Yes, it’s only one way, GC to Intervals. But that still creates problems because GC is an awful platform while Intervals is awesome, yet GC remains critical should one ever need to import all data into another training platform.
So I find myself wanting to keep it in sync with Intervals (to the extent possible), not the other way around.
As I mentioned before, GC limits its title length to ~128 characters (I haven’t counted, but I often blow past the limit) while Intervals has a much higher limit (I’ve never hit it, whatever it is).
Since I support (pay for) Intervals, from my perspective, this is the platform that should ultimately have the data I use on a daily basis. GC is a passive platform I try to keep in sync but don’t fret about that much.
Yet this new “feature” (bug IMO) flips that around and makes GC the primary and Intervals the secondary.
I often have cases where I can’t use the title I want to use in GC because the title is too short. So I often end-up with titles in Intervals that are not the same as in GC.
But now, today being a good example, I found myself needing to update the description of a number of past rides. So I searched/filtered for those rides in Intervals, and then I had to update them in GC and Intervals – but things no longer match for reasons I’ve explained above…
As I’m loading the GC rides one by one and updating the descriptions, my Intervals data is being overwritten and I’m losing information I had before because Intervals is reacting to the change and re-syncing the data.
That’s not good, and very annoying.
The only time this should be allowed to happen is if I have never manually edited the title and description of that ride in Intervals (I’d say the same for any field that’s now getting synced and is overridable in Intervals, though I don’t know of any others at this time). If I have changed it in Intervals, and GC changes, leave it alone because it may no longer be the same – and for good reason.
If anything, I’d wish it to be flipped: I should be able to edit a bunch of fields in Intervals and this action should then be replicated to third-parties like GC and Strava. Not the other way around. But I think internally flagging those fields as edited in Intervals and ignoring new data from GC post-initial-sync is probably easier than supporting that…
Or there should be an additional configuration on the GC sync settings to opt-in to syncing activity changes after the initial sync (should have been opt-in when the change in behavior was introduced so as not to automatically change the existing behavior for the rest of us since this is not fixing a bug; this is adding a convenience for the way some user like to use Intervals with GC).