I’m putting together a short set of emails that give new members some useful tips, and it’ll be most helpful if I can address the things that people actually wished they knew about.
I’ve got a very basic list to start with:
pinned cities help make info more readily available
the homepage includes lots of relevant info as a one-stop shop
you can connect multiple services to a single CityStrides account
revoking access deletes data
Then some more in-depth topics:
Tips on monitoring progress, and planning
Node Hunter (and how it pairs well with LifeMap Live), and Route Builder
Maybe a brief description of OSM. Not necessarily how to go in and fix things but more that the data comes from there and general time frames for updates.
Only runs/walks/hikes account for node completion, not cycling activities
Mention this forum! For some reason I only found this quite late
Private activities on Strava will not show for other users in Citystrides either
I’d have liked to know a bit more about the community – how many active users, from how many countries, maybe some stats around the region with most/least users etc.
Something about potential issues with OSM (inaccessible nodes) and methods of fixing (marking manually complete, learning how to edit OSM, or asking for editing help here in the forum)
The amazing value of route builder with the ability to create complex routes to complete many streets and the ability to load those routes into various watches or phone apps to provide turn by turn navigation of them.
How to view the progress of other striders for your cities in progress
I want to know points and ranking. I feel like you should get a multiplier for completing streets and cities similar to Ticket to Ride should get a point bonus
I was trying to use this to track every street I’ve been down on my bike. I don’t really care about competing with anyone else but it hasn’t been tracking anything despite being connected with Strava. Guess I misunderstood what the app was for and I paid 5$ for the month to get the mapping to work for nothing.
If you’re feeling slighted, you could always upload your cycle activities to a secondary service and change them from bike to run, then they’ll appear in CityStrides. But there are also other ones like wandrer that automatically work with bike activities.
Even if it is technically possible to bring cycle activities into CS using this workaround, I hope it doesn’t become common, since it would seriously dent the integrity of leader-boards.
Cloning CS, maybe with a different colour, and launching a “citypedals” site could be a fairly easy way to give cyclists access? @therealcjady out of curiosity, are you interested in cycling every street of your city, or are you after a way to map your cumulative riding? Or maybe something else even?
Wandrer.earth allows you to track bike rides as well as activities on foot. I use that one also. It gives credit for new miles rather than by street name and also includes paths.
I would like to build my own parameters of an area — I attempted to run every street of an area I live in, but the program is trying to show me the entire city. Is there a way to narrow down the focus?
Just the idea of it, so far: Custom "city" areas … click the ‘vote’ button in that topic to show your interest & if you have more/other details that aren’t in the thread already, feel free to contribute.
I wish I had realized that activities brought in from Garmin had a hard 5-yr cutoff and neither specific date requests older than 5yrs nor manual uploads are available. Does Strava sync have the same limitations? I’m not interested in the points and competition aspect of it; however I am interested in seeing select notable activities prior to 2019.
