Rider limit increase?

[cvcalhoun]

@aaronwelsh 168717 wrote:

Hi guys,

I was a 2016 FS participant, then I slept on registration last year and was locked out (I think I probably tried to register around 12/15 or so). I’m already signed up for this year, but on behalf of my fellow procrastinators, I wanted to suggest increasing the FS roster limit from 250.

As cycling infrastructure continues to improve and FS continues to be more popular, shouldn’t people be included? I don’t know the details, but it seems like the cost of adding more people is low.

More participants means more regional cyclists, more forum friends, and more fun…… right?

The problem with increasing it is that it quickly exceeds the limits of the software. Unless someone has the time and knowledge to program new software, we’re stuck with the 250 limit.

[jrenaut]

The rider limit is based on technical support issues. The web team is small and volunteer, and we didn’t feel we’d be able to provide tech support if it got any bigger. There is a more active effort this year to expand the web team, so perhaps next year we’d be able to support more participants.

[creadinger]

Also, if the 2017 Mileage list is any kind of indication (how did that data come about anyway? Is it all participants ever? There are 400+ entries). There are more than 100 people with 0.0 recorded mileage. There are enough No-Shows every year that if we do a better job of culling them off and getting actual participants on teams, that should help a lot.

[rcannon100]

All this would be solved if Freezing Saddles would just migrate to IPv6

[hozn]

So there are a few reasons for the limit:
(1) Simply supporting issues people have. Inevitably people will request help because their ride is not showing up, their photos are not showing up, they aren’t getting credit for riding with someone else, etc. When you have this many users there is just a % that will need help — and also use cases that find bugs in our software. Moving to exclude manual rides has helped minimize those issues, but this is still a concern.
(2) One limit we’re pushing up against that is motivating the 250 limit is that we can only make 500 weather-related API calls per day. So if we suggest that most people are posting 2 rides per day, 250 participants would saturate that limit. Granted, in reality the number of calls per day is probably less than 2x total participants. We could increase the API limit by buying commercial tokens … but not sure who’s gonna foot the bill there.
(3) There are also API limits for Strava itself, though they’ve increased the limits for the freezingsaddles application, so we could probably double our roster and still be ok from strava.com perspective.

So, for the above, I think (1) is the most pertinent issue. If we had some sort of nominal registration fee than (2) could be a non-issue, though I think once someone starts taking money from participants we have an entirely new type of activity going on and I believe there are liability etc. implications there that I’m sure no one would want to touch.

[Judd]

@aaronwelsh 168717 wrote:

More participants means more regional cyclists, more forum friends, and more fun…… right?

Not necessarily. The greater the number of participants, the easier it is for people to tune out and not form connections. You’d have to add a bunch more teams or dramatically increase team size. A 13 person Team is already pushing it for establishing camaraderie.

I’d be interested in what the original participants think since they’ve played with both a handful of small teams and with a large number of big teams.

[jrenaut]

@Judd 168753 wrote:

I’d be interested in what the original participants think since they’ve played with both a handful of small teams and with a large number of big teams.

Well OF COURSE it was better back in the day, sonny. Why, we used to bike to work in the snow uphill both ways! That was during the studded tire prohibition so you had to stick thumbtacks from the inside of your tires out.

On a serious note, kudos to aaronwelsh for not just bitching about the limited number of riders, but ALSO volunteering to help with the coding/backend.

[rcannon100]

@Judd 168753 wrote:

.I’d be interested in what the original participants think since they’ve played with both a handful of small teams and with a large number of big teams.

Freezing Saddles got lousy after the first few years when it grew in popularity and brought in all of these noobs. Oh hi Judd!

[Judd]

@rcannon100 168763 wrote:

Freezing Saddles got lousy after the first few years when it grew in popularity and brought in all of these noobs. Oh hi Judd!

I only said that I’d be interested. I didn’t actually want to know. [emoji26]

I actually rescind my interest in knowing through a public forum but will buy a beer for anyone that wants to share their thoughts in a non public forum.

[cvcalhoun]

@Judd 168765 wrote:

I only said that I’d be interested. I didn’t actually want to know. [emoji26]

I actually rescind my interest in knowing through a public forum but will buy a beer for anyone that wants to share their thoughts in a non public forum.

So you don’t want the views of anyone who doesn’t like beer?

[Judd]

@cvcalhoun 168766 wrote:

So you don’t want the views of anyone who doesn’t like beer?

Or soda or bourbon or tea or any other beverage of your choice. I’ll be drinking beer though.

[Steve O]

@Judd 168765 wrote:

I only said that I’d be interested. I didn’t actually want to know. [emoji26]

I actually rescind my interest in knowing through a public forum but will buy a beer for anyone who wants to share their thoughts in a non public forum.

Pick me! Pick me!

[SolarBikeCar]

@hozn 168725 wrote:

.
(2) One limit we’re pushing up against that is motivating the 250 limit is that we can only make 500 weather-related API calls per day. .

Caching the weather data and reusing it for multiple people would allow more participants without exceeding the API limit. I offered to help with programming and support last year but wasn’t needed. Unfortunately I don’t have time this year.

[Vicegrip]

I think the data is location dependant.

[hozn]

@SolarBikeCar 168779 wrote:

Caching the weather data and reusing it for multiple people would allow more participants without exceeding the API limit. I offered to help with programming and support last year but wasn’t needed. Unfortunately I don’t have time this year.

Yes, the data is location-dependent. A solution here would be to make a grid and “snap” nearby locations to the same lat/lon coordinates so that we could take advantage of caching (which we do already do) and everyone in a (e.g.) 10-mile radius gets the same weather data applied to their rides. This is probably as simple as decreasing the precision/scale of the coordinates, but I’d like someone with more geospatial knowledge to weigh in on that.

We used to use readable location names to help with caching — e.g. “Vienna, VA” — but that produced some really weird weather results for some people, so we switched to always using ride [start] coordinates for the weather data.

Of course, the ideal world would be to take sampling of weather at various points along the ride track, but obviously that would cost even more from an API perspective.

[Author]

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