Best Of

Hi folks,

Firstly, let me welcome all of the new folks to the Wayfarer Community! We’re so glad to have you here and are really looking forward to chatting with you and answering any questions you may have as you ramp up as new reviewers!

A great place to start would be to review the Wayfarer Community Guidelines and Welcome Note. We are working hard to create a respectful but curious culture here.

When it comes to ramping up on reviewing, the Wayfarer Help Center has the basics you need to know, with articles about what’s eligible, ineligible and in-between.

• About Wayfarer: Learn more about Wayfarer, your profile, how to earn upgrades, and how you can manage your own nominations
• Submitting a Nomination: A diagram that walks you through the nomination process.
• Wayspot Criteria: Understand how to identify a good nomination and what makes a good Wayspot. This section also allows you to submit questions you have about the criteria. 
• How to Review Wayspots:  Tips on reviewing nominations and edits 
• Step-by-step Wayspot Review Process: A video that shows the basics of reviewing in the Wayfarer Portal.
• Reporting Abuse: Tips for reporting invalid Wayspots or edits.  

In order to keep Wayfarer fair for everyone, your decisions are compared with the decisions made by others in the community. This information is used to create an overall rating for your decisions in your profile. Your Performance rating is displayed on a scale of Poor - Great and will change over time. 

Here are a few tips to ensure your Performance Rating stays Good/Great:

• Follow the criteria while reviewing nominations, we recommend keeping the eligible and ineligible criteria pages open in a different browser tab for easy access.
• Take your time and review each segment on it’s own merit. Read this article for tips on how to review each section. 
• Avoid using third party tools/plugins or depending on others to decide on how you vote on a nomination. 
• Note that your Rating may also be affected based on actions taken on abuse reviews.

There are also a lot of really knowledgeable and helpful Wayfinders right here in the forum with great questions and equally great answers. Here are a few lively and interesting discussions that could be worth your time:

• Wayfarer Mythbusting
• How to gauge safe pedestrian access
• Decorated poles and electric boxes

Again, we’re glad you’re here and we’re looking forward to interacting with you soon!

-Casey

Explorers,

First of all, thanks for your patience in waiting for this update. We can’t believe how quickly time has passed! You may have also noticed that we haven’t posted any release notes since release 3.3, last December, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been plugging away at our to-do list. 

We haven’t forgotten about the updates that were remaining from 2020, which are:

1. More tweaks to the Showcase to help you learn by example
2. Boosting reviews in dry voting areas
3. Improvements to the reviewing experience

But here’s what we’ve been up to, and you’ll see where and why we’ve postponed the remaining 2020 roadmap items:

• Refactoring code and tackling tech debt - We decided late in December that we would hunker down to update our stack for a more reliable experience. This couldn’t wait any longer. This is a pretty big task, but we’ll also be weaving in a few quality of life updates/tweaks along the way.
• Re-envisioning the Wayfarer experience - In January, as we reflected on your feedback and our own aspirations for Wayfarer, we felt the need to take a step back and re-evaluate both the submission and review experiences holistically, and dig deeper into the root of your pain points. 
• Evolving the Wayfarer Mission - Mapping the world together is a complicated, but exciting mission for us. We are always thrilled at the level of passion folks put into this collective experience. Now it’s time to take that mission and your passion to think about how we evolve and we’d love to hear from you! If you have opted in to Niantic marketing emails, some of you will have received a survey to share your thoughts on the Wayfarer experience. Please take a few minutes to fill that out, or continue to use the Forum to share your thoughts. 
• Focusing on India - As you may have heard, Niantic is putting a spotlight on India! We are so excited to collaborate with the Indian Wayfarer community later this month with the Wayfarer Challenge. We’ve also been reviewing submissions in India in order to fast-track the decisions in the queue . We’ll continue to do this for the entire month. See here for details about the India Challenge and the forum category. 

So what’s coming this spring/summer?

1. Showcase updates - We’re adding some Wayspots that we love from around the world. So in addition to popular Wayspots near you, you’ll see some of our favorite Wayspots from other countries. We always love reviewing Wayspots submitted from around the world, as it gives us a little sense of adventure. We want you to feel that too!
2. Minor updates to the Criteria page - We’ve heard your feedback on the consolidated set of criteria and plan to enrich it with clarifications and more examples. Please continue to let us know how we can help clarify the Criteria!
3. Improvements to the submission experience - We know it’s disappointing to submit a new Wayspot in Pokémon GO only for it to get rejected because as a duplicate of what we already have. We understand it's frustrating not knowing what other nominations are live or pending review in the area and we are working on providing this information. We intend to improve the flow by providing you with the right info at the right time. 
4. Improvements to the review experience - We also know the reviews can feel onerous and sometimes confusing and frustrating. We want to do better for you and are holistically exploring options here. For example, we could consider a more customizable experience so that you can do as much or as little as you’d like, while making our policing mechanisms a little less disruptive. 
5. Better notifications - We also want to bring more predictability and reliability into the notifications experience when there’s a decision on your nomination or edit. The email notifications have been troublesome as of late and it’s important that we get this right. 

More details to come, as this is part of our whole re-envisioning exercise.

1. More Wayfarer Challenges (countries to be announced soon!) - We’re eager to give many other communities the opportunity to participate in a Wayfarer Challenge! We’re working on expanding the challenges to the communities we know need a little more love.
2. Continuing to Address Emerging Issues - We are working on building out a larger team internally to better serve you. This includes staffing for the Forum as well as the Wayfarer development and support team. All of this is in service of your experience, continuing to address emerging issues in a more timely fashion.

That’s it for now. We hope you are all well!

- Wayfarer Team

Thank you to all our Wayfinders that have participated in our Poland and India Wayfarer Challenges! We have received a lot of great submissions and added many new Wayspots through those initiatives, and we want to maintain this momentum as we move to our next destination: Russia.

We are proud to announce our next initiative: the Russia Wayfarer Challenge! From 1 June 2021 at 00:00 a.m. MSK until 16 June 2021 at 00:00 a.m. MSK, eligible Wayfinders in Russia or those who review Russian Wayspots (via your home/bonus location ) can participate by reviewing Wayspot nominations in the country. For this challenge, we will be reducing the cooldown periods and increasing the limit to change your hometown settings if you are a local but living abroad.

This collaborative challenge also enables Trainers and Agents to unlock special rewards (for your Wayfarer reviews) in Pokémon GO and Ingress, based on the number of approved Wayspots by the end of the initiative. Trainers Level 38 and higher and Agents Level 10 and above are able to participate.

If you are eligible but have not used Wayfarer before, get started by signing in with the Facebook or Google account linked to your Pokémon GO or Ingress profiles. After you have signed in, check out the Criteria page and take a quick quiz to learn the basics of Niantic Wayfarer, such as nominating and reviewing Wayspots. You can also check out our onboarding video here. Over the next few weeks, we will be publishing new resources for beginner Wayfinders to use and get accustomed to the Wayfarer program.

For this event, each game will provide special rewards on 18 June 2021 based on a singular Wayspot approval goal:

Rewards - 3000+ New Wayspots Accepted

• Pokémon GO: 50 Pokéballs, 1 Super Incubator, 1 Incense, and 1 Premium Raid Pass
• Ingress: 20 Resonators, 20 Hypercubes, 3 Rare Heat Sinks, 3 Rare Multi-Hacks, and 3 SoftBank Ultra Links

We are very excited to be experiencing this challenge with our Russian community and helping them improve and enhance their gameplay experience. If you have any questions, please ask them in the Russia Wayfarer Challenge category.

See you out there!

-The Wayfarer Team