Club feature, new Strava Support, Improved Segment Matching, Improved Search & More: Sprint 10 Release Notes

Things are getting exciting here at Strava!  The next time you log on you will see many changes. We have pushed Sprint 10 and this post should give you a guide to the new features and functionality.  If you have questions, one of the improved features is even a new way to get help!  Keep reading below for more.

Strava Clubs – You asked for it and it’s here!  You can now create clubs within Strava and invite other Strava members to join them.  Once a club has been established there are several areas of Strava that are “club-enabled,” allowing you to filter rankings and pages by members that belong to a club.  Clubs can be private (membership requests must be accepted by existing members) or public (open to all Strava members).

Start exploring clubs by visiting the club box on the right hand column of your athlete homepage.  Be sure to check your club box often, as invitations from other members to join their clubs will appear there.

Team Page & Local-to-You Views — The Team page now highlights rides, KOMs, and segments that are local to you. The default settings show your Team information within 50 miles of the zip code you entered in your account profile. (You can change the default settings by clicking on “Edit Your Account” in the top right of the nav bar.) You can toggle to a ‘global’ view and see rides, KOMs, and segments for all of Strava.  You can even choose one of the clubs to which you belong and see rides, KOMs, and segments specific to that club’s members.

Support Pages – Strava has implemented a new support system. When you click on the Support link in the main nav bar you are taken to support.strava.com. On the support pages you will have access to our FAQs, be able to post support queries (called ‘discussions’) and view the public queries/discussions posed and posted by other Strava members. When you enter a question for Strava Support to answer, you are given a few suggested topics that may answer your question directly.  As always, you can still email us at support@strava.com.

Strava’s Google Group is still alive and well as a venue for Strava members to share stories, tips, tricks, and other Strava-related stuff.  We will continue to keep up on all discussions on the Google Group because we  believe member-to-member interaction is vital to Strava’s success, so please continue to post on Groups. The distinction is simply that support.strava.com is our new home for Strava support– specific inquiries about Strava where you are looking for answers from Strava Support can be found there directly.

Improved Search — We have added a bunch of new ways to filter searches. You can start by entering text in the search box at the top-right of the nav bar or simply click on the magnifying glass icon to get to the advanced search page directly.  From there, you can now “slice and dice” the Strava data in lots of unique ways and create personalized views in a matter of seconds.

Improved Segment Matching — We realize there have been some issues with accurately and consistently matching segments, especially non-climb segments (ones created from laps). With this new release we’re introducing a new algorithm for segment matching and so far we’ve been very pleased with the results.  For example, for all you SF2G’ers out there we found 205 new instances of the Airport Sprint!

Also, we do a much better job filtering out non-matching rides for those longer segments you’ve defined. For example, David Belden published his regular MTB loop which used to pull in 55 different rides and now pulls in a much more accurate 24.

We’ll start cleaning up segments once we release, so it might take a few days to reprocess things. As always, please let us know if a ride should match but doesn’t, or if ride matches and shouldn’t – your feedback was critical in developing our new segment matching algorithm – it’s all about testing with real world data!

Publishing Segments From Laps — Our feature to publish segments is fairly buried in our UI (our UI is slowly improving, but of course we have a ways to go…)  Those who have discovered it love it!  If you’re out on a ride on want to capture a particular route and publish it as as segment so that you can compare your times on it and the times of others, hit the Lap button on your Garmin device at the start of the route and again at the end of the route.

When you upload your ride to Strava you’ll see a section on the Ride Detail page for Laps. Click on the Lap to visit the page for your Lap and you can publish it there (it will look back at all your rides, and actually everyone’s rides, to find historic occurrences of the segment too!)

Right now if you publish a Lap you publish for everyone, so please consider if you’re publishing a route that’s already been published or if it’s really a route that merits publishing. In the future we’ll offer more publishing options (e.g. just match on my rides) and more tools for discovering similar segments (e.g. does the route I’m about to publish closely match an existing public segment.)  Publish away!

Nav Bar and Design Aesthetic — We are introducing a new look for Strava. Do you like it? Along with this comes a redesigned nav bar with a quick login box in the top right. What used to be called “Feedback” is now called “Support” and takes you our new Strava Support pages.

Athlete (Home) Page – On your Home page we have added a few additional views including an area for favorite climbs and segments. You can also view the clubs you belong to here and select a club to view its riders and manage your participation in the club.

Ride Detail Page Enhancements — When you click on a ride you will see that we have added some new features to the ride detail view including a new elevation chart that dynamically shows you where you are on the route map and elevation markers for climb peaks. We have also added expanded view of segments and climbs in your ride. You can find HR and watts charts on the ‘Graphs’ tab. You can also click on your private laps and shared segments from the ‘Segments’ tab and get details on each.

Climb / Segment Effort Page Enhancements — We have added a fun new way to compare yourself to yourself, and to others.  Introducing…the virtual rabbit!  Once you navigate to any climb you have done from on one of your rides you will instantly be able to see how your particular effort compares to your best, and to the KOM.  Simply move the cursor along the elevation profile of the climb or segment to see the compared performances.

Note: above the elevation profile, you’ll see the KOM holder and your PR with minutes and seconds they are ahead. The time indicates how long it takes you on that particular performance to reach the current location of the dots in front of you – not how much time has elapsed since they past the point where your dot currently is (yes, we can see the future…)

As always, we look forward to your comments, questions, and feedback.

Keep those wheels rolling!

StravaHQ

Feedin’ the Addiction

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