1/1/2016

Not to rain on the parade, but…we’ve got 238 or some number like that as participants this year, right? According to the data on the website, only 144 riders have posted rides today. Still an hour to go, but, having almost 100 not participate on the first day is somewhat sobering.

@vern 130725 wrote:

Not to rain on the parade, but…we’ve got 238 or some number like that as participants this year, right? According to the data on the website, only 144 riders have posted rides today. Still an hour to go, but, having almost 100 not participate on the first day is somewhat sobering.

No, it’s a celebration! More Freezing Saddles participants rode today than total players in any previous year. Go Freezing Saddles!

Note that the median number of days ridden last year was 58, meaning half of all players rode fewer than 58 days. So having 40% or so miss the first day is pretty much on par.

Some (a couple, few?) of the riders doing manual rides also aren’t being counted because the rides are misentered — e.g. elapsed time of “0” doesn’t work. If it were up to me, manual rides would be disallowed, due to the growing support burden (and general lack of verification, lack of geo/weather aspect, etc.). As they are allowed, though, I am going to add an “errors” section to the logged-in area so that users can see why something wasn’t picked up. So far I just comment on the affected rides, which works but doesn’t scale.

@cvcalhoun 130736 wrote:

A lot of people wait until the end of the day, or even later, to sync their rides. We’re now at 148 riders on the first day. I suspect that at least a few people still haven’t synced.

My rides did not show up until I made them public. If you check the box to make all rides private by default, they don’t appear to show up.

@bentbike33 130780 wrote:

My rides did not show up until I made them public. If you check the box to make all rides private by default, they don’t appear to show up.

We may wish to fix this — by requesting additional privileges in the Strava authorization . Or if people don’t want private rides to count, we can keep it as is.

I know some folks used private rides last year and did want them counted.

Apparently Strava changed permission scheme so that private rides are no longer visible by default. (This makes sense to me.)

@cvcalhoun 130786 wrote:

tl;dr I don’t see a reason to change the current system.

We didn’t change it; Strava did. I use private rides/activities quite a bit e.g. when they’re really not of any note, or I’m just riding somewhere and don’t want it public. Like it or not, Strava is both an activity logger and a social platform.

I would say by default ask for authorization to get private activities, and if the user doesn’t want their private activities accessed by Freezing Saddles, then only their public activities will count for FS. This is probably a huge PITA though OTOH from a privacy/security standpoint I think it is a bit much to expect everyone who is playing to make everything public.

Ok, system is updated to now allow participant to choose whether they would like the application to be able to read private rides. I can’t promise that we wouldn’t accidentally expose a private ride (e.g. it might win one of the pointless prizes), so caveat emptor. — But we do not expose ride names or geo specifics etc. on the website.

Anyone that has already authorized the FS app, but would like to have private data included, needs to go back and re-authorize (selecting the “also private” option):

http://freezingsaddles.com/authorize

Those that have already authorized the application and like the current behavior (where private rides will not be counted), don’t need to take any action. Except go ride their bikes in this finally-winter weather.