Unannounced Club API Change?

[David DePiano]

I had a small application that gathered certain metrics from club activities and posted them into a messaging platform. It seems today this API was completely crippled. Images of athletes are no longer returned, key data (including the activity ID) is no longer included, nor is data about the workout itself. Can someone explain why this change was made and why developers are not getting notifications that a change to the API like this isn't being sent out with notice? The app is now completely broken. 

[David DePiano]

I should add that I am a member of the club in question as it is co-workers sharing our workouts with each other. I can see a lot more information via UI at https://www.strava.com/clubs/[Club ID]/recent_activity so why isn't there parity between the UI and API? 

[Dan McCombs]

Also seeing the same problem beginning this afternoon, with the same kind of use case. Again, I'm a member of the club and can see the activity information and avatars via the UI, but not via the API anymore.

-Dan

On Monday, March 19, 2018 at 5:46:18 PM UTC-4, David DePiano wrote:

[Dan McCombs]

Should we now be scraping the UI rather than use the API?

[Rafał Olkis]

Same problem for me.

https://developers.strava.com/docs/reference/#api-Clubs-getClubActivitiesById

Looks like they throw now only the summary... (resource state = 2)

I hope it's a bug only.

[Ben Smith]

The List Club Members API call appears to have just been changed too.

Although the documentation states it should return an athlete summary representation, what it actually returns is a subset of the summary data, as shown in the documentation sample response:

[ {
  "resource_state" : 2,
  "firstname" : "Peter",
  "lastname" : "S.",
  "membership" : "member",
  "admin" : false,
  "owner" : false
} ]

The missing fields include `id` which now means it's not possible to identify an individual athlete (since their last name is now also truncated). This change has also broken part of my application.

It's frustrating that Strava are making these API changes without any forewarning or updating their API changelog.

Ben

[Felix Rieseberg]

Pretty frustrating. If we had the ID of the activity we could at least go and fetch more resources.

[David DePiano]

Felix, 

Yes, you could do that, but even then, you'd need the athlete to have authenticated your app via Oauth. You can't use the getActivityById unless it is your own activity or via the athlete's authentication (https://developers.strava.com/docs/authentication/). That was the benefit of this club API. You could get certain activity information from the club feed by the nature of the athlete opting into the club. There wasn't a need to make an additional call to get activity data or ask the user for additional authentication. So now, you'd also need every athlete in the club to opt-in and authorize your app. It significantly reduces the benefit of the club and related API.

[Warren Sergent]

This has completely broken most of the functionality of RunSyncSwim (our app for enhanced Club Leaderboards).

We used the list of club members to display Club Leaderboards, and a whole heap of additional Club based information/statistics that the Strava web/app interfaces did not provide.

Now that we have no actual details of the club members, it appears as though over a years worth of development and usage (and almost 100 Clubs from around the world were using our site regularly) may need to be scrapped.

We used the Club Admins list to allow those users to categorise Club Members (one of our favourite features was to allow a workplace to pit smaller groups/teams against each other), as well as other settings.

Now, those users can no longer do anything as we don't know how to associate them to the club as an admin (because the primary key of athlete_id has been lost - and many of our clubs have more than one 'John S.' in them, making any other form of matching useless).

On top of this, with Club Member lists now no longer telling us who the Club Members actually are (first name, last name initial is also completely useless), we can't put people in clubs either.

[Jon Stockdill]

Piling on here... The API changes reduce the value of the API significantly.  Pretty much ANY enhanced leaderboard project (like mine) is doomed.

--jon

[Patrick-Jeffrey Pollo Guilbert]

I had a similar app that would fetch the club activities and post them to a messaging platform using the club API. Now I don't really see how I can do this the easy way apart from keeping track of all the athletes in a structure on the side and manually fetch their newest activities, generating a lot more requests than before (I really wished they had a GraphQL API)... Anybody did something similar as a workaround?

[Albert Batiste]

Yeah, I need to get the ID from club memebers too!

[Minh Nguyen]

It looks like Strava won't fix it. I only need the ID of activities. Now I have to get update from every club members. It will increase the number of requests.

[Toto RoToTo]

APIs changes have been made without any announcement!
Documentation is not fully up to date.
No further information on this in the detailed change log!

That is quite embarrassing :/


Could we have any notes, details about those updates?
Which were the reasons for that?


Thanks,
Thomas.

 

[Rafał Olkis]

No official statement since 2 months?

... and I still have Premium?! :D

[Glenn]

same issue.. this is crap. 

If I am a valid member of a group.. that can see activities through the web ui, what on earth is the api "protecting" by giving some nuked version of the detail. 

My access token should be able to see what I see no more.. no less. Thats a consistent and useful API.  :-/

[Enzo Trout]

I bet these api breaking changes are a result of strava having to comply with GDPR rules.

Any thoughts?

[David Fernandez]

Hi Ben, 

Have you been able to figure out some workaround for this? I need the athlete id too.

[Ben Smith]

On Saturday, 14 July 2018 13:20:50 UTC+1, David Fernandez wrote:

Have you been able to figure out some workaround for this? I need the athlete id too.

I now make all requests using the access token for each athlete who's data I am accessing. That allows you access to which clubs the athlete is a member of, but you still aren't able to list club members including their athlete identity.

Ben

[David Fernandez]

That Sounds good. I just need to gather only a few access token so I can do it too. 

Thanks!

[Ash Glover]

It's super frustrating when they lock out this detail.

Something else i can't seem to figure out - is how to get the total number of items in the club activity feed. So for example, if i do a request for, say, 1000 items, and there's only 200, it gives me zero results.

if i ask for 210 and there's 200, it gives me the 200. Super inconsistent like that, and there's no way it seems for me to ask the API - "how many records do you have?", so i can ask for the exact right number.

Sigh.