to improve things. I rely pretty heavily on spell checkers but unfortunately they don't exist in development tools.
@bikerjp I've been a bit confused about the "percentile" thing since I was asked in another forum to add that column as the only time I've come across it has been in terms of my children's head size and weight but I take it those are based on normal distributions where as your placings isn't. Is that value actually just a placing percentage? If so then theoretically a percentile could be calculated from everyone's times but that would be hideously time consuming and API killing to find out.
Even if percentile was the correct term then I'm not quite sure why 13/499 would be 96th percentile rather than 3rd. My new boy's head is huge and so he's in the 98th percentile which would be the equivalent of being in say 480/499? I avoided stats at all costs during my maths degree so I'm more than happy to be educated to how this should be used :-)
In terms of your incorrect placings then see the https://veloviewer.com/blog/known-issues/ page and read "Optimistic placings" (linked from the top of your segment list also). Due to a Strava API bug unfortunately but hopefully they will fix in the new year.
Ben

bikerjp

Percentile is usually used to show what percentage of observations fall below a certain level. If your performance is better than 96% of the other observations you are in the 96th percentile. There is some discrepancy over how to calculate percentile but it's not that important for this application. The basic math would look like this:

If I'm 13/499 then I scored better than 486 others. So 486/499 = .974 or the 97th percentile (okay, I was off by one). The idea behind percentile is the higher the better (though not necessarily with baby head sizes because you wouldn't want your kid to look like a lollypop).

More info https://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/m.../quartiles.htm

veloviewer

Thanks for that. I'm not sure my wife currently agrees that the higher the number the better! Fortunately not a lollypop though, just a big lad.
I've tweaked the sums and now the percentile is showing as you say. I'm relying on my users to test it all for me :-)

Let me know if you see anything else that needs changing or if you have any other ideas I could implement.

Interesting thread this. One of the reasons I started putting VeloViewer together was to give a better way for comparing how well I had performed across all my own segments. The Strava placing doesn't really give you anything useful as it is not in the slightest bit comparable between segments due to all the reasons stated above. I also wanted to try and give something useful to those people who don't have heaps of KOM's as this is something Strava doesn't seem to do at all. Of course most people do like seeing their placings but hopefully they take them in context.

I completely agree with short segments (be they up, down or flat) being of little value, check out https://veloviewer.com/NewLeaderboard.php where I attempt to explain why.

cd34

I think you'd want to do this based on time rather than placement. 13th out of 499 could be 30 seconds behind 12th, and 1st through 12th might be separated by 10 seconds. Based on the speed of the slowest riders, you might be in the 98th percentile, but, if everyone is grouped after you, you might be in the 90th percentile.

I don't care if I am #2 or #3 on a segment. If I am 57 seconds behind the first place, I know I have a bit more work to do. If I'm one second behind, I know I'm reasonably well matched with that rider on that particular ride. Wind conditions being a real variable in South Florida.

The Strava API is quite powerful - and once V3 is released, I think we'll see some much better third party tools for analysis. I wrote two different tools to analyze my riding - one to find riders that have ridden local segments within the last 60 days, and the other to track progress on segments to see if I am improving. I have an idea for an app I've been toying with to run while I'm riding, but, alas, time hasn't been on my side.

But yes, the percentile on veloviewer is backwards, but, it is easy enough to figure out what was intended. It is what inspired me to write my segment performance tracker, though, minor hitches with the API prevented me from doing it precisely how I wanted.

Terex

You guys are right. It is confusing to many people. Clearer to just say "top 3 percent" or whatever - like the politicians.

refthimos

First of all, your app/website is awesome. As I continued to use Strava, I found myself looking for an easy way to look at segments that I had not ridden in a while (e.g. out-of-town segments) and better compare performance across segments and voila you did it with your app. Great stuff!

The most significant comment I have is that your app displays position without taking into account ties. For instance, if I am #14 on the Strava leaderboard, with the KOM at 2:01 and 12 others all tied for #2 at 2:02, with me coming in at 2:03, your app shows me at #3 overall (presumably, on the basis that I am just 2 spots back on an "absolute" basis), which from a view of the Segments tab, can lead me to believe that I am a lot closer to the KOM than I really am. This also makes the "Position %" inaccurate.

ricebowl

gaming is not cheating. If they're on their bike and not getting towed. Legit as far as I'm concerned.

fly:yes/land:no

lame as far as i'm concerned.

bikerjp

That would probably make more sense but it isn't what Strava reports - although the data is all there and it could be done that way. Percentile is often used with scores on things like the SAT so that would correlate better with time. With a large enough sample, however, it probably doesn't matter, but not sure how large would be large enough.

st3venb

There is seriously a lot of whining going on in this thread... For segments where they run a light, etc... Lame.

For segments where they KOM using groups / wind / whatever else... who cares? Life isn't fair, and if you thought that a sport that attracts competitive people would be played on fair ground... you're an idiot.

It just makes you sound like a ***** to come onto a bike forum and whine about that instead of HTFU and doing better, or accepting the fact that you'll never KOM on that particular segment and just to ****ing accept it.

fly:yes/land:no

st3venb

veloviewer

That's the biggest problem that I have with the site too (and yes % pos is then effected). This is the number one item on the known issues list (https://veloviewer.com/blog/known-issues/) and is down to the Strava api that I use to get placing returning the wrong value. The Strava guys were unaware of this bug until I pointed it out to them and they say it will be fixed in their V3 of the API that is due for release next year. Not sure if any of you were on the original stravaviewer.com site I had but that used to work out your position based on the leaderboard api (which returns the leaderboard 50 places at a time). This did result in the correct placing but some of your US segments have got 1000's of riders having ridden them which would require hammering their API whenever I wanted to check just a single place to see if it has changed. its only really a problem on the shorter segments where more ties on time occur but when you understand how Strava trigger the start and finish points of your ride through a segment you realise that can be a good few seconds out and hence possibly a number of placings in either direction.

BillyD

Let's tone it down in here, gents.

fly:yes/land:no

feel free to delete mine if you want, billyd. it was kind of tongue in cheek meme, but seems a bit more intense when followed by a post calling me a *****.

cd34

I rode a segment with another rider. I led, he drafted (and had his results removed). I used Android which appears to poll every 3-6 seconds for position and he used a ForeRunner 305(?). Even though he followed me, he beat my time on the segment, and on another segment we rode. I think raceshape used to try to figure this out to see legitimately how far you were behind the KOM based on the recording 'lag'.

V3 supposedly fixes a lot of issues, but, makes it much harder to write single-page apps. Even my tweetbot got throttled by their API and it was only checking to see if I had ridden, though, perhaps a bit aggressively.

Even though they send through the position number incorrectly, the time that they are sending in the JSON response is their 'corrected' time. So, with a condition check to see if the current time matches the prior segment time and a tiny bit of ugly code, you could replicate their leaderboard.

Seattle Forrest

No it isn't!!!

svtmike

I love it.

4 pages of hand-wringing, postulating, reverse engineering, and general whatnot about .... average speed.

pallen

No, no gotcha, just encouraging everyone to care less.

Yes, it would be lame for someone to go through on a moped and screw up the data, but that's part of having an open public data service like this. But anything anyone does on a bike is fair game. If it happens, I won't really be upset.

I have some KOMs I got on windy days because many of the segments I ride are on my commute. I ride them every day. My odds of getting the KOM are decent on my route to and from work because if there's a day with perfect wind conditions, I'm probably going to be riding. There is one day I had to drive and it was really windy and someone stole my KOM. That sucked, but I laughed because its funny - not something to get all worked up over and declare that Strava is lame.

Wolfvegas

can you guys answer my question?

pallen

To make a new segment, go ride it with a supported GPS device - Garmin or cell phone app. Then log into Strava and upload your ride. (or it will already be there if yo used a cell phone app). From the ride, at the bottom where all the segments are, there's an option to create a new segment. From there, you set the beginning and end point of the segment.