If you have ever scrolled a news feed, especially one based around workout activities, and felt like everyone else has a cooler post than you, it may be time to check out Bandok. Bandok is the latest in a list of Strava extensions we have reviewed, and the first to be entirely unique. While most other extensions are designed to help you get the most out of your data, like Strafforts or SmashRun, there are only a few that are focused on the social media aspect of Strava. Bandok fits squarely in that camp and is designed to do one thing, make you rides and runs more appealing within the feed by giving them unique names.
Admittedly the need for Bandok is small, but that does not make it useless. On a basic level all it does is go through your new activities and lookf or those that have not been customized. If you use an automatic upload to Strava, or simply do not care to alter the stats you have tracked, then most of your runs are likely named something default like “Afternoon Run”. While this is sufficient, it makes the runs less appealing in a feed. If you have a number of friends on the platform, are hunting for extra thumbs up kudos, or simply like to personalize things than the renaming can be nice.
So what makes a good Strava activity name? This really depends on what you are going for. Do you want your activity name to attract attention in the news feed from all of your friends. Do you want it descriptively named so that you can get a sense of what you did when scrolling through your training log? Maybe you simply want to see a unique pun in the name so that when you share it to twitter it makes you smile. Bandok does suffer from one struggle. The copy-writing style only really has one option. There is no way to personalize the names you get to include different categories. If we were to suggest any for the Bandok team they would include things like “No profanity”, “Inspirational Only”, “Movie Quotes”, or “Descriptive with emotion”. There are going to be people that find the humor and language in Bandok not to their liking.
The creator behind Bandok, Troy Hopwood, did a great job of creating a single use, simple application that was easy to integrate. Signup for the service takes less than a minute and you then just have to click a single approval button to start allowing it to do it’s job of renaming your new events. This is not to take anything away form Troy, however even in the FAQs it is suggested that the names that are generated are influenced heavily by a personal sense of humor.