Important information about “Top 10” ranking and EUC World Summer Contest 2025
When I added the rider ranking (now known as the “Top 10”) to the EUC World homepage a few years ago, I didn’t really intend to turn it into a competition. The main idea was to let everyone compare their activity with others in the community. I wanted to answer the questions people kept asking: How do my rides compare to others? Do I spend a lot of time on my wheel, or maybe not that much? Am I a speed freak by global standards, or do I ride on the slower side?
Still, it didn’t take long before users saw the ranking as a fun way to compete — without needing to show up at racetracks or travel across the world for events. The “Top 10” quickly became an unofficial contest, motivating riders to climb to the top and stay there as long as possible. If you check the EUC World homepage regularly, you can probably recall a few names that show up on top pretty often.
Task #1: Prevent cheating
Unfortunately, like in any competition, some people started trying to game the system. There’s always someone willing to break the rules just to get closer to first place. And yeah, we’ve had that too.
People got creative. The simplest trick? Recording a tour while driving a car or motorcycle. When that stopped working (since those tours didn’t make it into the rankings), others got sneakier. Some would put their powered-on wheel in the car trunk, connect the app, hop in the driver’s seat, and hit the road — while the wheel lay rolling in the back. Others tried hybrid tricks — ride part of the tour on a wheel, then finish it in a car, wheel still powered on in the trunk.
Clearly, I had to find a way to deal with that kind of stuff and keep things fair. Manually checking every tour wasn’t an option — we get between 200 and 300 tours recorded every day. So, I had to build a filter. An algorithm that could tell whether a tour should count toward the rankings or not.
It wasn’t easy, but eventually I created a filter that worked… okay. The only major problem was that it was working on an “all or nothing” principle. It would either include the entire tour or reject the whole thing. So, if someone rode their wheel for part of the tour and then drove the rest, the whole tour got tossed out — even if the wheel part was legit.
Task #2: Don’t penalize honest riders
Thing is, that’s not always cheating. A lot of times, people finish their ride, hop into a car, and just forget to stop tour recording in the app. So the app keeps recording — now in a car, or maybe a bus or a train. Another common case is when the app temporarily loses Bluetooth connection with the wheel. If those disconnects are frequent or last too long, the whole tour was excluded from the rankings. Also, power-saving features on phones sometimes mess with GPS or the app itself, leading to gaps in the route.
The start of the EUC World Summer Contest 2025 made it clear the old filter just wasn’t cutting it anymore when it came to fair competition. So I needed something smarter — a filter that doesn’t work in “all or nothing” mode, but can actually break down the tour recording and include just the parts done on the wheel, ignoring the rest.
Tasks accomplished!
After many days of work and testing with EUC World users, we finally came up with a new filter — and it looks like it’s working really well. The old filter only looked at some basic stats sent by the app. The new one takes a much deeper dive: it independently analyzes the entire tour recording, checking every part of it and looking at how well the EUC and GPS data match up. Of course, the new filter won’t magically fix missing data in your tours. A properly set up phone, good GPS signal, and a stable Bluetooth connection with your wheel are still key to getting the best results.
To keep things consistent, this new filter will also apply to existing tours in the database. So if you had a tour that wasn’t ranked before, some parts might now be counted — as long as the EUC and GPS data line up correctly. On the flip side, some rides that were previously counted in full might now only partially count. But overall, everyone will benefit. The new system is a lot fairer and more accurate.
Final words
As I write this, all tours stored in the EUC World database are being reprocessed using the new filter. There are over 1.4 billion records to go through, so it’ll take a few more days to finish. Once that’s done, the old filter will be gone and the new one will take over — for both the “Top 10” ranking and the EUC World Summer Contest 2025.
When the new filter goes live, scores might shift a bit. Some riders will benefit, some maybe not as much. But no one’s getting “punished” here. Anything the new filter leaves out is stuff that probably shouldn't have been counted to begin with. There’s one more important difference between the old and the new filter. From now on, a tour has to be finished in order to be included in the ranking and contest. That means you won’t be able to track your position in the leaderboard while you’re still riding and recording your tour. And if you’ve set your tour to be published with a delay, that delay will also affect when it shows up in the ranking and the contest.
I’m usually a fan of the rule “don’t change the rules during the game.” That’s why I spent a lot of time thinking about whether to introduce the new filter during the contest. But in the end, I decided that giving everyone a level playing field is more important. Anyone who’s ever come back from an epic tour, only to find it didn’t count because of a dropped connection, will totally get it — and appreciate the change.
