Sodisp Releases Time-Based Virtual Challenges and Badges

Remember Sodisp? They launched their Covid-inspired virtual challenge platform early into the pandemic last year, only to have the sport’s various national federations almost immediately ban the type of activity they promoted.

A former Derailed contributor was so outraged by their platform that she almost came out of retirement to write some fresh libel for us. She’d probably been drinking when she suggested that though, because Sodisp just felt more unnecessary than outrageous to the rest of us.

Anyway. At the time, we thought the new rules about virtual challenges were sure to be the end of Sodisp. But alas, eleven months later there’s still no an end in sight to the pandemic, which is good news for the burgeoning platform.

For 2021, they’re back with new features. And eagled-eyed readers will note that they’re now Sodisp rather than SoDiSp (an atrocious name derived from ‘Social Distancing Sports’). In case you’ve forgotten what they do, they’ve reminded us that “Sodisp is the most complete and engaging platform to host virtual events and challenges.”

They also told us that Sodisp is “The only platform with Strava, Garmin and Polar auto-sync,” which kind of sounds like a lie, or at least a truth so pedantic that we shouldn’t take it too seriously.

But most importantly, they’ve added new features to further gamify the virtual cycling challenge hellscape we’re living through.

totalTime Challenge (sic)

The new totalTime Challenge is designed “for challenges who put emphasis more on participation rather than performance.” Basically, the challenge isn’t about distance or speed, but the amount of time spent participating in the activity. Pretty neat idea, and also means it works for pretty much any activity. They use yoga as an example, but we’d use video games or wanking instead. It’s just a bigger audience.

Anybody want to join our gaming/wanking challenge?

Total Time Badge

Sounds like this is just a badge for people who complete the above challenge, e.g. ‘Wanked for 10 Hours in February.’ If that’s something you want to brag about.

Conversion of distance based on sport types

Organizers can weight different activities to create a level playing field. So you can have a total leaderboard for athletes competing in different sports, as well as track individual performance across multiple sports.

They gave us the example of having four cycling miles count the same as one running mile, but we’d probably make one cycling mile count the same as four running miles because running is fucking shit.

Convert participation time to distance

Event organizers can now also award distance based on participation time if an activity type doesn’t have a distance component. Their example is having one hour of yoga count as five miles of running. It’s actually a pretty cool idea, even if they’re getting into increasingly niche challenges at this point.

Before you ask: one wank is only about 50 meters of cycling distance. You still have to ride your bike.

The End

To be fair, this is a shitload of options for virtual challenges. Their claim to the title of ‘most complete and engaging platform’ may well be true.

Not sure we’re really the audience for this, but if you make a mad challenge using the new options then please invite us and we’ll join but not actively participate in any way.