Please check down this list of Frequently Asked Questions before getting in touch:
99% of veloViewer is identical for both Strava Subscribers and non-Subscribers. Since mid May 2020 Strava restricted segment placings for non-Subscribers and that is also reflected in VeloViewer. For full details of difference please see this page.
Whenever an activity is checked for new segments on the update page it also updates any other changes (e.g. name or gear), but of course the frequency of these bulk checks are restricted for performance and API rate limit reasons. You can however force an update on a specific activity at any time in order to check for new segments as well as pick up any other changes by following these steps:
- Remember, “hidden” segments on Strava will not be pulled through to VeloViewer (see below).
- Open the activity’s details page.
- Go to the activity’s Summary tab.
- Press the “Update Activity” button.
- The placings will not have been checked for any new segments at this stage so you’ll then need to press the “Add activities” button on your Update page to re-sync that activity.
VeloViewer only includes segments that are classed as “popular” by Strava. When you look at the bottom of the segment list for one of your activities on Strava then you will most likely see a button saying something like “Show 24 hidden efforts” (an “effort” is an attempt at a segment). This list can vary over time as Strava’s algorithm to determine which segments should be hidden includes a number of variables that change over time, e.g. how many times it has been starred, how many times people look at the segment details page and possibly how “overlappy” (my term) it is.
When VeloViewer’s update process gets a new activity details or checks it for new segments (runs the same code) then that is when the list of “popular” segments on that activity at the exact time is being recorded. If you did it the next day then it might be different. Because not all activities are checked at exactly the same time you might end up with some segments appearing on one activity and not another and so your Tries count might be out.
If one of your favourite segments has disappeared then just find, on Strava, any activity that you have done that includes that segment, find it in the hidden efforts list and click the “Unhide” button that appears when you hover the mouse over that segment. The next time any activity that includes that segment is checked in VeloViewer then it should reappear in your lists. And once all of the activities have been checked for new segments, your Tries counts should be accurate too.
When VeloViewer’s update process gets a new activity details or checks it for new segments (runs the same code) then that is when the list of “popular” segments on that activity at the exact time is being recorded. If you did it the next day then it might be different. Because not all activities are checked at exactly the same time you might end up with some segments appearing on one activity and not another and so your Tries count might be out.
If one of your favourite segments has disappeared then just find, on Strava, any activity that you have done that includes that segment, find it in the hidden efforts list and click the “Unhide” button that appears when you hover the mouse over that segment. The next time any activity that includes that segment is checked in VeloViewer then it should reappear in your lists. And once all of the activities have been checked for new segments, your Tries counts should be accurate too.
There are many millions of segments on Strava (over 8 million at time of writing), some areas have far more than others. Many of these are flagged, many more are duplicates or just poorly created. In order to keep the segment numbers down on activities Strava apply a number of rules to determine which segments should be hidden for any particular activity. You can view the hidden segments by scrolling down to the bottom of your activity’s segment list on the Strava website and expanding the hidden segments section.In terms of how Strava determines which segments should be hidden then read the following excerpt from their API documentation:
By default, only “important” efforts are included. “Importance” is based on a number of factors and its value may change over time. Factors considered include: segment age, views and stars, if the user has hidden/shown the segment and if the effort was a PR. Note, if two activities cover the same segment, it is possible that for one activity the associated effort is “important” but not for the other.
So expect them to change between activities.
As it stands I take the details for the Strava Challenges using a script (manually at present) from Strava’s Challenges page. For some reason not all Challenges appear on that page, possibly because some are segment specific challenges or because they don’t fit the typical challenge structure. In the future I could potentially manually crank the data together for challenges that aren’t on that page but right now I don’t have the time.
When you visit your Update page it will automatically look for deleted activities and remove them from VeloViewer. It should do this silently in the background. There is a chance that you might have to press one of the refresh buttons next to the main page headings on the Summary or list pages in order to remove the activity from your local storage. If this still doesn’t remove it then let me know via email me with the VeloViewer link to the deleted activity’s details.
Everything you need to know about the VeloViewer Score is available in this blog post – VeloViewer Score – How Do You Measure Up?.
This is just due to your locally cached (in your browser’s localStorage) data still retaining your old gear names. Press one of the refresh buttons (e.g. the one next to the “Your Summary” page heading) and it’ll clear your localStorage and grab all the data, without the old gear names, from the server.
Possibly but probably not 🙂 The Eddington Number is based on the total distance covered PER DAY rather than PER ACTIVITY. So if you’ve ridden more than once in a day then it is the sum of the distances that is used. This does make it a little trickier to see which activities are making up your number. If you hover your mouse over your Eddington Numbers you will see how many times you’ll need to ride over the next distance in a day in order to raise your number by 1 or 2 points.
Head to your Update page and expand the “Options” section. At the top you will see the list of activity types that you are currently have set to sync with VeloViewer. Make sure the “Virtual Ride” box is checked and then you’re Zwift rides will be pulled in.
This will be because not all of your activities have been updated recently to get these new fields. Head to your Update page and press the “Check for new segments” button until all of your activities have been checked. This process also updates all the details of each activity being checked so will pull in this newly stored data. There is a limit as to how often an activity can be updated/checked so you might need to wait up to a week for this button to check all of your activities (unless you are PRO+ in which case you can update all of your activities at any time).
Since the GDPR related rewrite of the leaderboards this shouldn’t really be an issue any more as the collecting of times works in a very different way that avoids the previous occasional issue with Strava’s club leaderboards. See this blog post for full info on how to get your times into the leaderboards.
I’ve had a number of users with this one get in touch over the years. Make sure that your data is up-to-date (and any deleted activities removed) and all your activity types are being synced, then also make sure you don’t have any filters on your Summary page. If the numbers still don’t match then the issue will be at Strava’s end. You will find a “Refresh Stats” button below your totals on your Strava profile page, try pressing that. Apparently it can take an hour or so for it to process at Strava’s end so give it a bit of time before heading back to your Strava profile and reloading the stats.
If you are seeing Explorer Tiles that aren’t being ticked when viewing the map in your Activities List then open up the Activity’s Details page and in the background it will populate a definitive list of Explorer Tiles using all of the Activity’s data points (by default the ticked tiles are only calculated using each Activity’s simplified map line which only includes a small number of data points). For more information see the “Definitive tiles for an activity” section of this blog post.
Once you retire gear (bikes and shoes) in Strava then their details are no longer provided via the Strava API. The activities that reference these retired items still contain the code of the gear (e.g. b123456 for a bike or g123456 for shoes) but there isn’t a way to get their text description from Strava. This is why you might see these codes in the gear column. If you un-retire your bike/shoes in Strava then you will see their full description in VeloViewer. (Note, you’ll need to logout and back in to VeloViewer to pick up the change in gear).
The “to city” shown in the Infographic is taken from a list of around 400 world cities. Mostly capital cities with a selection of state capitals in places like the USA and Australia. There will inevitably be occasions when the total distance covered doesn’t neatly map onto a city from the list from your chosen start location. In this case the next closest city will be shown (which may in fact be a fair bit further away than the Total Distance). You could always try changing the start location to provide something more realistic. The Infographic is designed as an end-of-year graphic so hopefully once you’ve racked up some more distance this won’t be a problem any more.
Unfortunately the Rivals page had to be turned off due to the restrictions imposed by the GDPR which came into affect in May 2018. Some more details available in this blog post.
The Strava API does allow me to get any of your segment leaderboard positions using age and/or weight categories it just gets far too complicated and expensive (in terms of number of API calls) finding out all of someone’s age/weight specific positions.
I provide a the option for women to have their positions using QOM but then people very rarely swap from one gender into another so all of their efforts will have been in the QOM bracket. When you come to age brackets, people move from one to the next as they age (and it gets even more complicated with weight brackets!) so you will end up having a PR and a position in one age brackets and then another PR (possibly faster, possibly slower) in another age bracket. Both of which would technically have their own Score. So if you’ve passed from one age bracket to the next then I would have to at least double up the API calls to find positions in each age bracket. Given that some people have way over 10000 segments, that is something that would not scale.The other tricky thing is that Strava’s API doesn’t provide your date of birth.So although it is technically possible, it isn’t something I’m able to offer in a way that would scale for the number of users I have.
I provide a the option for women to have their positions using QOM but then people very rarely swap from one gender into another so all of their efforts will have been in the QOM bracket. When you come to age brackets, people move from one to the next as they age (and it gets even more complicated with weight brackets!) so you will end up having a PR and a position in one age brackets and then another PR (possibly faster, possibly slower) in another age bracket. Both of which would technically have their own Score. So if you’ve passed from one age bracket to the next then I would have to at least double up the API calls to find positions in each age bracket. Given that some people have way over 10000 segments, that is something that would not scale.The other tricky thing is that Strava’s API doesn’t provide your date of birth.So although it is technically possible, it isn’t something I’m able to offer in a way that would scale for the number of users I have.
The individual tries on an segment are known as “efforts”. When you sync your activities to VeloViewer the site grabs the non-hidden segment efforts provided by Strava’s API at that time and the results are cached. If a segment didn’t exist or was auto-hidden (see #4 above) then that segment effort will not be stored/shown in VeloViewer.
If a segment has been actively hidden by a user then it will appear in the hidden list on all of your activities (and no longer come across into VeloViewer).
If a segment has been actively unhidden, starred, had a goal set or was created by you then it will always appear in the main segment list on all of your activities and will result in all the segment efforts being brought into VeloViewer and an accurate tries count.
If a segment doesn’t fall into either of those last two scenarios then there is a chance it could be in either the main segment list or hidden list on any activity that has covered that segment. If your activity has less segments (e.g. shorter) then it is more likely to be shown but then a longer activity that covers many more segments, this segment is more likely to be hidden. The result of this in VeloViewer is that not all efforts for a particular segment will be pulled across resulting in the tries count not being accurate.
If you have specific segments that you want complete stats on then make sure you either star it or hide, then unhide it which then should force it to appear on all of you activities. then when you check for new segments all of the segment’s efforts will be sync to VeloViewer.
I’ve been asked if it is possible to extend the Chrome extension’s ability to overlay currently ticked explorer tiles in route builders other than Strava’s (e.g. Komoot, Ride with GPS and others). When viewed in the Strava Route Builder the extension knows who you are (in terms of your Strava number) so can grab your personal explorer tiles. In a site other than Strava’s that wouldn’t be possible. The map controls and UI used by other sites are different to Strava’s so it would require a fairly extensive rewrite to get it to work on those as well, and it might well not be possible. They also require a fair amount of support as any change to the code on the site can inadvertently break the extension’s functionality. If any other developers want to give it a crack then let me know but I’ll only be supporting the extension on the Strava route builder.
In order for a time to be shown in the Zwift-Insider leaderboard for a particular route your Virtual Ride must have registered a time on the appropriate Zwift-Insider segment created by Eric. Eric creates the segments based on the spawn point if you choose to do a route in the free-ride mode of Zwift. If you enter an event and complete a route then that may well miss out the start of Eric’s segment resulting the segment not being matched on your activity and no time coming through to the leaderboard in VeloViewer. For more information please read the “A NOTE ABOUT GROUP RIDE EFFORTS” section on the Route Hunter page on Zwift Insider. If a Zwift-Insider segment isn’t matched on your activity then unfortunately you will not get a time in the leaderboard.
Sometimes you will correctly complete the course of a segment but Strava isn’t showing the segment as matched on the activity. The “Refresh achievements” menu item on the Strava website’s Activity Details page should remedy this sort of thing but it doesn’t seem as reliable for Virtual activities. In which case, try changing the activity type to something like surfing, save it, then change it back to Virtual Ride and fingers crossed that will force the recheck of the segments.
Sometimes you will correctly complete the course of a segment but Strava isn’t showing the segment as matched on the activity. The “Refresh achievements” menu item on the Strava website’s Activity Details page should remedy this sort of thing but it doesn’t seem as reliable for Virtual activities. In which case, try changing the activity type to something like surfing, save it, then change it back to Virtual Ride and fingers crossed that will force the recheck of the segments.
I’ll add more FAQs to this list as they crop up.
Craig says:
Hey Ben, any chance of getting the activity id included in the CSV export? Thanks.
Werner says:
Hi there. Is it possible to see your private activities in the wheel?
Ben says:
I’m afraid not at the moment as I’m only showing the publicly available route for each activity (respecting privacy zones) and obviously private activities don’t have those.
Casper says:
Hi Ben, a question: I’ve reading the information about paying for veloviewer. Of course i want to keep using veloviewr, so it is clear that i must pay, otherwise my data will be deleted except my last 10 activities. The problem is that i don’t know how i have to pay, it is not clear to me i’m afraid.
Ben says:
Hi Casper, Nothing will be happening regarding deleting data from non-premium users until next weekend by which point it will be clear how you can make your payment (it will be from your Update page). If I can get all the Terms & Conditions sorted out beforehand then I’ll add in the payments option earlier but still not begin removing any data until the weekend. I’ll make sure that it is very clear beforehand when there is a chance of any data being removed and give you a good chance to sign up before anything gets deleted.
Casper says:
Hi Ben, I understand it. However, the problem is that i don’t see the ‘donate button’. I also don’t have a paypal account. I live in the Netherlands, maybe that is the reason why i don’t see the button on the site?
Virginia says:
How do you dontate your information? Mine is listed as “private”
Ben says:
I’m not sure what you mean. Do you want to email me with more info?
Stig Haldan says:
Dear Ben – fantastic live – love it and use it more or less every day. I donated GBP50 from Denmark 5-6 weeks ago. Can you se that donation ?
Ben says:
Can you email me with your PayPal transaction ID and your Strava number (in your VeloViewer URLs) and I’ll sort you out?
Mark Edwards says:
Hi,
I recently did 2 activities on my Turbo Trainer, marked in Strava as “Stationery Bike” whilst the activity loads into Velo Viewer my total distance for the year doesn’t appear to have increased. Are activities completed on a turbo trainer excluded from this?
Mark
Erwin says:
Ben,
Which adress, can i fill in with my payment?
Gr Erwin