On Monday, Strava re-enabled the ability for you to post links within various Strava areas, such as completed activities, event descriptions, and more. As you might remember, back this past fall, Strava restricted that ability, instantly removing any links you added. And by “restricted”, I mean: Killed links in the most clumsy way possible.
In their attempt to deal with what they claimed was ever-increasing spam (sometimes adult/phishing in nature), they stopped allowing you to put any external links (e.g. to website.com) on Strava activities/posts/etc. This included your own activities, comments, club descriptions, club events, etc… The problem was, when Strava implemented this, they did so very poorly. Specifically, it ended up purging *anything* with a period (.) in it. Thus, people who even wrote 26.2 (as in 26.2 miles) in the title of an activity, would see it erased. This was all part of their Fall 2024 plan to see how many different ways they could trigger users to cancel their subscriptions, while concurrently angering their partners. Speaking of which, I still need to write about the 60M+ activities that were purged as a result of that…
While those initial URL parsing mistakes were corrected, the ultimate goal (restricting external links) was achieved, and since then, all external links would get zapped.
I’ll be honest, despite having a moderate number of followers on Strava (~24,000), I literally can’t remember the last time I had any spam-like comments. Years maybe? As many people assumed, this seemed it was more about Strava trying to rein in 3rd party apps that posted app names/URLs, as well as trying to keep people from meandering off the platform. I’m not saying there isn’t any spam on Strava, I’m simply saying it wasn’t the end-all-be-all that some made it out to be. Pretty sure 100MPH leaderboard segments is still the…uhh…leader there.
In any event, as of Monday, anyone can start putting links again in the following locations:
– Athlete Profile
– Club Descriptions
– Event Descriptions
– Activity Descriptions
– Club posts (but only admins of a Verified Club on Strava)
It’s worth noting that Strava also initially implemented links for Verified Athletes and Verified Clubs back in December. Inversely, Strava says that any previously removed links/content won’t be coming back. It’s gone-gone dead. Likewise, Strava’s FAQ on the topic implies there may still be some blocks in place “if it is formatted similarly to a URL”, but they’re pretty fuzzy on that.
Strava went on to say the following in their statement:
“These areas were chosen because they are among the most engaging and meaningful parts of Strava—key places where links help our community connect with one another.
We recognize that disabling and removing links last September was disruptive to our community. This was never the intention. The decision was necessary to protect users from a wave of harmful spam attacks that included links to fraudulent and misleading content. To prevent this type of harmful content from being posted on Strava, we moved fast and didn’t clearly communicate why. We’re sorry for the frustration this caused, and moving forward, we’re committed to greater transparency.
Since then, we’ve made significant improvements to Strava’s spam detection and prevention systems, such as an upgraded machine learning model. This helps us better detect and block suspicious activity—so users can share links in the places that matter most. “
In doing a quick test, I was indeed able to add a link to my activity (to here at dcrainmaker.com, as well as even a link to Relive.com to see if they’d block that. Both worked). I haven’t sat around though and tried to figure out which creative links will break it. I’m sure the rest of the internet will do that.
With that, thanks for reading!
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Strava – the gift that keeps giving
So much entertainment!
Someday I hope we get the real story about why they decided to implement this clumsy regex bludgeon across the entire site and app. Was it just incompetence, laziness, or was it something so serious and urgent they had to go nuclear on anything that looked like an URL instead of building actual spam controls?
I have a different experience with bots on Strava – I receive follow requests from obviously bot accounts on regular basis (several per month) despite being a nobody. URL war resolved it completely.
It’s an interesting question. In your case, with a locked-down account, then the bot follows are trying to build up reputational credit.
But in my case, with an open account (I lock individual activities instead via privacy settings), anyone can follow. Except, that’s not led to the thing that matters: Spam comments.
Of course, if the ‘other thing’ that matters is someone having a link to XYZ site on their profile, and is a bot account, then yes, that’s spam. But I see that as relatively passive spam that requires you the user to click on the profile, and then decide to click onwards, versus active spam that comes into my inbox.
And finally the links work/are clickable on the mobile app. It pretty much sucked to have to open the browser version just to click on a link.
The most annoying thing for me was killing everything with a . in segments! Segments with . in their name worked on web version though, but not in mobile app. I need to check if it’s any different now :)
Hey, have there been any updates on Strava’s new API policy? Have they backtracked at all? Or are they not yet enforcing it?