Due to the overwhelming popularity of the Street Tag app, our service is running slower and impacting the performance of the app
After some careful considerations within our team and with our partners.
Street Tag will be temporarily pausing some of the current leaderboards for approx. 4 weeks, to give our engineers the time to fix, update the app and test the app once more before the leaderboard resumes, and we can get back on track in supporting existing families and new families. This temporary pause in practice means once the app has been updated and opens up officially again back to families, we would be looking to reset individual accounts back to their score from the paused date. However, the app in the meantime will still be accessible with poor performance.
We are planning to resume with a new app and leaderboard kick off on the 1st of May. All the points collected between the 1st of April and the 30th of April will be archived to your STpoints at the top of the app menu, and only the points on the leaderboard before the pause will resume from the 1st of May i.e. only the points that you have as of 31st of March will be retained on your leaderboard when we resume on the 1st of May.
The above points archive will ONLY apply to the following leaderboards in...
1. Oxfordshire (community and school games leaderboards)
2. Barking and Dagenham (community and school leaderboards)
3. Redbridge (community and school leaderboards)
4. Basildon (community and school leaderboards)
5. World (community)
6. World (schools)
7. Kingston (community and school leaderboards - updated)
Colchester (community and schools points will not be archived),
Newham (community will not be archived) and other running leaderboards will not be archived at this moment.
From the early morning of 1st of April, both the leaderboard and dashboard display on the app will be going under maintenance, the following message will be shown.
Leaderboard
"Leaderboard display is in maintenance till 1st May, check our Facebook daily at 9pm"
Dashboard
"Dashboard display is in maintenance till 1st May"
We are currently struggling with the performance of the app right now as most of our community members will be aware of. If you've just discovered the Street Tag app, welcome, we are really sorry that we cannot meet your expectations at this very moment, but be assured we will be back to full service very soon for you, some key dates shared further below.
The app is getting (or has gotten) quite popular in this new year, which is a nice headache to have for our team, however, this has led to some unforeseen technology challenges. Although we've been working to anticipate and stay ahead of the technology requirements to meet the demand, it hasn't quite fully gone as we planned. For example, we created the 'power hour' functionality in Q4 last year, it has exploded in popularity fast beyond our plans, placing more pressure on the app as suddenly more families are committing to an hour of exercise daily. And, the offline mode and NFC tagging that we introduced a few days ago to take some load off our servers and to make the app even more accessible to the hard to reach families, the full potential of these most recent updates to the app haven't performed as we'd like, it has made the app performed worse even though we did even more private testing with some families from the community. This is not from a lack of manpower (although we can do even better in that department) as we have recruited new engineers into our team at the start of the year and we plan to add more.
In short, the app performance has deteriorated significantly this March due to a new surge in families creating accounts on Street Tag, and some key functionalities on the app failing. The user experience on the app is no longer smooth as it was once. We have tried to patch things along, but it's not enough. We need to make some significant changes to the app very quickly to make the app lightweight to support the increasing demand. No tags are being removed.
We have been overwhelmed with support tickets raised on the app over the past week, it will take us some time to get through most of them, and most of which are directly related to the content of this announcement.
We believe families and individuals should be happy and enjoy using the Street Tag app, and not be frustrated or angry. We want to help families and individuals return to that happy feeling from using the app.
Street Tag will now be temporarily pausing all the current leaderboards for approx. 4 weeks, to give our engineers the time to fix, update the app and test the app once more before the leaderboard resumes. This temporary pause in practice means once the app has been updated and opens up officially again back to families, we would be looking to reset individual accounts back to their score from the paused date 1st of April. However the app will still be accessible with poor performance, we will have a message note displayed on the app about the temporary pause. Please continue to head out for your daily walks, cycle rides, run or with a wheelchair without the app, and we will be back to supporting your daily physical activities stronger and better soon with an updated app.
The temporary leaderboard pause also means that the some eaderboard dates will be extended. Over the next 3 weeks, we will update the leaderboard dates once we have confirmed the adjusted dates with our partners, and they will be shared here https://streettag.co.uk/leaderboard-dates .
Leaderboards that have recently concluded over the past week or few days will be receiving their performance bonus prizes as planned within a week.
This announcement was a very difficult decision, but we felt it's the fairest possible way to meet expectations and to provide a quality service. This process also ensures as many families can be back to participating equally and fairly. We haven't come this far to fail or give up. Our whole team is extremely grateful and privilege to have so many families adopting Street Tag into their daily active lives.
Thank you for your understanding, we will share further updates if necessary (e.g. how we plan to make it possible for your C1 and C2 to collect tags too in complete offline mode, and you won't need to switch off your data. Plus the online mode itself will improve in performance) during the paused grace period.
In the meantime, please kindly avoid raising further support tickets about the app performance until after we have released an updated app on the 1st of May.
Thank you once again for your support.