- Added Route Builder Quick
- I defined a few ‘modes’ of Route Builder in this post
- This mode is meant to get you out the door as fast as possible - set your start/end point and your maximum distance, and it’ll give you a route that will complete roughly the most streets possible within that distance
- This does not care about your city efficiency
- There’s a bit of ‘jitter’ to it, so it won’t give you the same route over and over (unless there’s like only one incomplete street within the set distance)
- Continued efforts in my ~year long work to improve city sync processing
- I’m going to be able to start testing syncs again … my recent effort comes with some tradeoffs that I need to monitor, to see how the whole system responds … It’s still too early to say for sure, but the initial tests show a 1/3 to 2x speedup
- Block activities that are further than 200 miles or faster than
2015 miles per hour- There are a lot of very problematic activities and this effort cleans out most of them
- These are mostly car/train/plane rides tracked as walks (wtf), or activities that are tracked, paused, there’s a bunch of travel, and then un-paused
- Display warning for activities that are exceed these limits
- I’m actively cleaning them out of the site, but the warning is there to give you some notice
- Fix accuracy of mile/kilometer conversions
- Use a different duration value from MapMyFitness (active vs elapsed) because elapsed is sometimes reported as 0
- These activities with 0 duration are going to trigger the “too fast” filter mentioned above
- I’ll go through and try to update any existing 0 duration activities, but it does look like sometimes there’s just no timing
- If you notice an activity not syncing in, check its duration then try a single activity sync
- Add the ability for people to reconnect their Garmin accounts
- This is for people caught by the ‘duplicate request’ error when trying to sync individual activities
- If you’re not experiencing that issue, do not use this feature
- It works by clicking the ‘Reconnect’ button in the Settings page … you’ll be redirected back to the site and you’ll need to click the ‘Connect’ button on the same page in order to reinstate the connection
- Failling to click the ‘Connect’ button after clicking ‘Reconnect’ will cause all sorts of problems for yourself, so make sure you do that
- Added a special exclusion for trunk Ways from OSM in certain countries
- Added an exclusion for all trunk_link Ways
- Display visual feedback that Node Hunter is working/waiting
- Changed the X under the Node Hunter button to display after receiving response, not after sending the request
- Apply Gaps & Islands solution to Territory creation, to avoid building incredibly inaccurate Territories
- This is another result of people tracking, pausing, traveling, and un-pausing … stop doing that
- Add our largest Territory to our profile page
- Fix issue where Territories were re-shown across multiple pages
- Fix issue where the Territory size displayed on the profile page was wrong
- Stop showing Territory list to non-Supporters
- Display warning on Territory page if the user is no longer a Supporter
- Use a larger font size on Territories page
- Display currently syncing cities on Status page
- Swap out city sync status on the Status page to display whether or not syncing is running, not whether people are allowed to queue cities
- Manual syncing used to actually try to send the city in for the sync at that moment, and it would return an error if it couldn’t due to system load … To avoid all that irritation, the manual sync now pushes that city to the front of the queue & lets the automated system pick it up next
- Stop sending email on activity deletion for resync requests
- Disable the resync feature for activities that are manually uploaded
- Adjust menus throughout the site to always open within view e.g. open up if at bottom of page, open down if at top of page
- Fix for the default grouping in the chart on our profile page - it was displaying data grouped by month, but the menu was set to weekly
- Added more info to LifeMap Poster creation page
- Apply Gaps & Islands solution to LifeMap Poster to avoid printing long straight lines due to pausing/traveling/unpausing (please stop)
- Adjusted top navigation Become A Supporter link to hopefully not be as ugly, although you shouldn’t see that link because you’re a Supporter right? … right? because you like the site and want it to stick around? right?
- Cleaned up the directions present on our created Routes
- Reworked the footer that’s displayed at the bottom of every page
- Added the English language version of the city name to its page, like the region pages have
- Fixed an issue with people who fell between two AMSAP Divisions
- Added my own Links page to replace LinkTree
- Fix for fucked up activity categorization in Polar
- Added entries to the News page
- Various underlying software updates
25 Likes
I just noticed that my 3 journey runs in TN were removed from my map and found this post. I completed Heart of the South, Vol State, and Third Circle of Hell all on foot and was able to get them each as one Coros file. You can see the results in UltraSignup and on my Strava account. They are all over 300 miles. Any way I can get them back?
4 Likes
There isn’t a way right now, but I’m not opposed to allowing these types of journey runs into CityStrides. I just need to build out a way to exclude them from processing (at least post-city-sync, but potentially also direct).
I’m guessing that I’ll end up building some kind of request form that lets you share links/activity identification & an explanation. I’ll manually review these & add them to an exclusion list of some sort.
3 Likes
I’m also considering splitting each file in half and posting them on Strava temporarily so each file is less than 200 miles. Is there any issue with what I’m thinking of? If it’s on Strava temporarily, does it go away from citystrides once I remove it from Strava?
1 Like
Yeah, I’ve been feeling a little bit naked and exposed looking at the lifemap and territory with the 200 miler missing.
1 Like
Yeah, Strava sends alerts for deleted activities & I respect those by removing the data in CityStrides.
Well, that’s about how it felt running that race on 42 out near Mansfield so you’re used to it :-p
1 Like
Ok, I’ll wait until you figure out a way to deal with special cases like me.
1 Like
About that 200 mi limit. I had a hiking trip track where I walked 369 km / 229 mi over 17 days with a handheld Garmin device in a way that I turned off the device in the evening when I arrived to a campsite and turned it on and continued the same track in the next morning. With a CityStrides update it disappeared from the LifeMap but I uploaded it again manually using this page https://citystrides.com/activities/new and it worked. At the moment it is visible in the CityStrides: https://citystrides.com/activities/100166124
If it will be deleted again then I plan to divide the gpx file into two separate parts so each of them is less than 200 mi and then upload again manually. I think this way it should work.
1 Like
I think James underestimates the level of crazy on this website.
4 Likes
I’d suggest you don’t bother with that effort. The 200 mile limit was a bit of a quick fix, in order to get city syncing operational again. There are definitely valid 200+ mile activities, so I’ll figure out a way to ensure these can be included … perhaps through the manual activity upload, like you found.
That might be enough to keep out the actually bad activities, while still letting people manually upload their massive efforts.
Some of that 
but also some of … I needed to pick some cutoff value. I did a lot of digging into the data to see where things tended to fly off the rails, and how far people seemed to actually travel. I found the 200 mile activities to be very rare, typically not be on/near streets, and to also pick up a lot of the bad tracking errors.
It’s also, like, Menton - Chamonix 🐐 | Strava is super cool but is that what we’re doing here?
(and I realize I’ve seriously shot myself in the foot on this one with the addition of Territories)
2 Likes
We definitely need Russ Cook on this site. In 2024 he ran the entire length of Africa (9,900 miles).
1 Like