Copy-paste title/description/supporting information
SiIverLyra-PGO
Posts: 928 ✭✭✭✭✭
Do you guys get that in your local reviews?
It's a very common phenomenon around here. For instance: a nomination of street art with the title saying "Fuse box art", the description saying "Fuse box art" and the supporting information, surprise surprise, also saying "Fuse box art". In cases with longer specific wording it's so painfully obvious that the person just copy-pasted everything.
100% of the time the nomination is low quality/low effort overall (low quality photos, inaccurate location marker), and often it's straight up ineligible/fake too.
Apart from venting, I have a suggestion for Niantic - make it impossible to submit nominations with identical text in all text boxes.
I know that sometimes it's a bit hard to think of stuff to write, especially in simple nominations (like playgrounds for instance), but it's far from impossible, and would make our job as reviewers easier.
What do you think?
Comments
I absolutely hate this on a personal level. I'd rather the description be blank (again, speaking only personally). If the nomination is otherwise eligible, though, i will probably just knock off up to 2 stars on title/description rating and and up to 1 star on overall rating.
As for programming the games to make this impossible, I can kind of see where it might make a few submitters say, "Hey, maybe I should actually write something useful here." But I wonder what proportion of submitters would get this message and just add a period to the end of the description or something.
Re: rating - yes, I do pretty much the same. Unless the title/description is extremely generic - to the point that it's unhelpful. Say, if it just says "Statue" or "Sign". Then I'll rate it even lower. Such ridiculously low effort nominations don't deserve to be rewarded with high ratings, in my eyes.
Yes it's really annoying and mostly happens with really bad nominations - like trees, hydrants or any other ineligible things.
But as flatmatt-PGO mentioned, if you try to block using exactly the same text in title, description and support photo, submitters will just add one letter or dot to this text and send it anyway. It would be better if system would just give blank text for description and support text if they're the same as title - submitters wouldn't really mind it (if they copy-paste text 3 times, they really don't care what reviewers or other players see) and we wouldn't get angry for getting to review copy-paste nominations ;)
Here is an example of a common copy-paste right from wikipedia:
the sad part is that many submitters do this with good nomination because they (I want to believe) don't know what to write or how to "fill" the description with quality text....
Huh, I gotta say that I don't remember ever encountering this kind of copy-pasted nomination. Although I certainly do see nominations with unnecessarily long descriptions, but those are usually handwritten (in the gist of kids describing in length how this playground is so popular and important to locals... when public playgrounds don't really need any unusual justification to be accepted).
I've seen a few of these - most recently was a model replica of a historic nearby point of interest. The Description was copy & pasted from either a wiki page or the museum article (I forget exactly which). It was a shame because I overall liked the nomination.
These type of copy & paste descriptions are explicitly called out as ineligible.
You mean you don't like "Church," "Church," "It's a church" nominations?
Maybe I'm a snob, but they're not my favorite! :)
Hey, even having "it's a church" instead of a 3rd "church" is a rare treat with these nominations!
Sadly, I come across this kind of thing very often.
Here, another example:
Copy-pasted from the city page:
first paragraph in the description and the second one (to a certain extent since apparently was too long an exceed the text box capacity when pasted) in the supporting info...
And yeah, it's really painful when the nomination is good 😖
PoGO players are such gatekeepers ;)
I see both! Like you said, sometimes it's difficult to come up with something else to say (especially when you're afraid reviewers won't like more creative text), but anything else than the same thing 3 times is better.
Speaking of playgrounds & creative text, throwback to one of my favorite playground descriptions.
My god. That description is amazing.
Right :) I laughed so hard, it was totally unexpected. Arguably a little irrelevant, but definitely creative.
I did check Intel & Mission Creator and thankfully it was approved. Perhaps I'll need to road trip there some day.
A bit irrelevant, agreed, but still in good taste, IMO. Definitely better than a lot of cringeworthy attempts at "creative/funny" descriptions that I've seen. Or, of course, another "playground, playground, playground". Putting a little extra effort into a banal wayspot like that can really make it special.
Some people just lake creativity, some just don’t know what should go where
Both are true (I especially see a depressing amount of the 2nd - people putting supporting information-appropriate text in the description section and vice versa).
But I don't think any of the texts require much creativity. You just need to state a couple of short, basic facts. Playground? Those are often named, put the name in the title or the description. They aren't named? Write the location. Takes 2 seconds.
I don't think anyone is expecting to see sheer poetry - reviewers just want to see information that'll help in the reviewing process, especially in the supporting information section.