April Annotation

A Note From Jim

I'm hugely relieved and happy with the results of my recent efforts around the city update process. That area of code has been a pretty painful burden for a while - a pain that many of you have unfortunately shared with me. While there are still some zero-street cities to clean up, so much has been fixed - it's great to see cities back on a ~2 week update schedule and not causing issues around people's stats, sending too many notifications, etc.

With that out of the way, I'm excited to return to previously-planned efforts like Crews and expanded leaderboards. I've also been having fun over on Instagram. I've got some scheduled themes that are fun to put together & hopefully fun for you all to see/read through.

As always, you can reply to any email you receive from CityStrides - your reply goes straight to my inbox. Try it out! Reply and let me know one thing you wish CityStrides had or did better.

Have fun out there!

I post more regularly in the Announcements category in the forum. If you'd like a more frequent view of new features/changes/fixes/etc in CityStrides, definitely keep an eye on that. You can also subscribe to updates by clicking the bell in that category page & choosing "Tracking" or "Watching First Post" from the list of options. If you have a valid email address in the forum, you'll receive email alerts after subscribing.

🆕 New Stuff

Added a new entry to the In The News page
Added/awarded the National Walking Day (2023 and 2024) badge (full list of badges)
I’ve taken the first steps in moving subscription management out of the CityStrides site and into Stripe’s Customer Portal
- The Billing section of your Settings page now includes a link out to their site to manage your subscription and payment method
- I’ve left the old UI in place, just in case there’s some issue with their portal … this will be removed soon & I would greatly appreciate it if you let me know if you had to use this for some reason
- Prepay billing management will stay in the CityStrides site, because that’s A) much simpler (just a display of remaining months & a link to add more) and B) not supported by their portal
Update the “refresh” icon that’s displayed next to the city’s last updated date so that it will spin if the city is currently being updated

🛠️ Changed Stuff

Fully reworked the city update process to address heaps of issues
- Addressed issues include…
  - Stats not being updated
  - Street counts not updating, resulting in incorrect percentage progress values
  - Completely clearing the streets from cities
  - Behind-the-scenes infrastructure issues resulting in failed updates
  - Many notifications sent for the same update
  - Cities getting their timestamp updated but no actions take place
- Changes include…
  - Over the past ~month I’ve had the city update process only running between 7pm-6am Eastern, but have since returned the city update process to a 24/7 operation (as of late in the day on April 11)
  - The system runs minutely, queueing up 50 cities per batch as long as there aren’t too many existing updates running or too much queue backlog & I’ve reduced the aggressiveness of the process to make it quicker to pause the process (skip enqueuing cities in that minutely run) as that backlog grows
  - Adjusted the overall process to hold onto data that needs to be reprocessed (due to created/deleted/moved nodes etc) and do all of that reprocessing in a single step near the end of the update … This reduces overall load, removes duplicate notifications, and incorrect stat displays/reporting during the update process … This may cause some stats to be inaccurate during the update process, but this appears to be on the scale of minutes in most cases
  - Fixed an issue where the city update process wasn’t correctly removing nodes outside of the city border e.g. if the border was changed since the last update
  - Addressed issue where Overpass can sometimes incorrectly return 0 streets for a city
Not user-visible, but the nodes database table was cleaned up a bit to remove some duplicate fields … just one of those fun things that 2013 me didn’t know, and 2024 me does
Added a limitation to only allow 1 activity deletion per hour in order to address the load that is placed on the system when someone deletes a ton of activities

🐛 Fixed Stuff

Added a timeout to NodeHunter to address an issue where these could hang, eventually bringing down the whole system
Fixed a bug with the International badge that blocked it from leveling up
Fixed the badge achievement link in the in-site notification you receive if you happen to be online while receiving the badge
Various bug fixes, mostly around server resiliency & strange responses from MapMyFitness API

AMSAP (As Many Streets As Possible)

AMSAP March 2024 wrapped up with John Erwin winning at 872 streets.
Coming in second and third were Nick Kollett with 662 streets and Nicolas Parke with 597 streets.

The AMSAP Challenges can be found in the "Featured" section of the Challenges page. It's a Supporter Feature that currently requires you to manually join each month (or however frequently you want to participate).

National Walking Day Results

Last year we saw 8,098 people complete 37,476 streets in 3,959 cities across 72 countries
This year - 10,675 people completed 51,089 streets in 4,703 cities across 75 countries!

The top 5 finishers were:

Ertan T., 175 streets
Radoslav Todorov, 140 streets
Nigel Beecroft, 104 streets
Lies Bosma, 90 streets
Unknown, 90 streets

View your own results in the challenge page itself. You're listed at the top of the page if you're logged in while viewing it.
Everyone is automatically entered into the challenge, which is why you might notice way more than 10,675 people listed there. We're not all run-streakers!

📣 Upcoming: Global Running Day

We're 40 days away from this yearly event. Everyone is automatically entered, and previously completed streets count for this single-day challenge.

Follow along on June 5th

Last year we saw 9,270 people complete 41,066 streets in 4,158 cities across 65 countries

T-shirts, moisture-wicking shirts, hoodies, stickers, magnets, and pins - start at the list of designs, then decide what you want it on. You're not limited to just the CityStrides logo any more, either. Most badges are available in the store, as well as some custom t-shirt designs.

Upcoming Promos

Honestly - if you're thinking about buying any merch, don't buy it full price. There are sales every month that will save you some money.

May 3rd – 7th ... 20% off everything
May 11th – 16th ... 15% off everything
May 25th – 29th ... Free shipping
Memorial Day on May 27th ... 25% off everything

CityStrides Street View

I'm re-sharing first-person perspective posts/stories/reels on Instagram as a new #CityStridesStreetView series. Right now, these are all going into Instagram Stories, but if there's enough interest I might be able to turn them into a weekly series of posts.

I love being able to see places around the world through the photos you all take while out there completing streets.
Let's show each other where we're running!

City Spotlight

Every Monday, I'll be sharing stats in one city as part of a City Spotlight series. So far, I've done Boston (3rd place for most runners) & London (#1 most runners in the world). I started with these two cities since they both hosted incredibly popular marathons. Comment on any of the City Spotlight posts if you want your city covered!

London's numbers are huge, with 12,494 people having finished 39,346 streets by running 9,110.69 miles!

Finisher Friday

Similarly, every Friday I'll be posting a series that highlights people who have finished their city, along with some global stats from the past week. I chose this week's randomly. Get in touch if you'd like to be highlighted!

Thanks for reading (or 👋 hello/goodbye to those of you speed-scrolling down here for the unsubscribe link 😭). If there's anything you'd like added/changed in this newsletter, please share your thoughts in the Newsletter Topics post in the forum.