There is a company dedicated to tricking (voluntary and conscious) people from procrastination to actual sport, see https://www.squadeasy.com/
The main idea is to leverage the brain's sensitivity to cooperative team goals or competitive goals, plus some gamification. And it works!
Disclaimer: the main founder is my brother, I was involved in the very first steps of the project, and I'm currently on a freelance mission with the company. And the team is looking for a freelance or a permanent Typescript coder in Paris.
Then tell your brother that they need to work on cheaters because my company uses Squadeasy and every year it's just a disgraceful experience.
I know it's tough, especially when a giant like Strava that gamifies the hell out of sport barely does anything, but for the sake of giving an example, a cheater from my company basically took a tcx from someones marathon and uploaded every other day with shifted timestamps. I know it because they used Strava and with summit I saw the gpx from their workouts and the lat/long data was always identical. Also from averaging like 10k a week, he shot up to 200k, magically.
At least I managed to get some people's points revoked because they tagged each other on Strava for every workout even if only one/two of them were actually working out.
Now if I couldn't stalk on them on Strava there's absolutely no transparency on Squadeasy and I wouldn't have been able to point anything out to the team. These guys for sure are setting their profile private next year to prevent people from calling them out (since they did mid competition last year, actually).
> Typescript
So frontend, it certainly needs work too. If there's any work foreseen in backend, especially crushing cheaters, let me know.
Thanks for reporting. Yes, detecting cheat is one of those numerous cat-and-mouse games. Whatever you do to detect, will deter more cheaters yet with diminishing returns.
Squadeasy already deals with a number of scenarios, though not exactly this one. Thank you for your concise yet insightful report. I keep these ideas: cheating with multiple uploads of time-shifted TCX, transparency in third party trackers helped.
I just opened an issue in the internal tracking system with your text and a few lines. The team will notice it tomorrow morning (it's 10:30pm here in Paris), yet we have quite a backlog already so don't hold your breath.
To answer your last sentence and Typescript, the freelancer or new hire will be working on both front (user profile web-app) and back (bugfix, toolset migration, API evolution). Any contact welcome.
The main idea is to leverage the brain's sensitivity to cooperative team goals or competitive goals, plus some gamification. And it works!
Disclaimer: the main founder is my brother, I was involved in the very first steps of the project, and I'm currently on a freelance mission with the company. And the team is looking for a freelance or a permanent Typescript coder in Paris.