Is it possible that an entire voting community can stall nominations into queue?
CopperChick-PGO
Posts: 169 ✭✭✭
I went to Las Vegas in November and December and submitted 4 nominations in November and 5 in December. The 5 I submitted in December were all in one park, but the 4 nominations in November were within a few square miles of one another. Not a single one has entered voting as of April 2021. I did upgrade one of the December ones and it was accepted.
In Las Vegas they have a guy there attempting to overload the park by his house with POIs. His goal is one every cell so that Niantic will be so impressed they will host events there. He even put something on Google Maps that called a hill "POGO Hill" and then nominated it and cited that it was on Google Maps. He has also nominated a mark (a #5) on pavement that indicates the depth of water in a drainage area and a cell tower shaped like a palm tree and somehow got a painted marker on the sidewalk that said only "1/2 mile" approved. I have even told this guy how many things I see that need nominated in Las Vegas every visit and he has said if it is not at his park he doesn't submit it.
But because of my dealings with this player I can't help but wonder if it is possible he and other reviewers are intentionally not voting on submissions that are not in their desired area. If they see something not in their area while voting if they skip it does it just stay in queue and therefore you don't see that someone has seen it? I just can't imagine 9 submissions have not entered voting in 4 months.
I don't live in Las Vegas so I don't want to waste my upgrades there, but I have used 5 of my hard-earned upgrades to get things that will benefit the person I know who lives in Vegas because I know otherwise they would have just sat in queue for eternity.
Comments
You can skip only a very small number of reviews each day, I think that it's 3.
If they don't want to review the nominations from other people then they would stop reviewing and that happens a lot everywhere: people that don't nominate but don't review. The drawback is that the queue stalls and even their nominations don't move forward.
There are many places where the queues are huge (months/more than a year) and it's not due to ONE person, but to the number of nominations vs the number of reviewers.
You added 5 nominations to the queue in that location, if you review while you were there that's great, otherwise you increased the queue.
I submitted a bunch of portals when I was last in the Vegas area in December of 2020. They did take a long time to go through, but most were approved and the few rejections were reasonable. With a heavily tourist-based economy I would imagine there's a fairly large backlog of submissions, but with enough patience your stuff should be voted on fairly.
I actually do review when I am there - I review at least 100 nominations in a weekend. I go up one weekend a month.
There's a bottleneck effect that guy has created in his own park. Nominations that are in cells next to each other won't enter voting until a nearby nomination has finished the voting process. Of course, take that with a grain of salt because it's based on observed behavior since Niantic doesn't actually explain how the process works. But that is what we have seen. If I submit 3 things in a park and my friend submits 2 things, even if they're all in 5 unique cells, those things will enter voting one at a time. If they are not upgraded (which is pretty much the only way to finish the voting process in a timely manner), it will likely take 2 years for all 5 of those POI to be approved in a suburban area. Non upgraded submissions in my area take about 8 months to be either approved or rejected.