Pacific Northwest BAFS Advantage

[bobco85]

So, I noticed that I wasn’t showing up on the BAFS website leaderboard, so I followed the directions to reauthorize my Strava connection, and what do you know, I’ve apparently biked 4 days during this competition when it’s only the 3rd day of the year!

I had biked ~13 miles to watch the fireworks on NYE in Seattle, and somehow that ride counts as an extra 23 points (13 miles + 10 day points) on the BAFS scoreboard! Technically, for me the ride was on 12/31/2017 but according to East Coast time, it was on 01/01/2018 (I even joked about it counting as an extra day in the ride title)!

Here’s the ride: https://www.strava.com/activities/1335543423

For the sake of a fair competition, please remove that ride from my points. Should I change the title to the #NOBAFS?

[hozn]

@bobco85 170764 wrote:

So, I noticed that I wasn’t showing up on the BAFS website leaderboard, so I followed the directions to reauthorize my Strava connection, and what do you know, I’ve apparently biked 4 days during this competition when it’s only the 3rd day of the year!

I had biked ~13 miles to watch the fireworks on NYE in Seattle, and somehow that ride counts as an extra 23 points (13 miles + 10 day points) on the BAFS scoreboard! Technically, for me the ride was on 12/31/2017 but according to East Coast time, it was on 01/01/2018 (I even joked about it counting as an extra day in the ride title)!

Here’s the ride: https://www.strava.com/activities/1335543423

For the sake of a fair competition, please remove that ride from my points. Should I change the title to the #NOBAFS?

I can’t remove that ride If you want to delete it from Strava, you can. But honestly, it is within the rules. The competition starts at midnight Jan 1 Eastern time. So you can ride on Dec 31 and have it count if you’re out west. This has also affected start/end times for, e.g., vvill, so you’re not getting special treatment.

Edit: Note that this also means you’ll have to end any March 19th ride (if I’m remembering the end date right) a few hours early. So it goes both ways.

[LhasaCM]

@hozn 170768 wrote:

I can’t remove that ride If you want to delete it from Strava, you can. But honestly, it is within the rules. The competition starts at midnight Jan 1 Eastern time. So you can ride on Dec 31 and have it count if you’re out west. This has also affected start/end times for, e.g., vvill, so you’re not getting special treatment.

Edit: Note that this also means you’ll have to end any March 19th ride (if I’m remembering the end date right) a few hours early. So it goes both ways.

I agree that the ride should count because of the time difference, etc. But… how can he have 4 days ridden so far when it is January 3rd? Something else seems to be off.

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[jrenaut]

Dealing with time zones and dates is one of the most difficult things in coding. It would really be much easier if we could just count seconds since the beginning of time and correct for time zones only when you need to display for a person.

[peterw_diy]

@jrenaut 170773 wrote:

Dealing with time zones and dates is one of the most difficult things in coding. It would really be much easier if we could just count seconds since the beginning of time and correct for time zones only when you need to display for a person.

Um, you pretty much described what time_t and tzdata do…

[jrenaut]

@peterw_diy 170775 wrote:

Um, you pretty much described what time_t and tzdata do…

Yeah but it needs to be illegal to do it any other way

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[hozn]

@LhasaCM 170771 wrote:

I agree that the ride should count because of the time difference, etc. But… how can he have 4 days ridden so far when it is January 3rd? Something else seems to be off.

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I don’t know if I wrote that piece, but I believe the logic is truncating to the date value, which would count as 4 days — i.e. It isn’t calculating a time delta. I think we need to tweak that metric to take the truncated contest dates also into consideration.

Edit: the ride start dates just need to be converted to EST5EDT before the date is truncated.

Edit 2: Issue created: https://github.com/hozn/freezingsaddles/issues/34 — I assigned it to jrenaut, since I think he made that leaderboard — and doing the tz math in mysql sounds “fun”

[Brett L.]

Since this is really only going to affect rides for first day and for last day of competition for select few, would it not be easier to just have them modify their rides timestamp rather than mucking with the code?

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[bobco85]

Update: I added #NoBAFS to both the ride title and description. Hopefully this will remove that ride from the list (in hopes of being fair).

[hozn]

@Brett L. 170780 wrote:

Since this is really only going to affect rides for first day and for last day of competition for select few, would it not be easier to just have them modify their rides timestamp rather than mucking with the code?

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Well, the “mucking with the code” bit here is just for that “how many days during the competition have you ridden” metric, I believe. What we need to do is convert any ride start times to EST5EDT before we then truncate by date, so it’s a bug in the code right now — but should be easy to fix.

@bobco85 170781 wrote:

Update: I added #NoBAFS to both the ride title and description. Hopefully this will remove that ride from the list (in hopes of being fair).

Oh, that’s a good point; I forgot about that hash tag — But really the correct and fair thing to do is to leave the ride, because you’ll get penalized at the end of the competition. Just like folks over in Europe got penalized at the beginning of the competition (consularrider wouldn’t be able to start riding until 6am for it to count as Jan 1 by our clocks). The time zones even themselves out. We’ll fix any software glitches that make the days-ridden confusing.

[Steve O]

But will he and other far-distant riders be able to end up with 79 days instead of 78? That’s the question.
Not that 10 points will make any difference, but perhaps a special pointless prize for time warping could be awarded.

Also, note that Pacific NW and Brazil and England and Colorado Springs, etc. riders probably shouldn’t be on the Steve O’s Crazy Idea leaderboard, since their gnarly days won’t coincide with ours. I wonder if having them join another Strava group: “FS Diaspora” say, would allow for a simple way to remove them.

[Edelweiss]

Wait, Wait!

What about riders not in the EST who are in my Paul Revere Pointless Prize competition? For instance, if I ride in the MST at my midnight, am I going to show up as 2:00am on the official FS clock?
And IMPORTANTLY, if I (or anyone else) waits to get her daily ride in until 11:45pm, will I have missed the day-window, and have the ride count as the next calendar day, since it would be 1:45EST??? Say NO! This is a critical consideration for me, as I sometimes have to do these Midnight Rides to get my daily rides in! Do I have to time my rides around 10pm Mountain time to count as a Freezing Saddles ride day (turning green?)

Thanks, edelweiss

[hozn]

This really only affects the start and end dates for the competition. Tracking when (time of day) someone rode is always done in the rider’s local time zone. I agree that this is the only way it makes sense.

And this is why time zones are hard. Because often, like in this case, the time of day when something happened is important; we can’t just normalize everything to UTC, which is usually the simplest thing from a programming perspective.

[consularrider]

@hozn 171135 wrote:

This really only affects the start and end dates for the competition. Tracking when (time of day) someone rode is always done in the rider’s local time zone. I agree that this is the only way it makes sense.

And this is why time zones are hard. Because often, like in this case, the time of day when something happened is important; we can’t just normalize everything to UTC, which is usually the simplest thing from a programming perspective.

Which makes me glad I did not roll out of bed at 12:01 am on January 1 CET to try and beat vvil for the first BAFS ride of 2018! It does give me six more hours to ride on the final day! :p

[Nadine]

I agree that Bob should get to keep his ride, though he seems intent on giving it up. Just wait, Bob – there will be a glitch later that balances it out. It might even be before the last day.

It’s a computer glitch gift. Easier to take it now than to make someone “fix” it and then fix the next thing that happens to you that’s not in your favor… Take it! If somehow you don’t get an error later that penalizes you, and it looks like this ride is gonna make some kinda difference, you can revisit it then….

Miss you! And glad you’re still participating from afar!

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