Activity sync

Where: Leaderboard → Sync

Importing activities from Strava and turning them into event totals.

Whether an activity counts comes down to four checks. Almost every "my ride is missing" report fails one of them:

The two "imported but never counted" outcomes are the confusing ones: the activity exists against the participant, so to them it looks like the platform lost their ride.

Enable Activity Sync

The master switch. With it off, nothing is imported and the leaderboard stays empty no matter how everything else is configured.

Check it first when nothing is arriving.

Activity types

Activity Types decides what counts, grouped into Outdoor Activities and Indoor Activities.

Choose deliberately, and decide the indoor question before launch rather than during. Counting indoor rides makes an event accessible in bad weather and to people who cannot ride outside; it also makes results incomparable between someone on a trainer and someone in the wind. Neither answer is wrong, but changing your mind mid-event means recalculating results people have already seen.

An activity of an unselected type is imported, not counted

It will exist against the participant without contributing to their total, which looks to them like the platform losing their ride. If someone reports a missing activity, check its type as well as its date.

Force Sync

Re-imports activities that have already been processed.

Use it after correcting a configuration mistake — you widened the activity types, or fixed the event dates — so previously ignored activities are reconsidered.

It is not routine maintenance. Normal syncing happens on its own, and forcing it repeatedly does not make results arrive sooner.

Force Sync (before start date)

Allows syncing before the event begins, so you can verify the pipeline works during setup.

It does not make pre-start activities count towards results — the event dates still govern that. It only lets you confirm that the connection works.

Use it during setup. Turn it off afterwards.

Manual entry

Allow Manual Activity Entry lets participants add activities by hand.

It makes the event accessible to people without a compatible device, and it is unverifiable by definition. Decide whether that matters for your event: for a participation challenge it usually does not; where there are prizes, it does.

If you enable it alongside prizes, say publicly how manual entries are treated. Silence here becomes an accusation of unfairness later.

Gallery and team sync

Enable Gallery Sync imports activity photos into the event gallery. Enable Team Sync keeps team totals current as membership changes.

Gallery content refreshes on a slower cycle than activity totals. Photos lagging behind distances is expected behaviour, not a fault.

Troubleshooting

Nothing is syncing at all. Check Enable Activity Sync, then that participants have actually connected Strava.

One person's activities are missing. Check the activity date is inside the event window, then its type, then that their account is still connected — a re-authorisation can lapse.

Totals look too high. Check for duplicate imports of the same activity, and confirm the participant has not also entered it manually.

Everything stopped at once. Almost always the event end date having passed.