What counts

What counts toward your pool entry

Here’s the v1 accept/reject list — what counts toward your entry’s daily target (steps pools) or cumulative km (run pools), and what doesn’t.

Why we say no to manual entries

A manual entry has no source data behind it. When you type “8 km run” into a fitness app, that record is your claim — not a measurement. It might be accurate, but it could just as easily be a guess or a fabrication, and there’s no way to tell from the outside.

That matters a lot in a pool with real money on the line. If your friend Mara claims she ran 8 km and all STAKELANE has is a typed-in number, there’s nothing to dispute, confirm, or verify. A poolmate can’t open a dispute on “Mara claimed she ran 8 km” when all that exists is the number she typed. Source data — a GPS trace, a confirmed Strava activity — is what every settlement and side bet is anchored to. Without it, the pool is just taking your word for it, which defeats the whole point. The system trades flexibility for trust.

Why treadmill is out in v1

Treadmill runs have no GPS trace, which means there’s no public proof trail. Distance on a treadmill comes from the belt speed — a number the machine or the app reports, not something an independent system can verify. Anyone could inflate that number by hand-pressing a button, and the proof layer has no way to catch it.

This is v1 conservatism, not a permanent ban. Treadmill isn’t out because indoor running doesn’t count — it’s out because the verification story isn’t ready yet. When there’s a reliable way to anchor treadmill distance to an independent signal — a paired sensor, specific trusted Strava metadata patterns, or another verified source — indoor runs will join the accepted list. Until then, if it didn’t leave a GPS trace, it doesn’t count toward your pool entry.

What flagged ≠ rejected means

Some activities pass the accept/reject check but still get held for review. Flagged means the anti-cheat pass found something worth a second look — an unusual pace, a GPS quality signal below the threshold, a distance that looks far outside your recent baseline. Flagged is not the same as rejected.

A flagged activity is held during the 24-hour audit window, not auto-rejected. Most clear on their own — the engine confirms the pace is plausible given your history and lifts the flag automatically. The rare case that needs a human gets reviewed before the dispute window opens. Concrete example: Mara runs 21 km at 2:11/km. That’s world-record territory, so the engine flags it. Her established baseline is 4:30/km, which makes the flag legitimate. A reviewer checks the raw GPS file and decides — accepted at the verified distance, or rejected with a reason logged to the proof trail. The goal is to catch manipulation without penalizing performances that just happen to look unusual. See the anti-cheat architecture page for the full rule set and thresholds.