Time based filtering and challenges

I recently read an article about Rickey Gates completing the full compliment of streets in San Francisco, and it got me wondering about doing the same on a smaller scale for my community. Rickey discussed efficiency and the Travelling Salesman / Chinese Postman math problems and it got me wondering about what if someone wanted to do multiple attempts at running every street in their community?

My life map is great, but if I were to start a project like this, I think I would want to be able to start with a clean slate each time? Or at least have the ability to filter out past runs to see a particular time frame and what was accomplished etc? I was wondering if it would be possible to create a filter for the data on the life map, or within my profile so I can see just 2019, or just 2020 etc. Or perhaps a user set time frame to be able to do that.

I’m thinking that it would be nice to see how well I do on a first attempt to run every street in my community, but then perhaps to try a second time (my community is relatively small - Campbell River), to see if I can be more efficient in how I go about it. So in that regard it might be nice if there were an ability to compare my full attempt metrics (how many kilometres did I run to complete the goal each time, or how many days did it take to complete each attempt, how much elevation gain was there, etc).

From that, it might also then be possible to compare my in progress goal, or completed goal against that of others with respect to total amount of time or distance taken to complete the community.

Thoughts? Anyone want to build on this idea? (Or more likely, I am saying something similar to a previous idea brought forward?

Thanks for your time and efforts on CityStrides everyone!

There are two main forks for this idea:

  • Just changing what’s displayed on a map, no changes to progress/completion
  • Adding timeframes to progress/completion e.g. just this year, just this month, between two dates, etc

The first one is “easy” in that the UI could be either two fields or two sliders, where you’re selecting a start/end date pair & it determines what is displayed on the map based on that. I should really get around to adding this! :grimacing:

The second one is more nuanced, and people will have different preferences. After thinking about it a bit, I think I see two main architectures…

User-driven:

  • select start & end dates (so this can be a month or year or whatever, no limits)
  • select whether other people can join in on the project (I don’t even have an idea of what this would look like code-wise)
  • any activities that already exist in this timeframe are automatically added to the project (this is to allow retroactive projects e.g. for comparison, as well as to allow people to join in mid-project)

Site-wide (very similar to user-driven, but more community-based vs personal goal):

  • some regularly repeating set amount of time e.g. every month or every three months
  • either everyone is automatically entered, or it’s some kind of opt-in :man_shrugging: (I’m gonna be real here, I can’t keep barely breaking even or tossing some more on the credit card every month, this is probably gonna be a paid thing.)

Goals (each project doesn’t have to be only the number of streets we complete):

  • complete as many streets as you can
  • complete X number of streets
  • run in as many different cities as you can
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Thanks for your consideration of my thoughts! For my own current personal goal of running my entire community but starting from…“scratch” so to speak, the first “fork” would be fantastic, so I can look at the map, set my timeline and refer to what I’ve already done, or still need to do. I could track the other details myself (distance run, number of days to complete etc) and be quite happy.

The second “fork” sounds very cool but also challenging and/or time consuming to setup. It seems to somewhat connect with the idea of say…the Strava Challenges concept as a running community, but with the specific focus narrowed to the particular place you live (or however it can be setup), to see who finishes what within the given time period etc, but could also be personalized or kept personal if you don’t want to be part of a community challenge. I think I would totally pony up some $ for an option like that if it were to ever come to fruition.

Thanks for all your hard work, it is appreciated!

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Wondering if anyone has more ideas for different goals - beyond just running the most streets in a time period. So far, I have:

  • Complete as many streets as you can
  • First strider to X number of streets
  • Progress (complete?) at least one street in as many different cities as you can
  • “Scavenger Hunt” style game where a collection of streets have to be completed in order
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A post was split to a new topic: Badges for milestones

I like that scavenger hunt idea. It also made me think about the possibilities of efficient route planning - who can complete streets x/y/z in the least # of kms/miles.

Also made me think about strava ‘art’, but I sort of lost my thought on that and how to connect the ‘art’ idea with city streets.

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Awesome thanks James! Is there rough time for when the Challenges feature might be live?

I have a technically functional version of it locally. I still have to improve the UI a lot, though. I also don’t have any map visuals for it, yet - and that’s a really important aspect.
I’m hoping for early January.

OK, the first part of this - filtering the LifeMap based on start/end dates - is released for subscribers. :tada:

If you add _beta to the end of the URL for your LifeMap, you can check it out. So for example, my LifeMap beta is https://citystrides.com/users/1/map_beta
After some individual testing, I plan on releasing this beta as the full version.

I’m still working on the second part of this, but things are progressing nicely.

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Are you able to count all the streets completed within a time period (starting from 0) or only the newly completed streets within CityStrides (thus excluding the streets that had already been completed at least once before the begin of the time period defined by the filter)?

I’m working on a Challenges feature that will let us focus on completed streets within a start/end date.

Check out Alpha: Challenges (request for testers)

// @ccottell @craigwinter @dbafounta