I really appreciate wheels&wings perspective here. It’s really inspiring to see how much community gets drummed up over this crazy game. @rcannon100, @Mikey and any others that concocted this thing, must be very pleased.
I’ve got a couple Garmins and a smartphone that can all record my rides, and so I recognize I am approaching this from a position of some privilege. But … here is my thinking on the matter.
(1) The data we’re working with to make this competition is about a lot more than simply points. Really the cool parts of the experience — the metrics, the photos, and the geographic data (and derived weather data, etc.) — are all tightly coupled with using an online platform. Manual rides really throw a wrench in a lot of the work we want to do, partly because data (like weather) is simply missing and partly because people are constantly mis-entering ride data. The biggest offender is people putting “0” for the time, which gives them infinite speed (and then leads to all manual rides being excluded from visualizations that involve speed).
I don’t think we’ll replace the main leaderboard, but I’d love to see a collection of first-class leaderboards using things like vvill’s freeze points as alternative ways to score. There’s always who can ride the most & farthest, but I think the competition is about more than that. And the “more than that” kinda needs the auxiliary data.
(2) For Strava competitions manual rides are always excluded. For Strava it may be more about trust. I think here we’ll simply trust people (though as this grows, people cheating is probably also gonna happen [as dumb as that sounds]), but I mention this because the precedent is well-established by Strava that manual rides and trainer rides don’t count for any competitions.
(3) It is a pretty small percentage of current rides. 5.9% of the entries in the database are manual rides; however, only 1.3% of the rides in the database were logged by users who only logged manual rides (there were 15 such individuals).
Anyway, we’re considering capping competition participation next year; if it grows as it has grown, there will be a lot more people interested than we can accommodate. I am hopeful we can find ways to be as inclusive as possible and keep the competition fun (and social), but suffice it to say that we aren’t hurting for participants here. If there are folks that would like to participate but don’t have a device, I’m sure there are people on the forum that would lend them a gps recording device. There are relatively inexpensive GPS options from Cateye and Lezyne too.
It does suck to lose a ride due to GPS malfunction. Some of those manual rides were definitely mine, because my 510 is starting to flake out on me. But I think this gets spread pretty evenly across the playing field. It’s just a part of the game. Sucks for Strava competition too. I’m pretty confident the leaderboards would all be the same if we removed the manual rides (I haven’t actually confirmed this).
Edit: I should add that I personally wouln’t consider it cheating to use something like ridewithgps.com to reconstruct a GPX for a ride that was lost by GPS malfunction etc. It’s still “manual” but it’s in a bit of a special class, less likely to be wildly inaccurate speed values, and has the geolocation attributes that allow us to derive weather data, contribute to heatmaps, etc.
.
