Can Niantic please ban abusive nominators?
Fosveny-ING
Posts: 28 ✭✭✭
I keep seeing intentionally bad nominations for what we in Ingress call "Couch Portals" - a nomination that's deliberately submitted that doesn't meet the criteria, clearly knowing it doesn't meet the criteria, in the hopes that it will be reachable from the submitter's home.
I know that NIA will give people a review cooldown. That's not what I want. I would love if these nominators got warned when they do it, with a month or so without submissions, then were forbidden from ever submitting another wayspot with that account, if they do it again.
I don't mean stuff that's unintentionally misplaced, or stuff that I just can't find. I mean blatant - the actual object is 1km away and the nomination is centered on a residential property. Stuff like this:
Comments
If you post it with the address niantic can do something about it. @NianticGiffard
I put up a topic here - https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/9634/today-s-i-want-a-pokestop-at-my-house-reviews#latest
about this and Niantic said to leave in the addresses so they can take action on the submitters. I’ve a few minutes ending photo posts in that thread from today’s reviews.
Thanks for bringing this to our notice, @Fosveny-ING! I'll be sharing this internally and will let you know once we have any information.
aaayyy! I just got this to review too!
Twinsies!
Hi @Fosveny-ING! We have reviewed the report and have taken action on the Wayfinder in accordance with our policies. While we are unable to discuss our actions in detail to protect the submitter’s privacy, they may include, but are not limited to, sending a warning message, placing restrictions on their Wayfarer, Pokémon GO, or Ingress account, putting their account on probation, or placing a temporary or permanent suspension on their Wayfarer, Pokémon GO or Ingress account.
Thanks for helping us maintain the quality of the Wayspots.
Don't forget reviewers who already saw this nomination won't get an agreement for their time 🙃
But does that really matter overall? If your only reason for reviewing is to get agreements for an upgrade, take 20 seconds and review another. After the first couple of 1000 reviews 1 single review is neither here not there in terms of affecting your stats.
I’d rather wayfinders start getting punished as well because if they get punished & they submit another bad or fake the chances of their account being temporary or permanently banned for this are much higher. That’s the thing. I wish it could count as an agreement for our overall rating though
There are an awful lot of posts directed at both sides of the equation asking for "punishment" of either submitters or reviewers for doing things "incorrectly". Very similar to the complaints about "lazy reviwers" or "lazy submitters". As we well know, everybody thinks thier submission is perfectly valid and deserves a 5* review, even when both the reviwers looking at thier nomination and the comments in here say "no, no it's not".
In many cases, submitters need education about the criteria. It would be fairly simple ( ?) for Niantic to expand some of their rejection e-mails so that for some things such as K-12, the person who submitted the nomination for "My local school" sees more text and part of the criteria relating to it - eg "Rejected for K-12. School, Scout Huts and other facilites catering primarily for groups on Under-18 children are not eligible to be Waypoints on any Niantic game. For mre details see http xxxxxx"
I can agree 100% with your comment stating that submitters need educated. The majority of submitters need educated on criteria so they better understand what is/ is not eligible.
By the way @sogNinjaman-ING, the link you shared didn’t appear. Seems to have been censored by x’s
That was just me being lazy and using "xx" as an example space filler rather than doing a copy / paste of https://wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/criteria#rejection
In the grand scene of things, does it really matter? No. After 30,000+ reviews and 23,000+ agreements, am I worried about possibly missing one or two? No.
My concerns are 1) lack of real feedback 2) misdirected Niantic effort and least of all 3) my wasted time.
1) I've never personally received the feedback from Niantic rejecting my nomination, but I have seen it. Do you know what it is? "Your nomination has been reviewed and rejected for '.'" That's right, the lovely "." rejection. While we discuss with one another and plead for better rejection reasons from Niantic, their idea of in touch one-on-one rejection reason is "." Then the person also may receive a separate email saying something along the lines of "We have noticed abuse on your Wayfarer account. Further action may result in termination of your Wayfarer access and/or connected Pokémon GO account." Again, I've never received it, but I have seen somebody else receive it. He reached out to Niantic Support several times, including using official requests for information stored on him, and was never given a reason. And that's also assuming the person has an email and isn't using a Pokémon Club account.
2) I'm so grateful Niantic is willing to spend the time reviewing as more of these posts make their way to the Wayforum. It's such a better use of their time than actually investigating barriers to nominate or other ways to improve the submission/review process. Then again, fire fighting rather than preventative action is much more in the Niantic wheelhouse.
3) If I've reviewed this nomination, frankly yes I'm reviewing for agreements. In my area, I am #blessed with a 12-18+ month turnaround time on whatever I submit. With upgrades always feeling like a coin toss, that means typically finding the most obviously eligible of candidates and pouring my heart & soul into a quality nomination. I spend a few hours reviewing and stumble across dozens of the nominations like shown above. Sure, 99% probably get rejected by reviewers, but each one of those takes 20 seconds (ya know, to avoid getting told how good of a job I'm doing and to come back later) and keeps me from looking at another actually eligible candidate that should be getting approved.
It's also just bad mechanics to have it work like that, but that's just my opinion. Maybe I'm also bitter about years of bringing up low effort nominations and being told "Easy 1*, vote and move on."