I wondered if someone might be able to help me understand something.
I often ride in a group ride consisting of just myself. However, in my last ride (Watopia Waistband), I received 7 rideons from people not in my friends list or group. This leads me to two questions:
Thanks 
Welcome to the forums! I’m Haziel from Zwift, thank you for reaching out and sharing your concerns about the unexpected Ride On notifications you’ve been receiving.
In custom group rides, it’s common for participants to not see riders outside of their group due to privacy settings that are put in place. However, I want to let you know that sometimes other Zwifters on the same route may still be able to see you, depending on how the event is set up, especially if full privacy hasn’t been enabled by the leader.
I hope this clarifies things a bit. If you have any more questions don’t hesitate to contact us.
Thank you, that does help, however I don’t see any configurable option for “full privacy”.
Specifically which setting would I need to toggle? The only setting I can see that seems relevant is “Only club members can join”.
You don’t need to be friends to give or receive ride ons. It doesn’t mean anything. They are just trying to help you out. Every ride on accelerates the amount of drops you earn. (A 15 second boost of 1.5 times). Not sure how you received the 7 random.
Just out of curiosity. Why would you ride on Zwift. Apparently you want to be by yourself. No interactions with the outside world??
Hi Doug,
I do exchange rideons quite often with people, which is part of my concern in this context. Since I am in a solo group ride, I can’t see the people who give me the ride ones (except for their name flashing by at the top of the screen), and I find it difficult to attempt to use the companion app to find them and return the favor.
As to your other question, yes, I mostly prefer to ride alone. I don’t always enjoy all the “noise”: other cyclists buzzing around, “close the gap” messages, confetti, PRs, and the constant “encouragements”. This would be true even if I weren’t dealing with periodic injuries, but injuries make all that noise feel even more troublesome. My favorite way to ride is to turn off all the HUD, go into 1st person, and ride like I would if I were outside on my bike.
Having said that, Zwift seems to offer the best app on the market for what I want to do. I like the other elements of gamification, the CGI, the XP and drops, the shop, and so on. Now and again, I do like riding with other folks, but as soon as my wife gets a trainer, it will mostly be us riding together. If there was an offline app that did everything Zwift could do but only on a LAN, I’d probably buy it immediately.
If you had your hud on, there names might appear there (along the right hand side). Apart from that, I’m not sure what you can do. When your ride is over. You can look at the ride you just did(companion app). On the bottom right, it will show the who you ride with. They might appear there.
My wife and I ride together all the time. We might be doing different rides, but we chat lots. Unless I’m racing. LoL
Best of luck, hopefully you find what you are looking for
You can disconnect your internet while you ride to give you an offline experience.
Everyone else disappears and you ride solo.
You just need to reconnect before you save the ride to make sure your progress saves.
That won’t help if you want to ride with only your wife visible though.
On the unexpected ride-ons, I’ve got a theory that ride-on bombs can give ride-ons to anyone nearby whether they are visible to you or not. So if you’re in your own event, someone else could be free riding or in a different event and happen to be in the same place as you when they drop a ride-on bomb.
I think this can also be from people going the opposite direction to you if the ride on is at just the right moment.
Setting up private club events is one way to be alone, but followers will still see you are online. You’ll have to connect to Zwift, start a ride then disconnect the internet as suggested above. That’s painful and would be nicer to have a private mode.
I think I’ve seen this. You and the other riders are invisible to each other. However, you’re getting ride-ons because someone is doing a ride-on blast and you happen to be in the proximity of the blast radius. So the giver doesn’t know he gave you one specifically.