How does Challenge Hound ensure logged activities are legitimate and honest?

Enforcing honesty through technology is always tricky. Overall, Challenge Hound experiences a fairly low level of fake or illegitimate activities because of the way the system was designed. Since all participant activities and progress are visible to all challenge participants fake or exaggerated activities can be identified, by not only the challenge administrator, but also participants. Suspicious activities can be flagged and removed from challenge results.

Challenge Hound does provide some high level filters for super exaggerated activities, which will be automatically flagged. Examples of these filters are incredible distances, elevations, or durations. These filters help more with erroneous activities and less with suspicious activities. With an amazing range of abilities and activity types, it is extremely hard to know what is and what is not feasible.

Challenge administrators have the ability to flag any activity added to challenges they manage. Participants must contact the challenge administrators (not Challenge Hound support) with requests to flag activities. Challenge Hound support will not flag activities without the consent of the challenge administrators.

Challenge Hound does not offer the ability to turn off manual entries. There are many reaons for this, but a prominent one is that even if manual entries were turned off, Strava, Garmin, MapMyRun, and Fitbit, and others, all allow manual entries, so restricting on Challenge Hound doesn’t necessarily stop manual entries from happening. Manual entries are also most likely legitimate entries, just like app logged activities, or in other words, fraudulent activities are not soley detected by limiting manual.

As a challenge administrator, you can make a request via the challenge description, the invite, or by posting in the challenge feed, that everyone use a connected tracking app (strata, Garmin Fitbit, etc),. You can then go as far as flagging all manual entries. It should be noted, however, that someone will most likely legitimately log an activity that an app doesn’t log properly, and a manual entry will be needed. 

In all scenarios, there is the potential for someone to falsify. There is really no foolproof system. Challenge Hound does offer the tools necessary to handle these situations, but it will be mostly about monitoring the challenge, encouraging honest, and participants helping to identify suspicious activities.