Here’s a great new tool that aims to help keep Strava leaderboards honest.
The whole concept of the Strava leaderboard is based on honesty, isn’t it? As soon as anyone cheats, or accidentally leaves their GPS running in the car, or goes out in a hurricane, the leaderboards are meaningless.
KOM defender is a new service that monitors changes in the leaderboards of the segments you’ve ridden, and sends you a weekly summary by email, pointing out any suspicious rides. You can then check these out and decide if you think they should be flagged as suspicious.
What does it look for?
Apparently the algorithm looks for rides with anomalies in the cadence, heart rate, speed, and speed on uphill segments.
But do bear in mind that it’s new, and they acknowledge there is a risk of it identifying genuine rides as dodgy.
How do I sign up?
Just head over to www.komdefender.com, and click the orange button to authorise the connection with your Strava account.
You’ll then see this confirmation page:
So far, I’ve not had an email from the service so I can’t comment on what it looks like or how useful it is. I’ll post an update when I’ve got something to share.
Now that you have a couple of reports – what’s your thoughts?
I’d love to get some feedback on what I’m getting right (and wrong) and how the app can be improved.
Hi Martin,
First things first, the emails are being spammed by Gmail so you may want to check out a free service such as http://www.mail-tester.com. I recently used it for a newsletter I was setting up for http://www.denbighchoir.com and it told me that I needed to add a DNS change (something to do with SFP, or something like that?). Anyway, it assesses various factors and gives you a score out of 10, with suggested remedial actions for the points that failed. Awesome tool, and free too. Your email appears to come from somebody called No Reply – not very inviting!
The first mail I received said that there were no suspect segments. The second said I had not uploaded any more rides (but I had).
Thanks Al.
I’ll take a look at that mail tester tool. I assume that ‘being spammed’ means that Gmail is sending it to the spam folder. I’ve recently added extra text to the signup response asking new users to add the no_reply address to their trusted sender list. We also now send a welcome email with the same instructions.
Your first report with no discrepancies is not unusual, but I’ve no idea why the second would not have picked up new rides. If I look at the Strava data I can’t see anything obvious.
Thanks again for the feedback – Hopefully your next report will be more useful.