For recording sport activities Strava is just great. Full of features with great community and cheap paid subscription.
The problem is that everything works only when... everything works. If anything starts malfunctioning, is missing or isn't working as you expected then you are totally screwed. Because this is yet another company that has a support beyond any critics or imagination. That totally doesn't give a shit on their customers!
Yes, even those paid ones!
No support at all
In details:
- Closing tickets as done in the moment they're created (a bug is software?)
- Closing tickets as done without answering them at all (a nasty support engineer?)
- Answering all tickets in single one, making total mess.
- Providing completely useless answers.
Plus... A stupid Solvvy bot that brings no answers and only forces you to click through to the support form. It is also full of bugs, so rising another question after you just sent the first one is virtually impossible.
Here you have a nice example:
Here you have seven entries, but only four questions. This is because:
- The "Is calorie burnout calculator on bike rides correct in Strava?" question was marked:
- Twice as solved by the buggy system, in the moment it was created
- Once as solved by Strava Support even though nobody provided any answer
- The "How can force Strava to keep my screen on?" question was marked:
- Once as solved by the system
- Once as solved by Strava Support
- The "Configure mobile app's dashboard" question is the only one solved (see below)
- The "Missing created segments" question is waiting and maybe gets answer
And this is what you're paying 60 bucks per year for.
No bloody obvious functionality
Things that should be incorporated into Strave ten years ago:
- Mobile app dashboard's configuration
- Homepage dashboard's configuration
- An ability to decide which stats are shown in your profile
Are gone! Just like that.
- You can't decide what you see in your mobile dashboard and Strava bloats you with some garbage about clubs, subscriptions etc.
- The same goes for homepage.
- You can only see running, cycling and swimming in your profile.
If you are doing any other kind of activity then your profile (the one that you should be most proud of) will remain empty, full of zeros in stats for ever.
Can you imagine that in a sport tracking system that supposedly has 80 million users and exists for over 10 years?
Any kind of support request in the above area and you're:
- Redirected to their "improved Community Forum"
- Supposed to browse for "umbrella tickets" though nobody knows what the hell this is
So, they' have an automated copy-paste answer that gives you nothing!
Or actually it gives you... an umbrella!
In short: Yes, we know that we missed ten years of development. But we are working hardly to give you feature that you should have been given years ago.
And now goes the best part.
If you dare to visit their "improved Community Forum" and find a topic manually (cause searching for umbrella brings 0 results) then you will realize that they are gathering all the feature requests in single question - many comments formula.
Yes, you heard it out correctly. If you have a new feature request you can't rise a new forum question, which someone later would find to not create a duplicate. Instead there are grouping questions where each separate feature request is given as a comment.
Comments are of course not searchable at all. So, if you have a new bright idea, Strava Supports expects you to:
- Find a corresponding "grouping" question in their forum
- Browse manually through sometimes hundreds of feature requests grouped there
- Vote up, if you find your feature request already posted
- Only, if you find nothing, post your idea
Summary
No, Virginia, this is not a joke! This is a pure reality!
This is a kind of support that a world famous sport trackers gives you. It doesn't matter that:
- They have 85+ million users (as they claim)
- Their history spans 10+ years
- They request you to pay 60 bucks for such support
No, it doesn't matter. They don't give a shit on any of their customers.
So... Strava works fine as long as it works fine. If there is, however, anything that you would find not OK then... better start looking a new sport tracker.
And yes... Don't forget to cancel your subscription! For the support like above it is actually they who should pay us those 60 USD per your (for our patience!).
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