March Mumblings

A Note From Jim

I missed the February newsletter, and I'm barely coming in on time for March. How's your month going? 😅

Y'know what, this one has run pretty long so I'm going to let you get into it.
As always, you can reply to any email you receive from CityStrides - your reply goes straight to my inbox.

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

Various Changes

Fixed Bugs

AMSAP (As Many Streets As Possible)

AMSAP January 2024 wrapped up with DJ winning at 754 streets.
Coming in second and third were Mark Macefield with 596 streets and Chris Thoms with 543 streets.

AMSAP February 2024 wrapped up with Nick Kollett winning at 642 streets.
Coming in second and third were Daniel González Alguacil with 600 streets and Mark Macefield with 529 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).

Leap Day Challenge Results

The results are in on this incredibly rare challenge 🤣

9,965 people completed 48,678 streets in 4,445 cities across 80 countries!

The top 5 finishers were:

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 9,965 people listed there. We're not all run-streakers!

National Walking Day

We're 9 days away from this yearly event. Everyone is automatically entered, and previously completed streets count for this single-day challenge.

Follow along on April 3rd here.

Last year we saw 8,098 people complete 37,476 streets in 3,959 cities across 72 countries

I'm always working on a number of things - keep an eye on the Ideas Category in the forum, and vote for the stuff you like. Your opinion and perspective matter!

Crews

I'm still planning/thinking this one through. The core idea is to have the ability to create a Crew which allow several things - work together to finish cities, compete inside the Crew to have the most completed streets, and compete against other Crews in cities.

The biggest thing to decide right now is whether everyone's full history applies to their Crew's overall progress, or if each Crew has its own start date (defaulting to its creation), or if each Crew Member gets to choose their contributed start date.
I'm working through this idea because there are likely cases where Crews will have Crew Members who have already completed the city. This doesn't do much to build motivation, and can put a stop to all the fun before it even starts (thanks overachievers).

Share your perspective / Upvote in the forum

AMSAP Challenge Leaderboard

Progress stalled out on this one, but I'm still enjoying the idea. Here's the note from last newsletter...

This idea started as a leaderboard for the monthly AMSAP Challenges, but the more I think about it the more I feel it might end up being a full rebuild of the existing Leaderboard page. Since each city, region, and country has its own leaderboard, that global leaderboard page doesn't make as much sense. I just need to strike a good clear balance between the time boxed recurring Challenge stats/placement, and the lifelong stats/placements.

Share your perspective / Upvote in the forum

Updates to cities in England

This one seems to be a bit controversial, and is definitely super confusing/nuanced. The issue is that many cities in England currently in CityStrides are way too large (people don't consider them cities), so I've been replacing them with smaller places ... which other people take offense to, saying they're too small.

The general situation is with admin level 6, and some 8. The alternative is admin level 10.

It's not so clean & simple, though.
Some places are only fully covered by admin level 6.
Some places are only fully covered by admin level 8.
Some places have full coverage at either 8 or 10.

I'm in a situation where a "rule" would help decide all of this for me. Something along the lines of "if admin level 10 fully covers the area, then use that ... otherwise look to admin level 8 for full coverage ... and finally fall back to admin level 6 if no others work."

You can share your perspective here in the forum

New Shirt Designs

I've added a few new shirt designs to the merch store that are more generally focused on the Every Single Street aspect, as opposed to being solely CityStrides apparel.

You can also check out the full list of designs, and then decide what to put it on.

Upcoming Promos

April 2nd - 6th: 20% off everything
April 11th - 15th: Free shipping
April 25th - 29th: 15% off everything

I'm really psyched about the last few posts on Instagram - check them out - because they welcome my wife to the world of running. She's a dancer, has never run before, and with the help of our friend & trainer finished her first (super difficult) 10k race! It's an absolutely enormous event, so in addition to seeing her enjoy running in general it was also great to see her succeed in this kind of rite-of-passage in our hometown.

 

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.

 

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