Please check down this list of Frequently Asked Questions before getting in touch:
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.
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.
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.
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.