How do Strava stats work post-8/13 upgrade?

OK, I understand that Zwift rides no longer count toward Strava challenges now (which I agree with for climbing, but do NOT agree with for distance). However, I’m unclear on what else Zwift rides do, or do not, count against now, specifically:

  • Strava club leaderboards (I think not counting against this was a bug that is now fixed?)

  • Strava yearly & all-time distance

  • Strava yearly & all-time elevation gain (I’m worried about this because on the Activity Feed, Zwift rides no longer list the feet of climbing under the ride title)

Parenthetically, I was going to do the Strava September Gran Fondo 120 on Zwift because my wife won’t let me ride a 120km course on the road after 3 car-v-bike incidents, and I’m really disappointed that I can’t qualify for the first-ever decent-looking jersey that Strava has ever offered for Challenge Gear.

My suggestion: edit the ride and switch the activity type back to cycling for your Gran Fondo ride. After you buy the jersey, you can switch it back to “virtual ride.”

I agree with you that Strava is taking a much to limited view of virtual rides. I ride mostly indoors for the same reason as you - my wife is not thrilled with the idea of my riding outdoors after a friend of ours nearly died in a truck vs. bike incident.

What would be nice is if they just made the Segment leader boards virtual / Real and left all other stats as counting to yearly totals etc…

People have been asking for virtual leader boards for a long time but the way they have implemented Virtual seems like a very simple band-aid solution… Lets just hope that there is a better solution coming.

Agreed that the current Virtual Ride activity type is confusing as to what it does and doesn’t count on Strava.  I’m also finding other services that sync from Strava don’t like Virtual Rides (VeloViewer disables them by default, have to turn them on. Tapiriik won’t sync them at all, I’ve emailed them about this issue).