Most of the cities/towns I have run are missing and I no longer see the icon to show my completed cities. From yesterday’s run, I am seeing completed streets that I long ago finished as well as ones I didn’t even touch. Now, that I am looking further, the towns and villages where most of my runs have taken place over the years in New York are now being rolled up into the bigger Town of X so instead of seeing the say eight towns/villages that make up the larger town like I used to, I just see the larger town.
I’ve been waiting for someone to address this. I noticed it early this morning. I lost about 700 completed streets off my total and went from 26 completed cities to only 7.
the lifemap still shows the completed areas properly besides the past two days of activity that aren’t reflected on it but a bunch of my activities have just vanished from the logs
it’s truly a mess and each time I log on, I am just waiting to see what new problem exists
I have also noticed that this happened, and I’m glad you posted about it. I went from 4 completed cities down to 1. The 3 that disappeared were all small villages that reside within town boundaries. (For example, the Village of X nested inside the Town of X.) I also reside in NY state.
I have not noticed any issues with my activities going missing, but I noticed the sync time is slow. It takes around a day for my activities to change its streets from nothing to completed or progressed. It used to be instantly. I am not nor ever have been a subscriber, so I’m assuming that’s why.
@ddrebskyesq I think your street count went down because if you ran a city nested inside another, you got double the street completions. So when those nested cities disappeared, it removed the “duplicates”.
Several of my completed cities that still show up are smaller towns nestled within Louisville, KY. Those should have been eliminated under your theory.
However, numerous larger cities entirely independent of any other area have vanished. These include Hicksville and Plainview on Long Island in NY, which contain upwards of 400 streets each. There is no “Long Island” town to complete - that would be ludicrous as it would contain well over 150 separate towns which are separate jurisdictions and all have independent zip codes.
This is not a case of running streets which sometimes count double because of the wonkiness of having a town or city with three different parts.
This site for the past 2-3 months has constantly had issues. Maps constantly crashing (I now have to load mine 6-7 times to try and plan a route), longer and longer lags to process the lifemap and update data, now a bunch of data vanishing.
David, I notice that Hicksville and Plainview are right now just parts of Town of Oyster Bay in CS. Were they earlier nested cities in Oyster Bay? I saw Jim mention in the Water Station:
Also, the data hasn’t “vanished”, you still have all your runs. When the processing issues and classification of [nested] cities get cleared up, and your streets will return. In the meantime, it doesn’t affect your running or walking…just try to be patient and remember there’s one guy on the other side keeping this thing working as more and more people sign up and place load on the infrastructure.
I guess it is the same issue on Long Island which some of us have noticed. I am in the Town of Smithtown and all of the hamlets and villages that are part of it that once showed separately now just roll up into the Town. Thank you for your time and help!!!
There were ~600 incorrect cities in New York State that I removed. These were (CDPs, or admin_level 8/10 in OSM) places that sat inside the correct level (admin_level 7 in OSM), sometimes straddling two cities. The result of having them present in CityStrides was duplicating street data - run a street in one of these cities and they incorrectly counted twice (once in the small incorrect area, and once in the larger correct area).
Another side effect of ensuring the correct level is used is that there’s no 100% coverage across all of New York State. Prior to this change, there were large sections of upstate New York that had no cities.
No activity data was removed from CityStrides. Your runs/walks are still present. This can be confirmed by viewing the list of activities in your profile page as well as the traced routes in your LifeMap (either the standalone LifeMap page, or through any of your city pages - it’s the same data being displayed on the map).
I have had a lot more server trouble lately, so it sounds like you’ve been wrapped up in that mess.
Though, I have no awareness of any map crashing issues. Any details you can provide in a new thread in Support might help get to the bottom of that.
Yeah, there was a massive issue (detailed here) that caused huge delays on everything yesterday. The issue is mostly resolved, with the exception of non-Supporter LifeMap builds, which still have a massive delay. I’ll be adding some infrastructure to address that, but I expect that will take ~a day to resolve.
@JamesChevalier , it doesn’t make sense to reclassify towns like Plainview, Hicksville, Syosset and Old Bethpage as “Town of Oyster Bay.” All of them have distinct zip codes and school districts. Combining them makes it extremely hard to complete this zone. Nobody living there uses “oyster bay” as their mailing address. Running those areas never once created duplication with other areas. Plus apparently the Manhattan “nestled” community board towns are allowed to remain. That makes no sense.
Towns like Bellerose and Bellerose Terrace are effectively gone. There is no greater town to group them into. They are just effectively a dead man’s zone. They show up in my lifemap, but they are not anywhere reclassified.
As far as the map and site crashes, it is constant and I don’t know how to fix it or how posting in a support forum is going to do anything. Having to load and reload multiple times a day is extremely onerous.
I’m thankful for all you do, but it might be best to shut the entire site down for a few days or weeks and upgrade the software and servers or look into getting help. I don’t know if it is an effective use of your time to be putting infinite bandaids on constant issues that have been popping up the bigger the user base grows.
So, I’m operating CityStrides globally, which means I need to make decisions that are more systematic and can be applied to large areas. In the US, most states have their cities at admin level 8 in OpenStreetMap (my data source). New York, however, doesn’t have full coverage at that level … when I initially imported NY, it looks like I used 8 and then some wonky partial import that resulted in upstate NY being largely blank. I did a bit of research and found that NY has full coverage at admin level 7, which is what it was just changed to.
You mention that nobody uses Oyster Bay as their mailing address, which is typically a marker I try to figure out / point to when working on city levels. Since I only live in one place, it can be tough to get things right around the world - I try, though, and I listen to feedback from people who are local.
Yeah, for massive cities I add nested cities. Maybe the places in Oyster Bay were previously present as nested cities … The process I went through (which resulted in accidentally deleting the nested cities in Manhattan) removed all the places that didn’t have the correct admin_level 7 tag in OSM. It’s totally possible that more properly nested cities outside of Manhattan were also accidentally removed.
These nested cities only get created if/when people ask for them, and while I happened to catch the Manhattan nested cities being deleted (because they took a long time to delete, spreading out the agony of my mistake over some hours) it’s definitely possible that there were other nested situations that I do not recall and can repair.
If I don’t know it’s happening I can’t fix it. I do my support here in the forum. Posting here alerts me to the issue, which gives me some chance to fix it or figure out what the cause is.
When you say “crash” are you getting an error message of any kind? Can you describe this behavior in any more detail?
(We’re probably going to find out that this is a device issue, perhaps low RAM or outdated OS/browser, since nobody else has mentioned an issue like this, but it’s still worth digging into)
I can’t do that and buy groceries, so while I appreciate the sentiment of getting things right, I often have to work through issues - however they’re caused.
First of all - thanks for all you do! I too can vouch that on Long Island, the CDPs etc. are definitely the level of granularity that makes sense here - even more so than in Manhattan. I recall there were prior forum posts with Long Island examples, though the only one that I can find right now is this one, where you did reinstate CDPs that had been removed: Update of cities 07-31-2023 . It would be great if the prior level of granularity could please be restored on Long Island, if possible. Thanks again!
#1Please fix Long Island. Let me clarify on Oyster Bay. There is an actual town which acts as the central hub for the communities of Plainview, Hicksville, Old Bethpage, Syosset, etc. Those people would use Oyster Bay as their mailing address, however those living in the outlying communities identify with the namesake towns.
Each of those towns have hundreds of streets and are just as big as small or medium size cities. Grouping them in what you call admin 7 makes them extremely hard to complete. Previously every town on Long Island - and there is well over 150 of them stretching across about 125 miles - could be completed individually on CityStrides. I’ve done a few of them. @starr_michael has done many many more. So have others.
I should mention that if Manhattan is broken up into 12 separate nestled neighborhoods, the same should be done for Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island since all 4 of these boroughs are MUCH bigger than Manhattan and have large and vibrant neighborhoods which again all contain different zip codes and post offices. But perhaps this is too difficult to do.
In the future if it could be done it would make life much easier for the tens of millions of people living in the greater NYC area, at least some percentage of which account for the 86,500 CityStrides users.
#2In some senses, a cleanup to avoid duplication makes sense. If you do one street that is only a mile long, it is a bit silly to get credit for let’s say West Pelham, East Pelham, and Town of Pelham since you are triple dipping. Town of Pelham is more than sufficient, and because as you say you are operating globally, you aren’t picking and choosing. You are accepting the admin levels of OpenStreetSource. That kind of elimination is fine.
I just wish these changes weren’t made without alerting the community and just having us all wake up and see that a whole bunch of communities and streets are missing from profiles because of the reconfiguration. I myself lost nearly 700 streets and 19 completed areas. And I can’t help but think this cleanup was orchestrated purely to help reduce the strain on the servers since nothing of this scale was previously implemented, and without any warning to the users.
#3 Bellerose and Bellerose Terrace I see now are relisted in Town of Hempstead. My apologies, I went through my list of incomplete cities and couldn’t find where it was moved to. Honestly though, these larger towns that are now the norm for this region should be eliminated and the towns deserve to be listed individually.
Technically Bellerose for instance might be part of the larger incorporated community of Hempstead, but please note that the distance between Hempstead proper and Bellerose is 12 MILES. Bellerose is right next to Queens and Hempstead itself is barely in the same county.
#4 With the crashes of the map, it can’t be a low RAM issue on the device. It could be an outdated browser MAYBE, I can look into that, but prior to end of February, three weeks ago, nothing like this ever happened. The page usually after several seconds just reloads when it’s trying to draw the lifemap or load the leaderboard. If it does this at least 4 times, it will turn blank, to a white screen with a message saying CityStrides has failed to load after several attempts. I then have to manually close and relaunch.
Sometimes hours go by before it stabilizes enough for me to plan a route or analyze my progress. I’m not having any issue with any other websites I use besides this one.
#5 Finally, with what I said about moving servers or shutting things down temporarily, obviously I don’t know everything you have to go through and the fact that you take the time to educate us speaks volumes. I guess ultimately you are figuring it out as the community grows. It just appears to me like all these backend quick fixes are creating more and more problems.
And I don’t know what needs to be done long term but there’s no denying the quality of the website is not the same as it was in January 2026 and before that. I’ve been using it every day for over 2 years, not nearly as many as some others, but enough to see the recent deterioration. And I can’t even begin to process the headache you’re dealing with.
Like you, I just want stability. There will always be problems but enough time has passed that I’m just wondering if things will ever get back to normal.
Thanks for taking the time to read and respond. I appreciate it and it’s hardly just about me — I know others care too.
As a fellow Long Island runner, I was surprised at first to see all the villages and smaller towns I’d completed disappear when they were rolled up into their larger parent towns. I understand the reasoning, but it would be a great future improvement to keep the higher-level town view while also allowing users to drill down into the individual villages and hamlets. That way, you could still track your detailed progress and see which smaller areas you’ve completed—similar to how Wandrer Earth handles it.
Another vote for breaking down Long Island into the “village”/”hamlet” level instead of the larger towns. I understand this might not work globally but it’s helpful for this area. Also, if possible I’d love to add the Community Boards (as in Manhattan) to the other 4 boroughs.
Again, thankful for all you do and I understand these changes might not be possible. Thanks!
