STRAVA - pending new AWESOME feature appears to have closed competing sites #Discuss

A recent post by dcrainmaker (here) showed how STRAVA had effectively cut off access to relive.cc for the strava API. I covered it a little as well at the time (here). One suggestion was that STRAVA might have a directly-competing product in the pipeline. For the sake of argument let's just assume they have. I want to also cover some other STRAVA-connected sites that, errr, no longer seem to be connected to STRAVA. I'll come to that in a minute but let me briefly waffle to the point. Background I've been playing with the most-awesome AND FREE Xert segment hunter CIQ app on my Edge. It rather cleverly paces me through, for example, a 2-minute favourite segment by modelling my required instantaneous performance around Xert's knowledge of my CP2 (2-minute power). ie if I over- or under-achieve at the start of the segment that is accounted for in the app's instantaneous power recommendation; adjusting for fatigue, etc.. It's taken me years to work up an appetite for segment hunting but now that I have it I am a little disappointed for several reasons. These include As we already know there are many suspicious results on STRAVA leaderboards. I was particularly amazed by one local Top10 cyclist who had got there with a 214w average performance. Either they weigh 10kg or it was a very, very windy day in Richmond Park (a UK cycling Mecca-location). You get my drift. As a result of such nonsense, I decided that I'd much rather see my performance against my cycling buddies and/or my tri club mates ie people I trust not to cheat and who I can sometimes beat ( ;-) ). It doesn't seem possible to do that just using standard STRAVA functionality ie I want a club leaderboard for all the segments that the club decides we will go for this year...segment challenges like that. Yet this is such an obvious requirement that someone must have already done that right? (Edit: You can do this in STRAVA for individual segments as described by Mitch below) Right. Let's find a service/app to do this. First up you need to check the most awesome ScarletFire site for all things STRAVA-related. They list lots of goodies that are linked to STRAVA and very many of them are free. Sure enough, they list several sites that do EXACTLY what I want. Yay!! Here they are with a screenshot of what each does. A: matesrace.co.uk Jeez. That's a bit rubbish. The developer of Mates Race needs to be more on top of their site's status. Let's try a different one B: Segment Ninja This one sounds really cool, "Segment Ninja is a better way to enjoy Strava Segments. We do this by taking the best from Strava and adding a set of data-rich features along with a simple filtering system to allow you to better target your Strava rides.". Just what I want. Let's have a look. Jeez. Another rubbish STRAVA "partner". I'll drop them an email to let them know what's going on. There must be others, right? Yep. C: Segment Challenge The developer at Segment Challenge must be laughing as his/her competition's sites are all not working. Right? Hmmm. Once is unfortunate. Twice is a coincidence but three times is a trend. Let's look at this from the positive side. STRAVA is VERY, CLEARLY clearing the competitive decks so that its new, possibly imminent, probably PREMIUM feature has no competition. It WILL be a feature where you can link specific segments to clubs. So at least we will still be able to use that feature when it comes out. Here's a link to STRAVA SUMMIT...I'd be interested to see how many clicks it gets ;-) STRAVA SUMMIT SIGNUP #None Hopefully. This is where we all threaten to throw our SUMMIT MEMBERSHIP toys out of the proverbial cycling pram by threatening to cancel our subscription or pretending that we've just cancelled it. But guess what? STRAVA probably doesn't really care. Here's why... [caption id="attachment_41571" align="aligncenter" width="825"] Source: Wikipedia[/caption] Here's some gadget bedtime reading for you https://the5krunner.com/release-radar/